The recent Hammer film The Woman in Black was a massive hit for the resurrected horror studio,
earning approximately $130 Million in box office alone from a modest $15
Million budget. So naturally they’re anxious to try to replicate this success
with a sequel. From what I understand, a sequel of sorts (tentatively titled The
Woman in Black: Angels of Death) is already
in the works, with the haunted mansion Eel Marsh House from the previous movie
being the locale for a makeshift military hospital during wartime, and our
titular menace providing scares and stuff, I think. But is this really the best
way to go here? I think another direction might have been a better idea, using
the original setup again, but with a new twist to keep it fresh and zeitgeisty
with social commentary.
Here’s my conception of an appropriate sequel for The
Woman in Black: As we all know, the
eponymous mourning-wearing ghost lady likes to kill children in the village
where she, um, lives (?), and works as the local haunted attraction. Our story
would begin in the present day. The reputation of the village for being so
fatal to kids is kept as much of a secret as possible, but word has gotten out
to a minimal degree. Most of the original families have moved away from the
village, but there are still some people (adults) living there, as it’s in such
a picturesque locale. But as rumors of the village’s ghost spread, some
families with extreme problem children hear about it, and at the end of their
wits from their children’s outrageous delinquency, they threaten to move there
in the hopes that they can scare their kids into behaving themselves.
Unfortunately, these kids are so used to getting away with anything and
everything, what with spanking being considered child abuse, and any time any
parent yells at their child, someone videos it on their cell phone and posts it
online as a public shaming (and then the parent gets charged with child abuse),
these children have become completely spoiled and convinced that nobody will
ever be able to punish them for anything. So, dismissing the threats of moving
in such a bratty and insolent way, all of these tortured parents, reaching the
end of their ropes, snap and decide to move to Crythin Gifford, secretly hoping
the Woman in Black will kill their horrible delinquent children before they
do.
So all of the aforementioned families move to Crythin
Gifford around the same time, and it isn’t long before their unruly brats form
gangs and terrorize the town, violently attacking everyone, torturing animals,
spraying graffiti everywhere, robbing everyone’s homes and businesses, sexually
assaulting each other, etc. And any time anyone tries to discipline the
children, the kids claim it’s child abuse and that person gets arrested. Well,
all of this activity has caused something to stir in the Eel Marsh House across
the causeway… Yes, it’s the Woman in Black: she hears the voices and activity
of children, and she comes to get her revenge on the town! Oh, but once in the town, and after witnessing a taste of the
absolute pandemonium these awful hooligan kids have unleashed upon this
unsuspecting formerly peaceful hamlet, she decides that the far worse
punishment would be to let these children live, rather than killing them, so
she does not kill the kids, delivering unbearable shock and horror to the
entire adult population of the town. And the children taunt their parents,
saying: “See? I told you nobody’s allowed to punish us!”, and they become worse
delinquents than ever. The Woman in Black has had her revenge once again! The
End.
Then, if this movie is a success (or even if it’s a failure,
but they want to make another sequel to cash in on the original movie), they
could make a further sequel: The Woman in Black’s Dog. (Someone made a movie called Dracula’s
Dog once, so why not this?) So here’s how
this movie would work:
As we see in the film The Woman in Black, one family copes with the loss of their son by
getting two little Paris Hilton-style lap dogs and dressing them up and treating
them like children. So, in this sequel, it’s a few years after the events of
the first movie, and more and more families have lost their children to the
wrath of the Woman in Black’s vengeful spirit, and seeing as how well the toy
dogs have worked as surrogate children for other mourning parents, everyone
else decides to do this as well, adopting dogs to serve as replacement children
to assuage their loss and loneliness. So what happens now is that we find out
that the Woman in Black actually had a faithful dog, and it knew about how
heartbroken its owner was, and how much she still wants to get revenge on the
townsfolk (and it knows she committed suicide, and so it wants revenge on the
townsfolk as well), but with all the children now dead, she can’t hurt them
anymore, because she’s only allowed to kill children, or something. So anyway,
her dog, knowing how much his loving owner the Woman in Black still wants to
get revenge and stuff, and realizing that the little toy dogs are what the
parents of the village love now, the Woman in Black’s dog rises from the grave
as a ghost dog (a big spooky black Great Dane), and he haunts and kills all the
dogs in the village, making everyone horrified and miserable again, and making
the Woman in Black proud. The End.
And then, if this movie is a success, the townspeople could
replace their dead dogs with kittens, and then it could turn out that the Woman
in Black also had a cat, and…
(And maybe the next movie could be with goldfish, and then
hamsters, and then pet rocks, etc.)
BTW: I actually like kids. I just enjoy making fun of the
new hippie child-rearing policies of no punishment allowed for really bad behavior, because kids are really smart, and they learn quickly that they can
get away with almost anything when there’s no punishment allowed.
