The Woman in Black/YMMV

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.


  • Alternative Character Interpretation: Is the Woman in Black a Complete Monster who enjoys the misfortune of killing other parents children, or a Well-Intentioned Extremist who just wanted to replace her lost son or a Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds who was a Tragic Villain made into a monster by her sister adopting her son?
  • Non Sequitur Scene: In the movie, and of the non-comedic variety. While Arthur is busy waiting for the Woman in Black to acknowledge the discovery of Nathaniel's body, Mr. Daily has a vision of his son Nicholas which leads him to a tea room, where he's suddenly trapped by the ghost children and even sees a ghost child make a creepy face at him outside the window. Then the main plot resolves itself upstairs and the door unlocks itself, letting Mr. Daily go free. But since he was already waiting downstairs with nothing to do, this scene changed nothing, accomplished just as much, and was never mentioned again.
    • Debatable. It could be a means of isolating Arthur and keeping Sam Daily from running upstairs and saving him.
    • Or it was Sam's son luring him into the room in order to protect him from Jennet, since Nicholas' ghost had a connection to his parents that none of the other ghost children displayed.
  • Cliché Storm:
  • Complete Monster: Jennet
  • Fan Nickname: for the movie, "Harry Potter and the Woman in Black" for obvious reasons.
  • Fridge Horror: Kipps finds a baby bird that fell out of a nest in the fireplace. It's possible the titular ghost tried to kill the chick as well due to not having access to the town at the time or just not willing to allow anything to have surviving children.
    • Worse, Alice Drablow lived alone in Eel Marsh House with the ghost of her vengeful sister. For years.
      • Worse, the WIB kills when seen, and Mrs. Drablow is both the target of her hate and living at the place she most haunts. Her continuing to live there makes it nigh impossible not to trigger sightings, and thus cause deaths. Mrs. Drablow must have known she was triggering child deaths in the town, and in a way her staying in that house meant she was at least partly to blame for a ton of deaths. So is she a victim, victimizer, or supernatural proof step-mother that never saw the ghost?
    • In the 2012 version, listen carefully when the woman is taking away her son. You can clearly hear him yell "NO! YOU'RE NOT MY MOTHER!" So was Arthur even doing the right thing by reuniting them? Maybe the reason he was lost for so long was because he was RUNNING from her.
  • Hell Is That Noise: If you see the stage version the sound of the rocking chair will become this for you, possibly also the horses hooves as the ghostly pony and trap approaches.
    • The rocking chair in the film as well, as well as the jangling of the rotting old clockwork toys.
  • Hilarious in Hindsight: Is the name Radcliffe forever linked to the Gothic horror genre?
  • Idiot Plot: You're there to sort through the woman's paperwork, Harry Potter. Why not just take the paperwork back to town instead of staying in the house?
  • Nightmare Fuel: Jennet has complete power over the children she controls and drives to suicide, the Jump Scare of the movies may seem cheesy, the way the solicitor's daughter just stands and stares as she immolates herself certainly wasn't.
  • Unfortunate Implications: Many of those wind up toys were monkeys as musicians—this being the Victorian age, they were probably renderings of people of color as monkeys—the common parlance at the time.
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