Gothic Romance: Crimson Peak (Dir Guillermo Del Toro, 1h59m, 2015)

One cannot talk about Gothic cinema since the turn of the century without mentioning Guillermo Del Toro. Since 2001's The Devil's Backbone, and certainly since directing the beloved Pan's Labyrinth, Del Toro has practically become the standard-bearer for horror cinema of a certain type, a director who, by his own admission, "love(s) monsters, I identify with monsters", and has spent the last thirty years directing paeans, and in some cases (Pacific Rim (2013) The Shape of Water (2018) and Frankenstein (2025)) are unapologetic love-letters to monsters, horror cinema, and Gothic horror in particular. No trip to the tottering towers and haunted manor houses of the Gothic romance is complete, thus, without arriving at Del Toro's sole Gothic Romance, the 19th Century ghost story that is Crimson Peak.

At its centre, Crimson Peak is best understood as a haunted house film-Del Toro would later admit that the film's underperformance was in placing it as a straight horror movie, full of the archetypal jump-scares and edge-of-your-seat antics now derigeur in the genre, rather than an atmospheric Gothic mood piece. The films it shares connective tissue with, in particular 1961's The Innocents (based on Henry James' The Turn of the Screw) and 1963's The Haunting (based on the 1959 Shirley Jackson novel) are films that create a mood, a tension, intended to unsettle rather than frighten. It is also a highly literate work, Del Toro's love of the Gothic writ large, a narrative that - almost -perfectly 

Del Toro opens his haunted house tale with two arresting images; the first is Mia Wasikowska, back for a third review in a row, who plays heiress and aspiring novelist, Edith, bloodied, her face scratched and hands bloodied, in a shot otherwise dominated by white of her dress and the falling snow. Dan Laustsen, Del Toro's cinematographer for the last decade ever since this film, captures in a single shot what makes the Gothic work. The film is dominated by this red and white contrast, its landscapes and interiors and protagonists figures among snow and blood-in its latter stages, the film barely has a shot that doesn't feature one or both, not to mention the red clay that gives the film's main dilapidated mansion its name, oozing sanguine from under floorboards and revealed as snow is swept aside, or in footprints that dot the icy landscape. 

With Edith meeting of Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain, in New York, and immediately falling for Thomas, so the film immediately begins to weave familiar Gothic tropes into Del Toro's timeless story. Thomas is, of course, tall dark and handsome, his past is mysterious, and his attempts to get funding for a series of digging machines to revise his family fortunes are largely unsuccessful thus far, his sister is at once an intriguing, and equally Gothic and outlandish figure. Following unsuccessful attempts to separate the two lovers, including a detective hired by her father (Jim Beaver), and a brutal murder that may be one of the most violent things Del Toro has ever put to screen, the three return to England. 

Arriving at the dilapidated mansion, Del Toro's observance of the Gothic, and tales of haunted houses, so the narrative circles back round to the second element of the film's opening, of ghosts. luridly brought to life in an impressive mix of practical and digital special effects. The first, close to Edith herself, has brought warning, in an unsettling premonition of what the titular "Crimson Peak" threatens, with Del Toro's monster-man of choice, Doug Jones portraying a thing of veils and exposed skeletal structure that haunts the young Edith's childhood. It's easy to regard these figures as a cheap scare but, this being Del Toro, they are far more nuanced, the usage of actors under heavy prosthetics giving them a physicality and a presence that is quintessentially Del Toro. Together with their distorted and violent appearances, it is their deep crimson appearance that is unsettling, the hint at violence at the edges of the house. 

The house itself is a character, and not altogether a benevolent one. Much like Kubrick's Overlook, Del Toro and the late Thomas E. Sanders producing a space that hints at, from its dilapidated roof that lets snow fall past balconies and in the background of scenes, against the rotting grandeur of the house, to its depths, where the bloodlike clay hems in from every angle, or in one memorable shot, sluices past the camera. This is a house that has become eldritch, twisted and slowly sinking into the clay that surrounds it, a building steadily becoming a ghost. The humans haunting this house, meanwhile, seem trapped by their past; if the film has one theme other than its understanding of Gothic literature and cinema, it is the way that the past haunts the living, and indeed the dead.

There is something, much like the novels and films that this film takes unapologetic influence from, something wrong with the people that Edith finds herself living with. The Sharpes' fortune has long since gone, their ancestral seat is crumbling, and their past is shadowy, slowly being revealed by Edith's friend, Alan (Charlie Hunnam) back in the USA. This is a film that unspools its central mystery, that becomes eerier and more unsettling by the moment, as the true nature of the Sharpe siblings becomes clear, and their schemes for Edith take shape. Even without the supernatural aspects, Crimson Peak is a masterwork of tension, worthy of MR James and his ilk's page turners, even as the bodies pile up and the very earth of Crimson Peak bleeds.

Here, we must leave the Gothic Romance, but we leave it in rude health; with Del Toro's Frankenstein and Wuthering Heights, directed by Emerald Fennell currently in cinemas at time of writing, there is a renewed interest in Gothic literature and Gothic Romance in particular, as these recent cinematic outings prove. Guillermo Del Toro's films remain a high mark of Gothic cinema for good reason, and all of his films deserve attention; Crimson Peak, of all, feels like a director en capsuling, narratively, visually and cinematically the allure of the Gothic, as only Del Toro, that great lover of monsters and the macabre, can. 

Crimson Peak is available to buy on BluRay from Universal and is available to stream in the UK from Amazon Prime.

Next week, and indeed next month, to the world of videogames, and our search for a good movie based on one, beginning with the infamous 1993 adaption of Super Mario Bros