Susan Hill's The Woman in Black is perhaps the best loved classic style ghost story of the last 50 years and had already been running as a stage play for decades and had a TV film, written by Nigel Kneale, under its belt before the revived Hammer Films brought it to the big screen in 2012. Both films may dispense with Hill's framing device, which very consciously places this story in the context of Christmas ghost storytelling, but all the ingredients of a classic British haunted house story are still there, meaning that they remain ideal viewing for the holiday season. Kneale's version, written for ITV for Christmas Eve in 1989, may be more faithful to the plot details Hill's original story (aside from Kneale's curious insistence on changing all of Hill's joyously Dickensian character names), but it's the Hammer film, adapted by Kick Ass screenwriter and Mrs Jonathan Ross Jane Goldman and directed by Eden Lake's James Watkins, that really packs a punch when it comes to edge of your seat tension. Not all of its adaptation choices work completely, the amount of grim child death in the village is a little over the top, but the 20 minute sequence of grieving lawyer's clerk Arthur Kipps alone in the isolated Eel Marsh House with the vindictive spirit of Jennet Humfrye is one of the most tense and scary of any ghost story. Former Harry Potter Daniel Radcliffe (the 1989 version starred the Potter films' James Potter: Adrian Rawlins) sometimes struggles with the material that has him as a depressed widower with a young son, but he is superb at reacting to the hauntingly disturbing events of this sequence. Hammer have a sequel, Angels of Death, in pre-production with Hill's tacit approval. Really, though, many of us would rather see some of her other original stories, such as The Man in the Picture or The Small Hand, follow it to the screen.
