One of the more successful efforts to buff up the Hammer Films brand, The Woman in Black gives Daniel Radcliffe the role of the respectable gent given the challenge of focusing on his paperwork in a place of mystery and dread, surrounding by superstitious rubes who pop up to tell him he’s not welcome round these parts. Forty years ago, this part might have been played by Ralph Bates, but now its a vehicle for the ex-Potter to show whether he can branch out. Most of the film consists of Radcliffe, his lower jaw determinedly jutting out with the tension of it all, exploring a tricked-out, pop-up house filled with spooky Victoriana. The obligatory shots of pale faces peering mournfully out of upper-floor windows are also given a good airing.
The trappings of the abandoned 19th-century nursery (broken dolls, rocking chairs, staring-eyed portrait paintings, clockwork toys) have become the visual shorthand for uncanny terror, the return of a repressed childhood trauma none of us can actually remember. These are the hard, unhuggable toys invested with the memories of games with long-dead children (that the film is about dead young ‘uns only compounds the creepy connotations), superstitious markers of the end that awaits us all: we will be outlived by our stuff. There is potential shock built into the mechanism of a moving toy: haunted house movies are all about anticipating movement in inert things and, to paraphrase Chekhov, you know that the wind-up monkey automaton from the first act is going to spring into life before the last.
Scares are effectively engineered by James Watkins (director of chavsploitation outing Eden Lake), and I must admit that my buttons were successfully poked with a cold finger a few times, but we race so swiftly from one jolt to the next that there’s little modulation between quiet repose and skin-jumping shockery. Like any good ghost story, it sets up a contest between rational and supernatural interpretations of paranormal phenomena but, as usual, rational explanations, which tend to make for less unsettling horror movies, don’t stand a chance.
ory of Ayesha, queen of a lost African city who cannot die. She is waiting for the return of the lover she killed 2000 years previously, and believes she has found him in the form of an English explorer. The plot isn’t important right now, because watching it again, I came across a scene which had haunted me as a child, though I hadn’t remembered which film it had come from. Even after nearly 30 years, it came back to me, shot-for-shot. In the scene, Ayesha, believing she has been betrayed by a group of rebellious slaves, orders their execution by having them thrown, chained together, into a deep, fiery pit. For years after seeing this sequence it would come back to me and make me shudder at the plight of these poor guys – I remembered clearly the low whimpering noises they made as they were dragged towards the pit, and the screams they issued as they fell. I had only misremembered the pit as a bottomless chasm, an eternal tumble into pitch blackness. To find that it was actually filled with lava was strangely reassuring: I had previously thought to myself, years after seeing the film in my childish naivety, that “the slaves are still feeling”. It scared me, and it made me sad whenever I remembered it.
One of the best surprises in my overstuffed post box this week was a couple of copies of Robert Shail’s new edited collection 
