The Woman in Black Brings Daniel Radcliffe to the Darker Side

Few remem­ber the orig­i­nal movie, adapted by the novel, The Woman in Black from 1989. The fans of the for­mer movie had to take a back seat for the mass of new fans, though, when Daniel Rad­cliffe was cast as Author Kidd.

This new role was Radcliffe’s first time being on the big screen with­out a scar on his face, still had the glasses at times but it wasn’t too obvi­ous. The only times dur­ing the movie when it was some­what ques­tion­able if he was still attached to his for­mer char­ac­ter was when he went from scare to scare and some­one in the audi­ence finally said, “Daniel, you’re not Harry Pot­ter any­more, get out of there!”

How­ever, while the movie had its scares and sus­pense, some scenes were just too quiet too drawn out with lit­tle hap­pen­ing besides Rad­cliffe sadly look­ing around an old house. The plot was eerie with the lurk­ing pres­ence of an old widow and Radcliffe’s mem­o­ries of his late wife but too played out in the long train and car rid­ing sequences.

The orig­i­nal 1989 ver­sion had a dif­fer­ent turn, leav­ing Author Kidd’s wife alive with a fam­ily but the killing off of the wife in the 2012 ver­sion made for a bit of a more lik­able father-son relationship.

There were also more deaths than the 1989 ver­sion which is nor­mal in today’s hor­ror movies, but some­times quan­tity over qual­ity does not work. For this film in par­tic­u­lar, the deaths were not ter­ri­bly grue­some, in fact most of the moments right before the deaths were cut away, which did work to the advan­tage of the plot and twist at the end.

In an inter­view with Daniel Rad­cliffe, he said the chil­dren did very well and were very real­is­tic despite the cold weather and long scenes. The other char­ac­ters played their part as well as they could with few lines and oppor­tu­ni­ties to show any­thing other than gloomy attitudes.