A Supernatural Horror Film Adaption Of The Woman In Black

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Nursery rhymes and the themes associated with them are especially prevalent within the genre of horror. These traditional verses have been a part of everyone’s childhood, being associated with an innocent, safe and worry-free time in the viewers lives. However, whether it’s a song or a rhyme, directors and composers utilise these themes to violate the individual’s sense of security associated with those times of our youth. If we consider specific uses of nursery rhymes and themes within the horror genre outline, we may gain insight into ways in which the director and composer/sound designer create and convey the intended atmosphere of terror.

Through my analysis of horror directors and composers that employ these nursery themes within their artistry/genre, the most successful uses we will see how some of these seemingly quaint themes have been successfully, artfully used to create sometimes terrifying effect. The horror movie franchises, The Woman in Black, Nightmare on Elm Street and The Conjuring, are very different in the way they utilise nursery themes. The film creators of each, use an interesting variety of film and composition techniques to great effect. Their innovative approaches to film design are the foundation for conveying these simple nursery rhymes and themes to the viewers, as a powerful tool of terror. Music can strongly influence and stimulate our most basic emotions and with regards to fear, Composers use this elemental music to produce a distorted sense of reality, taking advantage of the audience’s existential and sometimes earliest physiological fears.

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Directed by James Watkins, the 2012 film adaption of The Woman in Black is a supernatural horror film based on the novel by Susan Hill written in 1983. This story is set in a small English village, Crythin Gifford, in 1910. The film explores the journey of a young recently widowed lawyer, Arthur Kipps. He is instructed by his firm to travel to the countryside to retrieve documents left by the deceased owner of Eel Marsh House, Alice Drablow. Kipps later discovers that the house of his late client is haunted by the spirit of a sinister woman wearing black who manipulates the children of the village to kill themselves.

“Whenever she’s been seen, on the Causeway, on the marsh, in the grounds of the house, however briefly and whoever by, there has always been one sure and certain result. In some violent or dreadful circumstance, a child has died. They took away her boy, she can’t find him, so she takes them” (Watkins, 2012)

Watkin’s terrifying adaptation of this dark story is achieved through careful and specific planning of the audio throughout the film. As “sound has proven an effective method for eliciting emotion in audiences” (Shehan, 2016). Their approach towards the sound and music of the film was quite different to the “Hollywood-ised American way of drowning the movie in sound”. (Mellor, 2012) They wanted to have a “less-is-more aesthetic, to pull the audience in, to be there in the present moment with him [Arthur Kipps, Daniel Radcliffe’s character] in the space, you want to hear his breathing, hear his footsteps”, putting a much greater focus on diegetic sound.

In the film, nursery themes are a constant. The childhood motif is accentuated by the room full of antique children’s wind up toys. Most of the paranormal activity occurs in the deceased child’s room, with musical toys being animate without physical interaction and a mother’s creaking empty rocking chair. This nursery represents the antithesis of a happy childhood room, despite having the elements of a blissful typical childhood it has become a symbol of death and innocence lost. These diagetic nursery sounds are utilised by the director in order to have the audience associate it with their own childhood. By placing this noise within a scene that has the protagonist scared and alone, exposed to horrifying supernatural activities, it highlights the reality that the audience is facing. The director has taken advantage of the viewers familiarity with the sounds and sites of childhood and effectively created a terrifying atmosphere.

The composer of the movie’s soundtrack, Marco Beltrami, worked with Watkins to produce music for the film that reflected the story and the themes within it. Overall, there is minimalistic uses of non-diegetic sound. The effectiveness of this technique is significant, as it allows for more emphasis when non-diegetic sound is present as it is used to signify when the Woman is to take her next child.

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