The Woman In Black Dominates Theaters In Classic Hammer Horror Form
A Review by Evelyn F. Altheimer-Fain
If you are like me, an American raise on the old Hammer films, then you miss the old classic type of British films that bear Hammer signature for great horror movies during the 50s and 70s. These were the films where there was not much in blood splatters but plenty of old manner houses and castles. They were often forlorn and lonely and scared you with ashen faces in windows, dark musty cobwebbed, shrouded rooms, and corridors, and unexplainable shadows screams, moans, cries, shuffling footsteps, and knocking. In addition, these places were located in out of the way areas that the locals feared to travel and surrounded by landscapes with dark and evil looking slime filled marches.
Well, Hammer Film Productions along with CBS Films have brought back the classic horror in The Woman in Black. This film is a new adaptation of British writer Susan (Elizabeth) Hill's thriller novel of the same name. This 1983 novel has had many incarnations since its printed debut.
The Eel Marsh House is situated on the Nine Lives Causeway, which at high tide is cut off from the mainland with only the surrounding marsh and the sea for company. From the start, Kipps realizes there is a mystery about the late Mrs. Drablow, the house, the marshes, and the town's people of Crythin Gifford than he was told. It is while sorting through Mrs. Drablow's papers that Kipps begins to piece together the horror of the late residents of Eel Marsh House, and in solving the mystery, he also endures ever increasing of unexplained noises, nerve-chilling events and more sighting of the woman in black. His inquiries about the woman gains him rejection from the town's fearful people, but Mr. Daily (the man who befriended Kipps on the train) tells him that the hauntings by the woman in black is her revenge for being torn from her young son and his senseless death on the marshes.
Kipps also learns from Mr. Daily's tale that after sighting the woman in black, a child never fails to die, and sure enough, he realizes that it was after he spotted her at the graveyard adjacent to the house that the children of Crythin Gifford began to kill themselves one by one. After witnessing the woman in black at one child's death and later seeing the dead children in and around Eel Marsh House, Kipps becomes fearful for the safety of his own son and he races with time to stop his son's arrival at Crythin Gifford train station.The story has a horrifying ending that at the same time is bittersweet.
As stated above 'The Woman in Black' has had many incarnations, which range from a novel, a BBC radio production, a stage play, a TV production on Hammer House Horror (UK only) and now the major film starring former Harry Potter star, Daniel Radcliffe.
'The Woman in Black' is a film that is a true hair-raising, jump-from-your-seat-a-minute trip into the old scary style of Hammer classic productions. A+.
Evelyn F. Altheimer-Fain©02/05/2012
===========================
===========================
Check out It’s A Woman’s Thing " Online Fan Page
