The Woman in White

People who peruse vintage TV programming schedules are used to seeing horror movies billed as something other than “horror,” as if the term was to be avoided whenever possible. Instead, one will encounter “thriller” or “mystery” or the particularly handy “suspense.” After all, a horror movie could be thrilling, mysterious, and suspenseful, so where was the lie?

Wilkie Collins’s 1860 novel The Woman in White is most commonly labeled a mystery, but any sole label is bound to be a misnomer for all of the others that are left out. The novel is also a family drama, coming-of-age tale, friendship saga, romance, comedy, ghost story, and horror undertaking. Ghost stories by their very nature are mysteries. We don’t know what we don’t know, and there’s a certain amount of surmising involved.

Collins and his pal Charles Dickens were adroit at conveying “real life” via a ghost story and ghost stories via real life. The ghosts didn’t even need to be spectrally legitimate, and a ghost might be a lot of things—the haunting specter of one’s past, for instance. The novel also offered opportunities to filmmakers as a sort of choose-your-own-adventure property: if you wanted to dial in on the mystery, you could make a killer adaptation. If you preferred to push the ghost story to the fore, a terror classic was potentially in the offing.

Warner Bros. opted to play up the fear component with their 1948 adaptation of The Woman in White directed by Peter Godfrey and starring Gig Young, Alexis Smith, Eleanor Parker, Sydney Greenstreet, and Agnes Moorehead. A ghost story turns the reader into a detective but in a fashion that’s less whodunit and more what is this? One will struggle to find a novel better plotted than The Woman in White, but it’s the humanly sinister portions that end up doing the most manifesting in the movie. We are getting what feels at times like a ghost story, yes, but the horror is in the people. Their venality.

With a score by Max Steiner and a running time pushing two hours, The Woman in White was no B-movie quickie. It may have been better off if it was. Sometimes with a literary work, there’s a tendency to step too lightly, which makes for a muddled final product. Over-reverence doesn’t serve horror well. Getting into a text and ripping out what you need does. There’s the floweriness of a costume drama to this adaptation that we’d be better off without, though it’s offset by heaps of atmosphere. You lose some, you scare some.

Val Lewton could have overseen an unsettling delight of a movie based off of the text—bastardized from the text, we might say. One suspects that the studio was trying to please too many people at once by appealing to the mystery buffs, the frights crowd, and the period-piece admirers. The most fitting label for The Woman in White is perhaps “horror as much as anything”—and it’s not as if that would have worked for TV Guide. There’s small mystery why the many scary-movie enthusiasts who likely saw the listing over the decades wouldn’t know what they’d be watching. 🩸