Susan Hill’s classic 1983 ghost story The Woman in Black first spawned a hit stage adaptation that had audiences leaping out of their seats in fear – and then a highly successful movie version under the Hammer banner, starring Daniel Radcliffe, written by Jane Goldman and directed by James Watkins. Now we have a sequel, with a storyline devised by Hill and scripted by Jon Croker; there is also an elegant novelisation by Martyn Waites for Hammer’s literary imprint. The story brings us back to Eel Marsh House 40 years on, during the second world war, by way of a slightly fanciful situation in which London kids are evacuated, though not to specific families; they are simply billeted in this big, creepy old house built on a mudflat that floods when the tide comes in, rather like Holy Island in Northumberland. Then the Woman in Black once again makes her uncanny presence felt. This inevitably doesn’t have the charge of the first story, but it is still interestingly weird and dreamlike, and quite disturbing. A commercially driven sequel, sure – but still effective.
