Fade To Black (The Woman In Black) - VHS Limited Edition

This shows my interpretation of a story that has gripped me ever since I first read the Susan Hill novel in school, The Woman In Black. A genuine family favourite of mine as I remember watching the 1983 film with my brothers way back as kids one night before Christmas and the book didn’t prepare me for what was to come, genuinely terrifying and real, no silly effects or big actors, just images that still make me go cold to this day. It was the power of the figure on the marshes that was the most gripping, the sense of isolation and truly being haunted by someone with so much subtle anger. I own one of the original video cassettes of the film and have made countless friends sit down and watch it in the pitch black, patio doors open and all, it was the first film that my partner and I watched together, obsessed?

I’ve also been lucky enough to watch the play adaptation at the Fortune Theatre twice and absolutely loved everything about the venue and the play so the chance to create my own interpretation and tell my story is incredible. The intention has always been to create a scene that was beautiful, serene and calm yet that showed details that pulled on the heart strings, that were full of sorrow and sadness and that would make you think a little deeper. I wanted to compose a piece that did just the same as the original did, to inject a small detail that turned the image on it’s head, that detail being the unforgettable silhouetted figure of Jennet Drablow dressed in her funeral attire. The thought of creating something dramatic and over the top didn’t interest me, it just wouldn’t be right for this subject.

There is one point where on the marshes Arthur Kipp knows that something terrifying is there and spins to reveal the silhouette, I wanted to create that factor where you are focused on the beautiful detail, you know something is there but try to avoid looking because you desperately don’t want to see her. The impact that Jennet had on all those who saw her was brutal and most often terminal but it is another case of not being born bad, it shows what we assume to be a normal woman who’s life is turned upside down through bearing a child out of wedlock and then losing him twice. We see hatred born towards her sister Alice who took her son from her and who couldn’t save him from the sinking mud and rising tide of the Nine Lives Causeway committing Jennet to a world of hatred and inflicted insanity. Is blood truly thicker than water?

It really is a story of the unforgiven - Jennet for having a child out of wedlock and Alice for being blamed for taking her son and not saving him. Details within the scene show the relationship between Jennet and her son, Nathaniel, an ageing teddy, a wooden train (links to how Arthur travelled to Criffin Gifford), poignant images that showed so much more before she faded to black. As with so much of my work I have created the piece to leave a lot to interpretation rather than dictating, you might look at it and think that you are looking at the point in time within the original narrative however if you look a little deeper you will notice the ruined Eel Marsh House, a broken rocking chair (I had to do that as that damned thing terrified me!) that suggest that time has moved by and the shifting tides have withdrawn to reveal objects previously hidden.

Yet Jennet remains, destined to stand there alone. It is such a terrifying story line, how could it not be when children are lost in horrific circumstances throughout, yet personally the subsequent remakes of the film seem to make it hard to find any apathy towards the woman in black because of how hyped up every detail was. My hope is that I manage to make people think, to consider the events that took a woman, a mother and made a monster. "They have asked for my story. I have told it. Enough.”