A Crime Against Scary

Rating: Null/10 (15 November 2014)

The Woman in Black has run for years and years as a successful stage play in the London West End. I have had the privilege of seeing it twice and each time the superb staging and acting has blown me away. The stage play is based on the classic "less is more" theory and the moments of scary are limited to a few times but when they come they are nothing less than chilling and downright terrifying.
By contrast, The Woman in Black film is not scary in the slightest and the basic reason why is that we are bombarded scene after scene with "scary" faces and ghoulish spectres. It literally becomes a matter of going "oh look another ghost and so what?" The location are well thought through but the haunted house is one giant cliché. The acting is OK but the script gives them very little to work with. Daniel Radcliffe seems a really nice chap but he was miscast as a tragic widower as he cannot muster any emotion beyond "mild alarm".
Delivering such a poor film with such great source of material is one heck of a feat but the Hammer team manage to do this magnificently.
The last great act of the Hammer Company was in 1980 with the TV Series "Hammer House of Horror". Most episodes were really scary and one in particular "The Two Faces of Evil" was just about the scariest TV programme ever to grace our screens. I watched it as a 12 year old in 1980 and then as a 42 year old 30 years later. Both occasions were a thing of sleeping with the lights on afterwards. The Hammer team that made Woman in Black should all sit down and watch this episode and then hang their heads in shame.