Here’s why most “haunted houses,” the kind that spring up in amusement parks around Halloween, anger me: They don’t frighten their customers. They merely startle them.

You know how it goes. You paid your five or 10 bucks to get in, and then you spend five or 10 minutes walking through a series of dark hallways wherein every so often some teenager lurking unseen in a “ghostly” getup will jump out at you unexpectedly. You’re momentarily taken aback, and then maybe you’re overcome with a desire to punch the little punk for catching you off-guard. But are you ever actually scared? Truly terrified?

The Woman in Black is a movie about an actually haunted house, and its tricks are no better than those you’ll find at the “Dallas Scaregrounds” or “Fright Fest” at Six Flags. There are a few genuinely creepy moments, but those are completely undone by the story’s insistence that we not expect its characters to act as if they are anything like actual live human beings.

Seeing Daniel Radcliffe (most famous as the child star of the Harry Potter films) play a father is perhaps the most jarring element in the film. He’s Arthur Kipps, a lawyer in early 20th-century London who was left alone to raise his young son after his wife died in childbirth. His firm sends him on an assignment to a remote English village to examine the accumulated papers of a widow who died in an even remoter house along a patch of coastal marshland that’s isolated from the mainland during high tide.

So Arthur thinks ‘Why not make a vacation of it?’ He arranges for his son to be brought up north as well after he’s had a few days to complete the assignment.

Once he takes the train north, the movie trots out the Gothic Horror Movie All-Stars. Present and accounted for are the Mysteriously Unwelcoming Villagers, the Blank-Faced Children Staring Out From Windows, the Creepily Happy Music From Children’s Wind-up Toys, and of course the Haunted House on the Hill.

The local innkeeper and the local solicitor urge Arthur to return to London immediately, and not to dare visit the home of the deceased Mrs. Drablow. Arthur doesn’t feel any particular need to ask them why he should leave, but makes his way to the house anyway. The empty place is covered with cobwebs and dust, though fortunately all of the papers that Arthur is charged with examining are clean and assembled in a chronologically-arranged pile that allows him to puzzle together the horrific history of the house.

Soon the strange noises begin, and he spots a woman in black standing in the graveyard on the grounds. She quickly vanishes. When he returns to the village, a tragedy has occurred. The villagers claim it’s Arthur’s fault because he saw the Woman in Black.

Continuing to demonstrate a lack of curiosity, Arthur doesn’t feel any particular need to ask anyone why they believe one thing has to do with the other. I realize there’d be a lot less to this movie if he had, but that wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing.

The rest of the story involves Arthur’s return visits to the Drablow house and lots of him hearing spooky sounds and suddenly encountering ghastly apparitions. (You may be startled a time or two.) He sticks around beyond the point at which any rational person would have run outside screaming.

By the time the movie reaches its unconventionally happy conclusion, you’re more likely to stroll outside yawning.