Weekend at the Movies

I saw The Woman in Black yesterday at the theatre. It was a very fun movie. It also has Harry Potter in it (Daniel Radcliffe). Though if you go to see movies because Harry Potter is in them and will admit it, you are likely younger than I. This one, based on a Susan Hill novel that became a play (in fact, the second longest-running play in the history of West End theatre - you can still see it today), is edge-of-your seat scary. It's an Edwardian ghost story with all the trappings. Harry, sorry, I mean Daniel, plays a handsome young British lawyer who is sent to a remote country estate to 'put some papers in order' - a task that has been shorthand for 'be tormented by supernatural baddies and suspicious townspeople', since Bram Stoker's day.

This movie just happens to also be a Hammer Film, so be prepared to jump. They didn't miss a trick - scary old house with things lurking in the shadows around every corner, faces that disappear, the scariest dolls I've maybe ever seen, and dead children in abundance. Ok, you probably aren't thinking "Yes! Dead kids!" And if you are, please send me your full name, description and address, and I promise I won't forward it immediately to the police station nearest your house. But all of the best scary movies have dead kids in them. The Shining. The Ring. The Others. Probably a plethora of other movies starting with "The". But this plays on very primal fears - our inability to protect the defenseless. The idea that kids (and maybe animals) see things that adults cannot, so really we are the defenseless ones. The idea that despite our best efforts to protect them, some people (even our children!) maybe won't ultimately want to be saved (just look at Whitney Houston for a recent example of this). And of course, no matter how cute they were before, if they've just come out of the graveyard and are blue, dripping wet, and rattling your doorknob, you really won't want to let them in. (But what to do about the wet footprints that you see already inside, once the door has been secured?)

There is nary a moment of downtime, so drinks at the theatre are not recommended. If you go to the bathroom during the movie, you will miss a crucial plot point or a big scare. And this is probably schlock horror, to be sure, so the scares are sometimes cheap, but isn't that why we go to a film like this? If that's your cup of tea, it's well worth the price of admission.