Susan Hill: Why we all need a fright on a winter’s night

Susan Hill

Thu 20 October 2015

“D

o you believe in ghosts?” they always ask me in interviews. I reply: “I keep an open mind.” The new physics allows for them; it is all to do with time. I don’t understand it, but quantum physicists are not gullible souls.

JB Priestley was fascinated by the subject of time and the way it might shift about. He wrote plays and fiction about it, but, so far as I know, he did not write a ghost story. I wish he had. The genre has attracted some fine writers but it is often dismissed as mere “entertainment”. Literary snobs might heed the American writer Tom Wolfe. He gives another definition: “Entertainment enables people to pass the time pleasantly, and any writing should first entertain. It’s a very recent thing that there is a premium put on making writing so difficult that only a charmed aristocracy is capable of understanding it.”

 

Haunted Harry ... Daniel Radcliffe in The Woman in Black,
which has become the most successful British horror film at the UK box office

Daniel Radcliffe's The Woman in Black sets British horror record

This article is more than 8 years old

Potter's powers help ghost story become most successful British horror at UK box office, with haul of £14m in just three weeks

Ben Child
Wed 29 February 2012

The Woman in Black, starring Daniel Radcliffe, has become the most successful British horror at the UK box office with a haul of more than £14m in just three weeks of release.

The supernatural tale, from director James Watkins and the revived Hammer Films unit, has overtaken homegrown rivals including Danny Boyle's 28 Days Later and Edgar Wright's Shaun of the Dead. It has also outpaced similarly-themed US productions shot in the UK with British casts, such as Tim Burton's Sleepy Hollow, Alejandro Amenábar's The Others and Francis Ford Coppola's Dracula. Its success has been partly credited to it appealing to as broad a church as possible in being a horror film with a 12A certificate.

Written by British screenwriter Jane Goldman and based on Susan Hill's novel about a widower who travels to a remote mansion said to be haunted by spirits in Edwardian England, The Woman in Black has received mostly positive reviews. The Guardian's Xan Brooks noted (via a three-star review) that Radcliffe, the erstwhile star of the Harry Potter series, "had taken a shrewd baby-step in the right direction with this busy, bustling ghost story that at times appears less indebted to the Susan Hill bestseller than the Haunted Mansion ride at Disneyland".

THE GUARDIAN