THE WOMAN IN BLACK

In America we have the Gray Man, a lonely figure haunting the shores of Pawleys Island in South Carolina. He is said to be the ghost of a local landowner who long ago drowned in the marshes on his way to visit his sweetheart. Today residents take his appearances as a warning of pending disasters, usually hurricanes. Locals who claim to have seen him believe in the legend enough to evacuate the beach after the sighting and their homes are said to have been left undamaged after the coastal flooding.

            In 1983, Susan Hill created a sinister counterpart for England with her novella The Woman in Black about a malevolent feign whose appearances mark the death of a local child in some terrible way as vindication for the death of her own son. Hill’s novel, set in the late 19^th century, took place roughly over the span of a year. James Watkins’s film adaptation retains the late Edwardian setting but puts its hero, a lawyer named Arthur Kipps, on a crash course toward a somber finale. His movie takes place over the course of a week and in that time Kipps will uncover the dark secret of a small town in north east England, a deserted mansion at the end of the causeway (aptly called Eel Marsh House), and encounter the force of evil that dwells within.

            Kipps, the youthful widowed accountant from London, is played by Daniel Radcliffe in his first role since the end of the Harry Potter series. Though it exceeded expectations, the movie was not a big enough financial success to shake off his association with the boy wizard but it is proof of his talent elsewhere. He’s good enough to make us forget he was once a bespectacled student of Hogwarts, at least for the duration of this film.

            Oh, there are plenty of homages to the Harry Potter movies, notably the train ride from London (the real world) to the spooky village (where supernatural forces lurk), though the magic here is far more sinister than even Lord Voldemort. But the real roots of the film intertwine with the great tradition of Gothic horror and its heart is often with The Innocents, itself based on Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw.

            A devotion to the old stock robs the film of surprises or innovations, but its very familiarity with the classics gives it an allure of its own. In its own way, The Woman in Black is a genuinely frightening and lurid film making effective use of human drama.

            Kipps’s story is not unheard of. His wife died giving birth to their son and he holds a mournful heart while raising his son. He can’t keep his mind on his job but is given one last chance to do well by the company. An old woman has died way out in the mist-covered Eel Marsh House and he is to put her affairs in order. For some reason, the local residents aren’t being very cooperative.

            Such is the first layer of The Woman in Black and it’s an old trick. A train ride away from the world of terror is the world of law, attorneys, and real estate. It’s the real world we know so well, perhaps a little too well, with all of its cold hard technicalities that get in the way of an easy life. And yet, its very predictability makes it something of a comfort in comparison to the horror we know lurks just on the other side of the train tracks. For all its legal headaches, the world Arthur Kipps works in is a world we are familiar with, can grasp, and some of us can eve master.

            In between the world of papers and the occult is the bridge world which Kipps encounters upon his arrival in the hushed town. It’s a classical town with a secret. The locals want Kipps out and try to expedite the completion of his business there. They fear him and with good reason. Children of the village have died in horrible ways, seemingly by their own intention. As the movie opens we see three little girls playing and then spotting an unseen (to us) terror in the nursery. They calmly walk to the window and jump out in perfect unison. Many of the folks attribute this to a local legend and some have gone so far as to lock their children up to protect them from this force of evil. They live in a fragile state of fear, wondering what child will be next. Understandably they don’t want Kipps messing around at Eel Marsh House, the cradle of the town’s horror. Hostility grows among the villagers when the arrival of Kipps coincides with the death of more children in the most dreadful of ways. Despite the ice cold demeanor of the town toward the stranger this is still the real world and there is some comfort in knowing that the locals are acting on relatable human emotion or, even more understandably, concern for their young ones. But this world is linked to the supernatural because the behavior of the town is a direct result of a ghostly spell. It is the middle world; real enough though under the influence of spirits.

            The deal is sealed, however, for the third level when Kipps enters the crumbling mansion. It still is the real world, but not as we know it. The Woman in Black is in complete control, the doors of the manor a threshold to her domain of terror and evil. So strong is her fury, in fact, that her thirst for revenge knows no boundaries, and the very wickedness of her doings, rather than their supernatural nature, become the focus of the story.

            The website tvtropes.org categorizes movie ghostly goals into two types, A and B. As the website describes, “Type A will never actually be proactive in getting things done to end their undeath; it’s always about scaring the people inhabiting their house into exhuming their hidden-after-the-murder corpse, or investigating the strange disappearance of their family, or whatever it is their ectoplasmic tuchus is unable to do.” However, “Type B will be forces of pure, motiveless evil whose thirst for bloody death will be forestalled only by their sadistic desire to cause as much psychological anguish beforehand as possible.”

            The Woman in Black exhibits definite signs of Type B. She wants blood for her son’s death and will stop at nothing to feed her anger, vowing never to forgive the town. But her case is unique in that she also has elements of Type A. Her rage is not unfounded. In life she was robbed of her child when courts deemed her unfit to be a mother and put her boy under the care of her neglectful sister where he came to his death. There is no justification for her method of revenge, but her anger is easy to understand. From her point of view, her story is a tragedy and her afterlife a nightmare.

            This emotional crossroad gives The Woman in Black a special, if not quite unique, place in the annals of horror. Essentially, the film consists of two stories working together. On the outset we have a traditional ghost story. The macabre is suggested but never flung. Most of the unadulterated horror is clumped into the central part of the movie in which Kipps spends the night at the haunted manor (how a house so recently inhabited could have so quickly fallen into such a deplorable state is never explained) where he is visited by ominous apparitions, is spooked by loud thumps coming from dark hallways, and encounters a perpetually swaying rocking chair with a story of its own.

            But the scares are encompassed by three love stories. The principal one highlights a dangerous similarity between Arthur Kipps and the Woman in Black. The loss of a loved one (Kipps his wife and the woman her son) has led them both down paths highly destructive to themselves and to others. Kipps may not realize it, but his inability to control his grief has put his career on the line and has hurt his son, if only because it has made him a detached father. Indeed, Kipps is haunted as much by his dead wife as the Woman in Black because both are posing a threat to his and his son’s well-being from beyond the grave. Of course, the Woman in Black carries malicious intentions toward Kipps and son, but the mother’s memory brings pragmatic problems of its own.

            The similarities between Kipps and the ghost are such that they ultimately become a sort of rivalry. This is hardly surprising given that they are both motivated by a love for their sons. But Arthur’s advantage is that his son still lives and he has a chance to make things right. On the other hand, the Woman in Black, at least by the time of her son’s death, was never given a chance to form a bond with her son.

            The ending has been called many things, notably bittersweet or depressing, but if there is one thing it shouldn’t be it’s surprising that the ghost refuses to pardon Arthur Kipps. He is, after all, her living counterpart, a man haunted by death, and yet he has a chance that was denied to her. Her jealousy results in evil, but it’s no mystery where it comes from.

            And yet, while it’s clear that this was not the result of the ghost doing them any favors as some have suggested, it is Kipps’s love for his son and the benevolent force of his dead wife that grant the Kipps family a better end than the woman’s other victims. For virtually everyone else we meet, little has been resolved, but the Kipps family does find peace. This is a deeper note than the one the book closes on and still the movie manages to end on a more optimistic tone.

            The Woman in Black is a well written ghost story; scary enough but, more so, it’s haunting, a word horror films have long since forgotten as meaning the lingering pain of past events. But what better way to explain the presence of a ghost?