Fridge / The Woman in Black

Fridge Brilliance

• Arthur is Jennet's Good Counterpart. Jennet does what she does out of spite and grief. Arthur runs into burning buildings to save children and swims into quicksand pools to try to lay two specters to rest and rescue a town of their dreadful curse; for no other reason than decency and kindness.
• In the 2012 movie, villagers that have lost children to the Woman in Black and interact with Arthur reflect four of the Five Stages of Grief:
  • Denial: Samuel Daily, who is in denial of the supernatural curse plaguing Crythin Gifford despite the considerable signs to the contrary that he's been exposed to, because to acknowledge that it's all real would mean facing the horrible reality that his late son has been Barred from the Afterlife and condemned to walk the earth as a malevolent spirit's slave.
  • Anger: Mr. Fisher is the most passionately angry and outspoken man towards Arthur and Sam after Arthur has triggered the curse, and his marriage seems to be cracking as he acts curt and harsh towards his wife after the Woman in Black claimed their three daughters.
  • Bargaining: Mr. and Mrs. Jerome try to stop their daughter Lucy from coming to harm by the curse via keeping her locked in their basement 24/7, and it's also strongly hinted that they had Lucy to try and cope after they lost a previous child to the Woman's curse. Furthermore, Mr. Jerome tries to get rid of Arthur before he can trigger the curse by handing him several legal papers in his possession.
  • Depression: More of the villagers than not have a very sad and depressed air about them, but the most individual example is probably Keckwick, who Elizabeth Daily confirms lost a son to the Woman. He's cold, curt and vacant-eyed when dealing with Arthur, and he focuses more on doing his job as the village coachman, not mustering the energy to prioritize keeping Arthur away from the house once the latter bribes him.
    • An alternative example would probably be the Constable, who has a solemn demeanor, isn't susceptible to bribery like Keckwick, and when he learns Arthur has seen the Woman, he can do nothing but walk away to another room and conspicuously fail to return when Arthur starts shouting for him to help a poisoned girl.
  • The only stage that's missing is Acceptance. Fitting, because the borderline Downer Ending establishes that the Woman in Black's curse will never end and she'll keep on tormenting the village, killing the villagers' children and trapping their souls forever.

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?
    • If she moved, though, she'd carry the curse with her wherever she went. She would have had to find some place where there were absolutely no children, which would be a tough task for a grieving widow whose means of traveling might be severely limited.
  • This is even discussed in the book when Kipps ponders to Daily, about how could Drablow suffer living with Jennet's mad apparition for so many years.
  • The sequel film takes this horrible thought a step further, when a recording made by Alice Drablow before she died indicates she was fully aware the ghost was lurking in the house, but she was so terrified that she tried to convince herself that it wasn't real, that she was only imagining it, even after we hear the ghost tormenting her on the recording.
• Arthur finds several pictures with threats and insults written in red while in the house. It hints that Jennet was a psychic, just like Mrs. Daily, and that her sister and the townspeople held it against her and took her child away for it. Which would then make Jennet Humfrye a Tragic Villain Expy of Lily Evans Potter, especially considering her sister Petunia, who hates her for being a witch. Imagine if Lily chose to remain a ghost to watch over Harry, and the Dursleys got him killed somehow...
  • If Jennet was a psychic, this could also explain why her spirit is so powerful in death.
• Speaking of which, there's also Nathaniel's death. The carriage somehow sank in the swamp, half a kilometer from the house, apparently driving itself straight into the mud? No coachman's body around (though it's possible the man just jumped before getting killed)? And the boy's aunt wasted little efforts to retrieve his body, and preferred just to build a cross on the crash site, when the protagonist needed only to swim probably one meter into the mud to find it (he probably used Sam's car to make it easier to swim up, but the same could be achieved by a group or a single strong man)? Plus, the kid's body was laid out on the floor of the carriage; the body could have fallen during it's years-long stay in the mud, but there's also the fact that the boy apparently didn't struggle to get out of the vehicle before it sank. The whole thing is strange enough to imply that it was not an accident.
  • Alice's gramophone recording in the sequel notes that it's quite conspicuous how the horse "somehow" veered off the road into the bog. Considering the aforementioned hints that Jennet might have been psychic in life, could she have accidentally caused the accident while she was watching from the house?
• In the American version, when Jennet is being reunited with Nathaniel, you can clearly hear his voice crying out "YOU'RE NOT MY MOTHER." Maybe Arthur didn't do such a good thing in reuniting Jennet's mad ghost with him. It also provides another explanation for why reuniting Jennet and Nathaniel didn't end Jennet's curse.
• The fact that the attempt to reunite Jennet with her son won't work is foreshadowed by the Madness Mantra: NEVER FORGIVE. She means it literally.