Young London solicitor Arthur Kipps travels to the coastal town of Crythin Gifford to sort the affairs of recently deceased client, Alice Drablow. With some variations, each version of The Woman in Black follows the same basic story. (Amusingly, Adrian Rawlins played James Potter, Daniel Radcliffe's father, in the Harry Potter films.) In 2012, the resurrected Hammer Films produced a glossy version starring Daniel Radcliffe, followed by cash-in prequel Angel of Death in 2015. The theatre version by Stephen Mallatratt opened in Scarborough in 1987, before moving to London’s West End, where it continued to haunt the Fortune Theatre until lockdown. Susan Hill’s original book was published in 1983, a classic ghost story pastiche in the tradition of Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. Now it’s come to Blu-ray for the very first time, released by Network. For many years it languished in spectral, grainy form in the dark corners of YouTube hell. It was repeated on terrestrial TV only once, on Channel 4 in 1994, and had limited VHS and DVD releases. More than 30 years later, it’s almost like a ghostly legend itself, its reputation passed around by those who saw it – via word-of-mouth or taped-off-television video. I was absolutely howling with laughter.”īased on the novel by Susan Hill and adapted by TV horror visionary Nigel Kneale, The Woman in Black was first broadcast on ITV on Christmas Eve 1989. “In front of me was a row of men – technicians and props people, all good honest blokes – and when that came on the screen, every single one of them leapt away in the same direction. “There was a screening for the cast and crew,” she recalls. ![]() So frightening is “that moment”, that Pauline Moran – The Woman in Black herself – remembers it scaring a load of burly men literally out of their seats. Much more than just a jump scare, it’s the inevitable eruption of all-out terror after 90 minutes of subtly-crafted suspense. ![]() There is a scare in the 1989 TV adaptation of The Woman in Black (a scare known by the relatively few people who have seen it as simply “that moment”) that’s up there with the most terrifying things ever seen on British television.Īfter a long night of ghostly torment in Eel Marsh House – haunted by voices, self-unlocking doors, and a ball which bounces itself – bumbling solicitor Arthur Kidd (Adrian Rawlins) is in the grip of a fever dream when – ARGH! – the Woman in Black comes for him, screeching a sound of pure, soul-curdling horror.
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