Shown on UK TV

Yeah; see, I'm loath to be too critical of the new film as I love the fact that a story of that kind can be successful, I want the Hammer brand to succeed, and I saw much that was good in it... but I wouldn't rate the new film above the old, by any stretch of the imagination.

I find Hill's judgement on this to be perverse, since the original film is certainly much closer to the book in many ways than the new one, and is subtle and restrained in a way appropriate to the material.

In the new film I didn't like the fact it suddenly turned into The Ring, I didn't like the attempt to lend more sympathy to the woman, and I didn't like the overdependence on special effects when she's depicted. I also didn't like the whole thing about children committing suicide under her influence, and the spiritualism bits - it's really quite out of keeping with the tone of the book to have things as blatant as spiritual possession. I always thought that what made the Woman in Black scary was it's very low-key nature, which helped lend a sense of reality to it. The new film is a fantasy movie, and I found it difficult to forget.

Not that there aren't many great things about the new one, and I loved a couple of the innovations - in particular the shot where the toys' eyes appear to move across the room, the moment where Kipps walks into a room and sees a flash of a hanging body... and the creepiest for me was the moment when Kipps hears a woman sobbing and then realises that it's actually a mynah bird, mimicking the sounds of a household tragedy. Oh, the first time a figure rises and slips out of the vile mud is very effective and Jamesian too.

I didn't prefer the depiction of Eel Marsh here, but it works well enough. I preferred the authentic sense of the desolated landscape from the original.