Trailer: The Woman in Black UK version and why I’m still not excited

The story centres on a young solicitor, Arthur Kipps, who is summoned to Crythin Gifford, a small market town on the east coast of the United Kingdom to attend to the funeral of Mrs Alice Drablow, an elderly and reclusive widow who lived alone in the desolate and secluded Eel Marsh House.

The house is situated on Nine Lives Causeway, and at high tide is completely cut off from the mainland with only the surrounding marshes and sea frets for company. Kipps soon realises there is more to Alice Drablow than he originally thought. At the funeral he spots a woman dressed in black and with a pale, wasted face, who is watched in silence by a group of children. Over the course of several days, while sorting through Mrs. Drablow’s papers at Eel Marsh House, he endures an increasingly terrifying sequence of unexplained noises, chilling events and hauntings by the Woman in Black.

Via: The Film Stage

The movie looks interesting but the only problem is that it’s not captivating. It looks generic. The idea of a spectre of someone/something haunting a “special home” has been used, re-used, and abused so many times over the last couple of decades and what’s in this trailer does little to imply that they’ve done something unique or even incredibly well to help destinguish this movie other than Dan Radcliffe.

I’m still rooting for the guy in his ambitions to avoid being typecast as HP, and this does help, but I’m not sure that we’re getting the best impression of his capabilities with this particular project and so far this movie is doing very little for my radar. The eerie tone and absence of audio does help create the atmosphere that they’re aspiring to but there’s very little in this trailer that makes me think that the movie will rank very high in the “scary movie” dept. Maybe it’s the environment but so far I’m going to have to hold hope to be “pleasantly surprised” with this one.