When it comes to scary movies, moviegoers don’t seem to mind clichés. Regardless of the endless sequels and remakes that studios throw our way, we expect a movie ticket’s worth of spooks and scares — no matter how predictable.

We anticipate pounding hearts and forcefully shut eyelids. Or, at the very least, we’ll dig our fingernails into the person sitting next to us. The experience is familiar to us, almost comforting.

‘The Woman in Black’ is about as predictable as they come, but that isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Simple and traditional in its storytelling, it relies on the same horror tropes we’ve seen before without running the risk of being too conventional. It certainly isn’t the ideal choice for viewers looking for something fast and dirty. But for those seeking some genuine and well-earned chills, this gothic ghost story delivers.

Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) is a widower and a London lawyer struggling to keep his job for the sake of his son. To save his position, he travels to the English countryside to organize the affairs of a woman who recently died in an isolated estate called Eel Marsh House. He meets frightened children and inexplicably hostile adults who urge him to take the first train back home.

When he doesn’t leave, the consequences prove fatal. His arrival rolls in tandem with a black apparition that appears in the mist, just as village children start dropping dead. Yet he refuses to acknowledge that one has to do with the other. Nor does he believe in the local tale of a child who drowned in the marsh surrounding the mansion and the dying mother who swore vengeance. This changes after one night at Eel Marsh House.

Radcliffe is an empathetic center for the movie, if not a little too young to convincingly play the father of a 4-year-old. But out of his Harry Potter glasses and in a period suit, he’s separate enough from his wizard counterpart to banish most thoughts of Hogwarts from the mind. It’ll take some time to get over Pottermania, much less to wholly distinguish Radcliffe from The Boy Who Lived. However, this is a sturdy enough role that should help along the recovery process.

In a long, dialogue-free sequence, Radcliffe’s Kipps encounters everything that could be expected from a run-of-the-mill haunted mansion. Creaking floorboards, dusty mantelpieces and cobwebbed candelabras lurk in the shadows of the empty estate, while rocking chairs and musical toys spring to life of their own accord. Even spectral children aren’t as fearful as the eponymous woman in black, whose motives Kipps must solve before anymore children die.

Based on Susan Hill’s 1983 novel of the same name, ‘The Woman in Black’ is the latest movie out of relaunched Hammer Film Productions, known for the low-budget, gothic monster movies of the late ‘50s and ‘60s, like ‘Dracula’ and ‘The Curse of Frankenstein.’ In true Hammer tradition, this latest movie is less concerned with gore and more about methodically scaring an audience. It takes familiar elements and presents them in a slow burn, with disquieting effectiveness.

Maybe it’s because too many recent horror films have been about gruesomeness and brutality that ‘The Woman in Black’ succeeds as an earnest scary movie. Director James Watkins uses time-honored techniques to build suspense: a dog that barks at nothing, a sudden knock at the door or lights that turn off in a hallway. These clichés shouldn’t work, and yet they do. Under Watkins’ sincere direction, they’re forgivable, if not almost appropriate for the foreboding Victorian setting he has created.

‘The Woman in Black’ takes the horror genre very seriously, making it a nice reprieve from its ironic and self-aware counterparts (‘Scary Movie,’ anyone?). Although the terrors aren’t new, they’re stylish and frequent enough that you’ll be on the edge of your seat the whole way through.

dataroy@syr.edu

Published on February 8, 2012 at 12:00 pm