Routine stuff but on a stroll around the house, he comes upon a small ruined graveyard and, stung by a sense of dread he turns to find the spectre of the woman in black glaring at him with pure malevolance. He runs back to the house and locks himself in. At the end of the day, as he waits outside for his ride back into town, the seamists roll in and in the white void he hears the sound of a carriage crashing into the sea and the screams of a child. When the air clears and old Kekwick clops up on the transport. Rattled, Kidd goes back to the Inn in town, determined to unravel the mystery.
The Woman in Black, set here in the 1920s, was a novel from the '80s with a vaguely turn of century setting. Heavily original thinker in horror and sci fi, Nigel Kneale, wrote this adaptation for television. The post war setting is poignant, allowing Kneale some ways out of writer problems. Quite a lot of the novel is given over to letters. Even as late as the '80s the worst way of doing this was to narrate them over scenery or perhaps action but this forces considerable truncation and the burden of this correspondence is taken up with a complicated backstory. Kneale puts the narration on wax cylinders. Antique by the '20s, this device nevertheless lets us hear Mrs Drablow's storytelling, Arthur's own journaling and hints at the wealth and engagement with the world by the Drablows in having such a luxury to record their days and ways.
The period also allows us to see Arthur as a compassionate professional in taking the difficult case of an ex army officer damaged by gas attacks in the Great War. He winces at the sound of the laboured breathing in the office but he is kind and forthright with the client. Kneale is pointing to the worldly horrors of war technology, how they are matched by the otherworldly ones at Eelmarsh House.
The backstory of the causeway haunting and the vengeful ghost that emerged from it must be pieced together by the alert viewer. This can go against the dense atmosphere of the production but the good news there is that as long as you have the basics you can easily sit back and enjoy this one. I only got the full story of it when I finally read the novel (in advance of the blithering 2012 feature film) and was happy to read through all the letters. By the time you're following Arthur running down the house's corridors or hearing with wide eyes the clopping of hooves through the mist, you're taken up with the thrill of it which allows only so much backstory concern to seep through.
The other side of this atmosphere is a very cosy warmth in scenes of vintage train travel, country inns and town markets. One of Kneale's (and director Herbert Wise's) admirable restraints here is to follow the source novel and dismiss the old Hammer Horror traits of the grumpy local yokels warning the city slickers "not to gaaaugh there! We told yer. Don't gaaaaugh therrrrre!" The people of the town might be a little roughshod but they're not cliches. James Watkins' 2012 Hammer production shoehorns this rubbish into it, along with a mass of cattle prodding jumpscares which were in high cinematic fashion at the time (and now used by the laziest minds in cinema). Kneale's Woman in Black has one (count it) jump scare which is fully earned and silences the most jaded genre fan when seen for the first time.
I seen this too many times to really be affected by my favourite scare (in the manorhouse cemetery) which is a sudden appearance. It happens in one long take and the ghost appears behind Arthur. The entire effect in those pre-CGI days would have been about physical blocking; the actor would have hid behind a prop headstone and, with the camera and Adrian Rawlings in the right places, was suddenly and terrifyingly there. Even the close ups, which you don't expect, of her blue glaring face which might be goofy, are unnerving. I couldn't watch the scene in isolation for years, even in a brightly lit room. The effect has waned on me a little but there's a trace of it still there and when I saw it again for this, I braced myself when the scene approached.
For me this is a rainy night standard, especially when showing it to someone for the first time and best if it's cold enough for an open fire. It might help if you aren't too spoiled by the 4K pristine images of streamer movies and can settle into a vintage look and feel. It's not quite as bane bones as a '70s Dr Who episode but it's not the over egged garbage of the 2012 remake. What you'll get, if you're happy to settle into a well told ghost story, is a purely pleasurable journey into dark intrigue with atmosphere to bottle. But you must be ready to settle, that's how it gets you and that's how it works. And this still works.
Viewing notes: I have sad tidings bout this one. I first saw this in the '90s on a VHS rental. A little later I got a copy of the U.S. DVD release, by then out of print. During the plague in 2020, I was delighted to get the beautiful restoration on Blu-Ray from U.K. label Network Releasing. Finally, a respectful and well presented high def way to watch. What's more you had a choice of seeing it in a tastefully reframed widescreen or the original tv ratio of 4X3 with ad spacers (I watched it this way to see it closer to the original way, without the ads, o' course). Did you notice my use of the past tense there? That's because Network Releasing who were great for a host of U.K. tv and cinematic physical media, went bust last year and their back catalogue was either destroyed or distributed otherwise, not to be taken up by any other label. So, that will leave U.K. Prime for the streaming or (just checked) a second hand copy of the Network disc for over $200 AUD. Meanwhile, the jumpscare crazy bullshit version is there to play at a click on most streaming services. But, not even for giggles should you watch that one.
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