Originally published in 1982, Susan Hill's ghost story has been adapted for radio and TV, and a stage version has been running for more than 20 years in London's West End. Like Henry James's The Turn of the Screw, Hill's story is part of a succession of supernatural yarns planned to be told around the fireside at Christmas, but the narrator considers it too terrifying for the festive season and writes it down to be kept for a more fitting occasion. Jane Goldman's screen adaptation for the revived (or disinterred) Hammer studio has dispensed with this framing device. Instead, the young Edwardian hero, an inexperienced London solicitor, is dispatched right at the start to a flat, swampy coastal area of the Midlands to settle the affairs of a recently deceased widow, Mrs Drablow. For some reason he's called Arthur Kipps after the draper's assistant in HG Wells's Edwardian novel Kipps, and he's played in a sad, subdued manner by Daniel Radcliffe. He's a blood brother to Jonathan Harker, protagonist of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and his reception is much like Harker's when approaching the Count's castle – superstitious, inhospitable peasants utter grim warnings, draw their offspring inside and refuse to talk to this dangerous stranger. It appears there's been an epidemic of children dying painfully as a result of a late Victorian curse associated with the eponymous woman in black, a cloaked Scottish Widows type, but more emaciated.
The film is altogether more conventional than Hill's novella, and one rather misses the nicely dated narration and the way we're drawn into the mind of a middle-aged man looking back to the unforgettable terror of his most memorable experience. Here the usual things go bump in the night, and familiar shocks are visited on Kipps when he spends the night alone at the Drablows' remote gothic mansion. And there's a lot more action involving the local landowner Mr Daily (Ciarán Hinds) and his vintage Rolls-Royce. But Goldman's script and James Watkins's direction are efficient, and the movie is handsomely designed.
