![‘The Woman in Black’ with its star Ben Porter [Dread Cover Story]](https://www.dreadcentral.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/12/woman-in-black.jpg "‘The Woman in Black’ with its star Ben Porter [Dread Cover Story]")
Courtesy of Mirvish Productions
For more than three decades, The Woman in Black has occupied a unique, shadowy corner of the horror landscape. In London’s West End, the stage adaptation of Susan Hill’s bestselling novel became a phenomenon—over thirty years of uninterrupted years of fog, grief, and carefully engineered dread, making it the second-longest running play in West End history.
Now, with Mirvish bringing the touring production to Toronto for the first time, Dread Central is stepping into unfamiliar marshland: dedicating our December Cover Story to a stage show, and one of its stars, Ben Porter, who has spent a meaningful chapter of his career haunting audiences.
“The Woman in Black has played all over the world,” Porter tells me, on an adventure in a cold new land, not unlike one of his characters, Arthur Kipps, “but it’s never been to Canada. Nor have I. So I’m completely new to it — we’ve only been here two or three days. It’s cold. But I’m prepared.”
A few minutes into our conversation, he reminds me—almost as an afterthought—that I unknowingly saw him perform the role in London in 2008, the first and only other time I caught the show on the West End. He performed the role that year. “That’s extraordinary,” he says, delighted. “So you’ll see me again on Sunday, then. Very full circle.”
As to why the holidays are the perfect time to invoke Gothic horror, Porter knows the reason. “Because it’s a time for gathering,” he says. “The ghost story, or the frightening tale, goes back in time—around the campfire, shadows in the forest. You huddle up, and you scare each other. There’s a Victorian tradition,” he explains, “when the ghost story was reinvented by people like Dickens as almost a morality tale. It became fashionable to tell ghost stories on Christmas Eve.”
David Acton (L) and Ben Porter (R) in The Woman in Black
Given the global reach of the Daniel Radcliffe film, I ask (pry) on how the theatre community regards the movie adaptation. Porter pauses, choosing his words carefully.
“When the film came out, it actually did the play some good,” he says. “More people had heard of the story.” But in his mind, the two mediums do not compete. They barely intersect. “We’re a live theatre event,” he says plainly. “Our job is to get people together in a dark room and share that experience—what people think they’ve seen, or haven’t seen, but felt anyway. It’s just a totally different genre.”
He admits he hasn’t seen the Radcliffe film, and I do my best not to push my luck any further. This is a professional, after all.
The play achieves a very rare on-stage horror production. It’s not something that happens very often, and Porter doesn’t deny it. “I haven’t seen another stage show that captures horror in the same traditional way,” he says. “People talk about Ghost Stories, but I haven’t seen that either.” If there’s a secret, it isn’t a trick of staging so much as a shift in theatrical fashion. “Victorian theatre loved this kind of thing,” he says. “Pepper’s Ghost effects, illusions. But over time, realism took over. The gritty kitchen-sink drama. Writers weren’t exploring this genre on stage anymore.”
The Woman in Black, then, is both an anomaly and an inheritance—an artifact that adapts itself to contemporary audiences without diluting its Victorian DNA.
Ben Porter in The Woman in Black
He might have missed the 2011 Hammer film adaptation of The Woman in Black, but Porter knows a thing or two about horror. “I’m interested in the Lynchian thing,” he tells me, seriously. “The weird, the uncanny, the strange. When it’s a recognizable world, almost mundane, and then somewhere behind the veil, something else is going on.”
He lights up when recommending writers. “Robert Aickman,” he says. “People don’t read him enough.” Aickman’s work, he argues, captures something essential: not fear, but disturbance. “He’s a brilliant writer, and when someone is really good at writing, it takes everything up a notch. It gets under your skin. And he doesn’t explain anything. He leaves everything open. I love that.”
Porter’s earliest formative fright wasn’t from horror proper but from Ray Harryhausen. “Jason and the Argonauts,” he says immediately. “When the bronze statue comes to life—that freaked me out forever.” What disturbed him was motion that looked human but wasn’t. “Stop motion is uncanny,” he says. “Too lifelike, but not quite. It looks weird.”
Having done my homework, I already know about his love of folk horror and The Wicker Man. “That messes with your brain because it’s so many different things at the same time. And then they start singing. You can’t hold it together.” He laughs. “I don’t think you can top The Wicker Man. It’s extraordinary.”
David Acton (L) and Ben Porter (R) in The Woman in Black
In its heart, The Woman in Black is rooted in atmosphere and environment. Porter speaks of this with genuine affection. “A damp, desolate, marshy estuary with a causeway running to a promontory with a house on it,” he says. “Isolated, strange, and beautiful at the same time.”
Fog, weather, distance—these are not props but emotional cues. “The play uses weather as horror,” he says. “Fog is a good horror staple.”
I mention a phrase I’ve always loved, pastoral noir, wondering if it resonates. “What a beautiful phrase,” he says. “I’m going to try and say it six times today.” He asks if I invented it. I confess I didn’t, but he treats it the way one treats a compelling new aesthetic category.
Porter has spent years watching audiences react to the same moments in the same play, and yet no two reactions are identical. “People come back more than once because there’s a mystery element,” he says. But the longevity of the show is not due to jump scares alone. “All the best horror is about something other than just making you frightened,” he explains. “The Wicker Man bothers you because it gets inside you. You don’t understand it. It’s the same with The Woman in Black: it’s funny at first, but it touches on grief, survivor’s guilt, trauma.”
Students in the UK used to study the play in school, which means generations of teenagers filed into theaters on field trips, screaming at the same carefully orchestrated moments. Porter remembers them fondly. “It’s great doing it for a young audience. They go crazy.”
Some returned years later, now actors themselves. “They’ll say the reason they became actors is because they saw The Woman in Black. The play is about storytelling—two men making something happen before your eyes through imagination. It inspires people to want to create their own thing.”
Ben Porter in The Woman in Black
At the end of our conversation, Porter mentions—almost accidentally—that he will appear in a horror film next year. “I suddenly remembered,” he says. “It’s a sequel to something called The Circle—apparently it was big in Japan. I did the sequel: The Circle: Awakening. The special effects take forever, but it should be released next year.” He offers to put me in touch with the filmmaker, Peter Callow. “You won’t need to hunt him,” Porter says. “I will deliver him.”
As we log off, he still seems amused by the coincidence of my having seen him in 2008. “The real horror,” he jokes, “is how fast time goes.”
And in a way, that’s the heart of The Woman in Black: a story about what lingers, what refuses to dissipate, what returns. Porter has lived inside this ghost story long enough to know that hauntings take many forms—sometimes on stage, sometimes in memory, sometimes in the strange, circular paths that bring a performer and an audience member back to each other, years apart, on opposite sides of the ocean.
The Woman in Black runs in Toronto from December 4, 2025, through January 4, 2026, at the CAA Theatre, located at 651 Yonge Street.
The production is part of this season’s Mirvish lineup, marking a rare chance for local audiences to experience one of the longest-running ghost plays in West End history.
Tickets are available now through the official Mirvish website and at the CAA Theatre box office.
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