A Masterclass In Scaring Your Audience – How To Do Horror, By The Woman In Black Team

Susan Hill‘s 1983 ghost story The Woman in Black was a very successful novel in its own right, before being adapted into a popular TV movie, a phenomenal stage production, and now, a new movie, starring Daniel Radcliffe.

The film did very well in the US weekend, and audience word of mouth was strong. It seems that people are still enjoying old-fashioned spookiness.

But what did Hill do to make sure the book was going to scare its readers? And how did Jane Goldman and James Watkins, the screenwriter and director of the new film, try to get the same effect on the big screen?

I sat down with them to talk about the tricks of the scare trade. Here’s their masterclass in spooking an audience.

Susan Hill:

I started by reading a lot of ghost stories, because I was writing a ghost story. I didn’t think at all I was writing horror, or a thriller, or whatever else, because it is about a ghost, specifically.

It’s easier to write a short story and frighten people for five pages but when you can do it, as in The Turn of the Screw or A Christmas Carol, and go on doing it, it’s different. You have to build it and build. There are two important things here: there’s building tension in the reader, so that they’re looking over their shoulder at every noise; and there’s relaxing it, just slightly, so that the reader can catch their breath. And then you build it again, rack it up even tighter.

With a book, people are going to let themselves be frightened because they’ll be in a safe place reading it. If you’re reading by the fire at home with the curtains drawn, it doesn’t matter if the wind is howling outside, you can give yourself permission to have that delicious feeling of being terrified. I think that’s what you can rely on as a writer. Being frightened when you’re not sure you’re alright is something altogether different, so you’ve got to build in, which is hard to do, that thing of “I’m quite safe… I think.” There’s just got to be that suggestion.

Jane Goldman:

I think the rhythm of film is slightly different, but the principle is exactly the same as Susan says. It’s about pacing, it’s about building tension.

When it came to additional embellishments to be added for the film, I tried to draw on things that had genuinely scared me rather than being too technical about it. I’m really quite hard to scare, so it was about mining the times that I had jumped, the things that creep me out. I collect Victorian automata and I know, sometimes when you glance at them in the dark, it does give you a little shudder, so that was something I thought was true to the spirit of Eel Marsh House and to the nursery. Those things are a little unsettling, as well as being of the period.

Susan Hill:

That’s the word, isn’t it – unsettling. Not all of the time are you terrified, or even frightened, but you are unsettled. And once you’re unsettled, the door’s open.

James Watkins:

We talked quite a bit about how a lot of horror films now are nasty and gory, and I’m not using those terms pejoratively at all, but those terms do not necessarily mean the same as scary. What we have tried to do is address how we can make the film scary.

I think it’s very important that it’s a ghost story, rather than necessarily a horror film. A ghost story is different. Ghosts are so hardwired into our culture – like the fear of water, or the fear of the dark, which is obviously a big factor in our film. A ghost is what you can’t quite see, so we tried to make a film that will play on people’s imagination.

This is what books do brilliantly – books do that better than films. But if you can try to approximate that in a film, what people will imagine will be scarier than what you can show. So, if you can engage the imagination, through indirection, through staging, then you get under people’s skin.

The ghost is something just caught in the corner of your eye, blinking on the edge of the frame, something just peering, peeking out of the black. And we really started to work that arena, approximating something like the great ghost stories.

Scaring people is like comedy in a way. You build towards a joke, or you build towards a pitch, and then you let it come back, then you build again but the overall trajectory is always moving upwards.

Susan Hill:

During some horror films, everybody laughs. They’re so ridiculous, and so frightening, in a way, that they end up being funny. This is the one thing that I thought: The Woman in Black must never be funny at any point. It must never get so frightening that all the audience can do is laugh.

James Watkins:

You get to be quite attuned to responses of the audiences. Sometimes there’s laughter of relief. There’s tension and when you let it go, audience members look at each other and let out a little laugh. And that’s a good thing. You really do need to listen to the audience and try to calibrate it to their responses.

We wanted to have a less-is-more aesthetic with the audio. We wanted to pull the audience into the present moment. We want them to be there with Kipps, to hear him breathing, to hear his footsteps. What we didn’t want to do was to go into the Hollywood way of drowning it in sound. The film is very pared back in terms of its atmosphere, so there’s an immediacy there. You’re feeling the house, feeling the room.

We worked to create a film that pulled the audience in. They’re leaning in, looking into the darkness, and trying to hear the sound. It’s analogous to what Susan was saying – pulling the audience in and then building and building and building.

The Woman in Black is in UK cinemas now. She’s also stood right behind you, reading this over your shoulder… and she’s about to touch you…