Back in Black

I've been holding off when it comes to writing about the new version of The Woman in Black (2011, directed by James Watkins). It's the kind of movie where, when I was in the moment of watching it, it was profoundly terrifying. When I was not in the moment, would it still resound in my mind? The best horror movies linger in the memory. The original BBC version of this story was such a movie; it gave me bad dreams for weeks after I saw it. Is it an unfair standard, this insistence that horror movies continue to disturb you after the screen fades to black? I don't think it is. I can think of several horror movies that did exactly that. A personal example: my mother would never take a shower if she was in the house alone. Psycho did that to her. Jaws kept people off the beaches for months during 1975. I sometimes pose this question to people who don't understand my indifference to the Nightmare on Elm Street movies: what's more frightening, some dream demon in a bad sweater and a drawer full of steak knives on his fingers or the notion that your gynecologist is whacked out of his mind on drugs, designing his own medical instruments, and using them on patients? I know what my answer is. And yet, there's something to be said for a scare machine, for movies that want to do nothing more than jump out and say "boo!" There are even legitimately great horror movies that do exactly that. Halloween is one of them. So is Carrie. I don't know yet if The Woman in Black is a great horror movie. It's much too soon to make that kind of judgement. But it IS a pretty great scare machine, though, and it even has a jump scare that's as cunningly executed as the dream sequence at the end of Carrie. And that, my friends, is high praise. I had a grand time watching it.

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This is how to get me in the theater...

I don't normally post trailers for upcoming movies, particularly since most trailers are crap these days, but I'm making an exception for this trailer for the upcoming The Woman in Black. This is how you do it:

Here's what I'm taking away from this trailer:

First, this is creepy as hell. It takes every creepy image one associates with desolate Gothic ghost stories and dumps it into a richly textured visual pageant.

Second, the makers of the trailer have come up with a rhyme that gives this a kind of fairytale ambiance. By blotting out the diegetic sound from the footage from the film, this amplifies the creepiness of the images.

Third, this doesn't give away the store. What do I take from this regarding the story? That it's a ghost story. The trailer keeps the movie's secrets.

Fourth, Daniel Radcliffe has turned into an absolutely adorable young man, and boy, howdy, does the period costume amplify this. Yum.

Fifth, I'm going to see this in the theater whenever it comes out. This is the aim of a good trailer, and this one succeeds.

I should mention that this is a Hammer movie, the first since their rebirth to go full-on Gothic. That by itself is cause for rejoicing. I'm there.