“You grow to like my character,” says the 62-year-old star of Chernobyl and the Harry Potter films.
It’s inexplicable anything bad should happen to him, but it does.” He has boyish likability, a good man who does nothing wrong. But another important detail is Rawlins’ performance as Arthur Kidd. “A huge inspiration to me and Jeremy when writing Ghost Stories was the way Herbie creates this drab, ordinary sense of despair with long, elegant single shots. “It will always remain special,” he says. So what are the reasons for its enduring power? Why did it disappear? And why, after all this time, is it coming back?Īndy Nyman, co-creator, with the League of Gentlemen’s Jeremy Dyson of the long-running stage-play Ghost Stories and its 2017 film adaptation, has a particular interest in the film, as it gave him his first ever acting role, aged 23, as a young office clerk. The League of Gentlemen creators are vocal fans: Reece Shearsmith has called it “the most terrifying programme I’ve ever seen”, while Oscar-winning director Guillermo del Toro cites it in his list of favourite supernatural films. In later years, it has made fleeting illegal appearances on YouTube, accompanied by comments speculating darkly on the reasons for its disappearance.Īdrian Rawlins in The Woman in Black. Partly owing to its scarcity a mystique grew around it, with copies passed from hand to hand on dubbed VHS and hooky DVDs. The film was a hit with critics and audience alike, yet while Hill’s book went on to sell millions and become a set GCSE text, and Stephen Mallatratt’s stage adaptation began a West End run in 1989 that was halted by Covid-19, Wise’s film slid into relative obscurity.Īfter briefly surfacing on WH Smith’s own-brand VHS label in 1991 and screening on Channel 4 in 1994, it disappeared.
“ a genuine physical reaction,” wrote Nancy Banks-Smith in the Guardian, “as if one layer of your skin had shifted over another.”
There, in a remote house at the end of a shingle causeway, he is tormented by terrifying noises and cries – and appearances from a tall woman dressed in black (Pauline Moran), who comes to exert a malevolent hold over his life.įirst broadcast on ITV, at 9pm Christmas Eve 1989, it haunted all who watched it, thanks in part to Wise’s tense, economical direction, and one of the greatest jump-scares in the history of horror. Adapted by visionary British sci-fi screenwriter Nigel Kneale from Susan Hill’s 1983 novella, it stars a 31-year-old Adrian Rawlins as Edwardian solicitor Arthur Kidd, sent to settle the estate of an eccentric widow, Mrs Drablow, on the north-east coast of England.
“The Woman in Black ruined Christmas.”įew horror films have acquired the cult reputation of Herbert Wise’s TV production of The Woman in Black.
You wake up next morning, Christmas Day, you’re still scared …” But there were after-effects, a mood that carried on after the film ended. We all just wanted to watch a spooky ghost story. “I saw it when it was first shown,” says the film critic Kim Newman.