Advertised as a straight horror film upon release, Crimson Peak is best understood as a gothic romance about the sinister history of a haunted house and its inhabitants
In a very practical sense, the task of writing a piece of film criticism on horror is commensurate with writing on comedy. The visceral experiences that these genres offer are so immediate, so far removed from abstract thought and rationality, that it is nearly impossible to put them in writing. Even if someone did furnish a vivid description of a scare or a goof, two problems remain. First, even though every horror or comedy film intends for certain reactions from audiences at precise moments, everyone has a different sensibility — what registers to the critic as “shocking” might not scan that way to the viewer, and vice versa. Second, to put an affective sensation into words is to, in some sense, deaden it. A description of a pratfall removes the physicality and precise timing that makes the joke work in the first place, so even the best retelling would be sort of haunted by a delay. There is nothing to be gained from trying to explain exactly why something is funny. A worthy review does not imitate these sensations, but it proceeds from them by intellectualizing the very ideas set into motion by such feelings. Its purpose, then, is not simply to evaluate the efficaciousness of filmmaking techniques that produce, or fail to produce, laughter and fear. The job of the review, more precisely, is to explicate how filmmakers direct those emotions toward a higher end. In this way, there’s a certain delicateness with which the critic must approach writing on horror films and comedies.
Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak (2015), possibly because it isn’t exactly part of the genre, is itself highly attentive to the delicate nature of horror. Moments of brutality punctuate del Toro’s gothic mise-en-scène, some that we directly witness, others that have taken place prior to the events in the film but echo throughout. But this is precisely the function that such moments of violence and grotesquery serve: they reveal the hidden, all-consuming realities that the characters, naively or cynically, attempt to avoid. Midway through the film, we come to the dilapidated mansion where the rest of the story takes place. The house is sinking into the red clay mines it sits atop. When any weight is placed on the rotten floorboards, the clay oozes up like blood. This, exactly, is indicative of del Toro’s finesse in drawing out the horror of Crimson Peak — it is part of the structure of the narrative itself, intimately imbricated within the romantic affair at the center of the film, and yet the terror in the film is not visceral or spiritual. Rather, the horror in Crimson Peak has the feel of a ghost’s caress.
At the turn of the 20th century — at the birth of the cinematic medium, no less — Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) is an aspiring writer living in Buffalo, New York, with her industrialist father, Carter Cushing (Jim Beaver). Edith lost her mother to black cholera when she was a young girl, and has since been haunted by her mother’s spirit who warns her, “beware of Crimson Peak.” As Edith tries to break into publishing she is thwarted by the industry’s sexism and the dismissal of her “ghost stories,” or, as Edith would put it, stories with ghosts in them. Carter encourages his daughter even as he seems to despair for her. He’s fearful that she is making an oddity of herself in high society circles and closing herself off from finding a husband and moving forward with her life.
However, it is not long before this figure appears in the English land baron Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston). Thomas and his sister, Lady Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain), have come to America to raise funds for a hulking mechanical contraption designed to mine the vast reserves of red clay over which their family home, Allerdale Hall, sits. The arrival of the Sharpes causes a stir among New York’s elite, with many smitten by their stateliness, elegance, and social stature. Edith is immediately drawn to Thomas, but her father is suspicious of him and Lucille. When Thomas approaches Carter and his associates to invest in his machine, Carter harshly turns him down, making a point to humiliate him publicly as a dandy who was afforded everything to him and lacks the industrious spirit of an American. Not long after that, Carter arranges for the Sharpes to return to England to keep Thomas from marrying Edith, even though he knows well the departure would break his daughter’s heart. Despite this, Edith does marry Thomas and the newlyweds arrive at Allerdale Hall, otherwise referred to as Crimson Peak, and live there with Lucille. The secrets housed in the decrepit, disintegrating palace begin to emerge, and it becomes evident why Edith’s mother warned her of this place long ago.
Crimson Peak is a gothic romance more than a true-to-form horror production, and del Toro has expressed his frustration with how the film was misleadingly marketed during its theatrical run. The ghosts of the film, which include Edith’s mother and the wraiths of Allerdale Hall that keep the memory of its sinister history alive, are not driven by cruelty or hatred toward the living. If anything, the ghosts are tormented by their own existence and passivity more than they terrify Edith, who becomes their confidant as she realizes the truth behind Thomas’s and Lucille’s plans for her at Crimson Peak.
It cannot be overlooked that most of the ghosts who appear are women who are attempting to help Edith. In the first instances Edith is fearful of them. Most cannot speak, and with the exception of her mother’s ghost, their spectral bodies are mutilated from the physical trauma they suffered. Once the initial shock of these undead spirits dissipates, one cannot help but feel tender sympathy for these women. Not only are they eternally condemned to this death palace, but they must see another woman placed into the same dangerous circumstances. They can do nothing but cry out to her and attempt to make Edith understand the real terror of her situation. Like the ghost of the orphanage in del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone (2001), they are cursed with a kind of angelic terror that agonizes and redeems the lives of his protagonists. In other words, the leads in The Devil’s Backbone and Crimson Peak are, in one way or another, social outcasts who come to a greater realization about themselves and others through the grace of the dispossessed. Edith, in a manner of speaking, grows up: She recognizes that she cannot keep herself cloistered from the absurdities and brutalities of the world by composing fantasies or doting on her father and all of the comfort her family’s wealth provides. Even in death, this is what Edith’s mother attempted to tell her daughter — but like so many lessons our parents teach us, we are never ready to hear them at first.
Edith is not the only character haunted by her past; the same is true for Lucille to some degree, but it applies especially to Thomas. Despite how they appear to some of their American companions, the Sharpes are plagued by a dire financial crisis. If they cannot extract the clay from their plot of land, they will have no source of revenue and can only leech off the remnants of their family’s wealth, which is precious little. The house is a potent symbol of this very self-cannibalization. Not only is it being swallowed up by the earth below, but there is an enormous opening in the roof, from which the elements pour into Allerdale Hall. Lucille and Thomas have all but surrendered to this entropic situation, as if waiting to be erased from this life and carried to another. This is a remarkably affecting aspect of the film, one that comes close to what we feel in some of our worst dreams where something dire seems to be happening but no one approaches it with any urgency. Everyone, the dreamer included, is reduced to passivity, with it being unclear whether anyone really wants to act or if they are so weighed down by helplessness that they cannot bear to contemplate their present situation. Exhausted by failure, but doomed to repeat his efforts endlessly, Thomas has become little more than his demonic machine devoted to a singular, pointless purpose. As one would expect of del Toro, whose filmography is defined by the collapse of the barrier between human and non-human, the ghosts of Crimson Peak are not all immaterial.
There is a moment in the middle of the film where Thomas shows Edith his workshop, where he tinkers with toys. Edith is delighted by her husband’s ingenuity, and Thomas explains that he began making toys for Lucille when they were children to make the bitter days in Allerdale Hall more bearable. One gets the impression that Thomas is attempting to broach a bigger conversation about his and Lucille’s time together in their family home, but he is also reluctant to tell the whole story. There is a gentleness and menace to this brief interaction that is emblematic of del Toro’s approach to this gothic story. The horrors that animate the characters are always just below the surface of what they say and how they interact. As Crimson Peak progresses, and as Edith grows increasingly suspicious of her surroundings, more and more of this horror — this history, this clay, this blood — comes out. The eldritch machinery of del Toro’s film hisses and shakes, waiting for the mechanic familiar with these rhythms, who understands them not as a sign of deficiency or breakdown but the product of intricate design.
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