James Watkins, “The Woman in Black”
Hammer Films
2012, 95 minutes
“The Woman in Black” is a respectable, if unspectacular, horror film that owes its effectiveness as much to the gothic tales of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain as to twenty-first century cinema. In the film a young London solicitor named Arthur Kipps, still reeling from the death of his wife and trying to care for his young son, travels to the small town of Crythin Gifford in northern England to see to the legal affairs of the recently deceased Alice Drablow. The townspeople are wary of outsiders and rudely warn Kipps to stay away from Drablow’s residence, the sentinel-like Eel Marsh House, which stands atop a small wooded island just off the coast amidst foggy and treacherous salt marshes.
Kipps, played by a surprisingly mature post-Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe, soon learns of the tragic history of Eel Marsh House: Nathaniel Drablow, whom Alice claimed was her son, drowned in the marsh some years previous, and Alice’s sister Jennet Humfrye hung herself in the house’s nursery. These tragedies were followed by a number of apparent suicides by children in Crythin Gifford, and the townspeople believe that a ghostly woman in black is responsible for the deaths. Two more children die once Kipps begins visiting Eel Marsh House, and the solicitor must try to solve the mystery of the death-spirit in black before his own son arrives for a weekend holiday.
The Woman in Black appears to be a conventional horror film, so it is a good fit for James Watkins, who not only wrote the screenplay for “The Descent: Part 2″ (2009) but also wrote and directed “Eden Lake” (2008). The standard fare in his latest film includes a dreary English town that is tormented by ghosts and a haunted house that is surrounded by an overgrown garden with a small cemetery in the nearby woods. Furthermore, the character Arthur Kipps is assaulted by the usual gothic terrors, including strange sounds from empty bedrooms, children’s wind-up toys and dolls with demonic visages, and a maniacal nursery rocking chair.
Although the story is based on the 1983 novel by Susan Hill, the film barely distinguishes itself from recent horror films, most notably Gore Verbinski’s 2002 film “The Ring.” Both stories involve a single parent who must investigate a tragic family history, which in each case began with the drowning of an only child, and those deaths begin to reverberate in the wider community as more and more people mysteriously die. Each protagonist also locates the child’s drowned body and believes it to be the physical source of the haunting and deaths, and with proper burial of the child they hope that the killings will come to an end.
Even though these similarities portray James Watkins’ film as merely derivative, such a comparison neglects the literary foundation that Hill utilizes in her story. In particular, the geography and landscape that Hill builds with Crythin Gifford and Eel Marsh House continue a cultural construction that has been present in English literature for more than a thousand years. The foggy and threatening marshes around Hill’s haunted house echo the dwelling of the monster Grendel in the famous medieval poem “Beowulf,” and this type of eerie and haunted landscape also appears in Charles Dickens’ “Great Expectations” and Graham Swift’s “Waterland.” The ghostly marshland is even present in fantasy literature and cinema, most notably in the Dead Marshes in J. R. R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings.”
Susan Hill taps into this culturally constructed landscape, like her literary progenitors, in which fens and marshes possess a hybrid identity. Such a landscape is physically perilous, because of the ever-present danger of being captured in the quicksand-like salt flats and then drowned in the murky water, but it is also a metaphor for trauma and death, an uncanny reflection of solid ground that can preserve the dead and the memory of their fateful last moments on earth.
While Kipps is working overnight at Eel Marsh House, he hears horses neighing and a child screaming outside, and he rushes out into the marshland only to find impenetrable fog and the chill of the sea air. The screaming comes from the ghostly apparition of Nathaniel, who died when his carriage ran off the causeway and sank into the marsh. The boy’s traumatic death and the inability of his parents to rescue him or even recover the body leads to an emotional and psychic trauma of the landscape. All of the dead children, no matter where or how they died, become part of the scarred psyche of the marsh, and they later appear to Kipps and leave muddy footprints and handprints in the house.
As Kipps pours over the family’s accumulated documents, photos, and holiday cards, he learns that Jennet Humfrye was actually the boy’s mother, and Alice Drablow kept Jennet from her son and locked her away because of her mental fragility. Jennet’s letters make it clear that her sentiments towards her sister are none too friendly, and she holds a grudge so powerful that her need for vengeance over the death of her son extends the evil power of Eel Marsh House; after her death she visits all of the children of the town as a haunting specter dressed in black. The only possible remedy for all of these deaths, and the only way to try and save Kipps’ own son, is to recover Nathaniel’s body from the marsh. His drowning and the deaths of his family have been absorbed by the uncanny landscape, and Kipps has to dive into the muck himself in order to extract the almost mummified remains of Nathaniel’s body. The scarred psyche of Eel Marsh House is a powerful supernatural entity, however. Even after Kipps lays the boy’s body to rest in his mother’s grave, an evil presence remains.
Justin T. Noetzel is an instructor for the English Department at Saint Louis University, where he teaches English composition and medieval and modern British literature. His research and publications focus on manuscript studies, landscapes, space and place theory, ecocritical approaches to literature, monster theory, and cultural history and geography. He lives in St. Louis with his wife, infant Twins, and two dogs.