Although things tended toward the spooky now and then at dear old Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, surely nothing prepared Daniel Radcliffe to face real terror in a remote English village in his new movie. "The Woman in Black" is the second picture from the resurrected Hammer Studios, the legendary company that produced scores of horror flicks from the late 1950's through the 1970's, thrilling audiences and influencing a number of contemporary filmmakers. "The Woman in Black" therefore demands some attention from students of film history, connoisseurs of the genre, and of course the countless fans of Radcliffe's work in the Harry Potter franchise.

Radcliffe plays Arthur Kipps, a London lawyer who travels to a dreary hamlet in the marshlands of East Anglia to deal with the estate of a woman named Alice Drablow. A young widower whose wife died giving birth to his son, Kipps suffers a deep, persistent melancholy that frequently manifests itself in visions of his dead wife. His condition, coupled with the strange atmosphere of the village, deepens the sense of menace that imbues every scene in the film.

In the village he encounters a pervasive hostility - the innkeeper initially refuses to lodge him, the citizens snarl from their doorways, and the children stare expressionlessly from the windows of their hovels. He persuades one of the locals to take him to Alice Drablow's home, a hideous Victorian Gothic pile called Eel Marsh House, which the tides periodically isolate, cutting him off from any contact for hours. Naturally, at Eel Marsh House he experiences numerous unsettling phenomena: unexplained noises, doors that lock and unlock by themselves, a rocking chair that creaks and moves without an inhabitant, vaguely glimpsed figures in the garden.

As Kipps searches through Alice Drablow's records, he begins to discover some of the history of the village, the house, and the Drablow family. The only friendly person in the place, a prosperous landowner named Samuel Daily (Ciaran Hinds), who drives a magnificent Rolls Royce and dwells in a substantial mansion with his lunatic wife (Janet McTeer), provides more information, which contributes little to Arthur's understanding.

For apparently inexplicable reasons, over the years many of the village children die violent deaths; before the titles, for example, three little girls enjoying a pretend tea party silently stand up and jump out a window together, and Daily himself lost a son many years before, which unhinged his wife. During Arthur's stay a young girl drinks lye and dies in his arms; another, whom Arthur tries to save, sets herself on fire. Despite local history, the townspeople, for no particular reason beyond the usual ignorant xenophobia, blame Arthur for the tragedies.

The picture relies heavily on an increasingly ominous sense of doom, suggested in the repeated shots of Arthur roaming the dark halls of Eel Marsh House, looking for the cause of the strange sounds he hears, in the vast bleakness of the flooded marshes, in the truculence of the citizens, and in the gloomy squalor of their village. Its frequent moments of shock, signaled by an insistent musical score, grow out of the appearances of a vague, extremely scary figure, the woman in black of the title, sometimes looking over Arthur's shoulder, sometimes peering out a window, once hanging horribly from a beam.

The movie departs from the great Hammer tradition in the quality of its production values, seldom a strong point with the studio, which specialized in cheap sets, washed-out colors, decidedly functional acting, and occasionally inadvertent humor. "The Woman in Black" exhibits a most meticulous attention to the details of its time, from Samuel Daily's automobile to the costumes, the impressive exterior shots, and its unprecedented precision in set decoration. It also employs a most un-Hammerlike resolution, ending in a scene that combines shock, tragedy, and heavy sentimentality.

It maintains fidelity to one Hammer tradition, repeating itself, with too many sequences of the puzzled and frightened Arthur, guttering candle in hand, wandering through the creepy corridors of the Drablow mansion. Despite all the shocks and frights, however, the film's most distressing scene shows Janet McTeer seating her two Pomeranians at the dinner table, then babying them in their little cradles, far more disturbing than the spectral woman in black.