Adoring thoughts on Guillermo Del Toro’s 2015 masterpiece.
This review and bit of analysis is related to the talk I’ll be giving on Crimson Peak tomorrow, responses to misogyny and marginalisation in and around Gothic fiction, and how much of this social conservatism is mirrored in BookTok and modern retorts to problematic fiction.
All proceeds from the Romancing the Gothic Goths for Breakfast talks go to charity, feeding school children free breakfasts! You can sign up for tickets here.
Crimson Peak (2015) frustrated me when it came out, and often frustrates me today — I was desperately excited about it when it was released, loved it the first time I saw it, have loved it every time I’ve watched it since. What frustrated me was not the film itself, but its advertisements and the way it’s filed and tagged on sites even today is that Crimson Peak is not a horror film.
Crimson Peak is a Gothic romance.
Yes, Gothic fiction — Gothic horror — might be classified under traditional horror tags and descriptors, but gothic romance is a different and more complicated kettle of fish.
Gothic fiction is typified by its associations with the most visceral of human emotions — with fear and horror and terror; with disgust and anger and rage; with want and jealousy and envy; with lust and love… and grief.
We see in Gothic fiction what we see in the the Gothic architecture for which the genre is named, inspired by its traditional settings — the darkness that lingers thick and impenetrable amidst the ceiling arches, untouched no matter how many candles are lit; the long shadows cast by figures silhouetted against windows and fireplaces; the endless corridors, the haunted attics, the cold and shadowed cellars, the strange and troubling shapes of the house around us.
What do we find in Gothic romance, then?
In Gothic fiction we find the most macabre and grotesque of happenings, of settings, of events — in Gothic romance, we find those who love and lust for them.
Some of the most famous Gothic romances are Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre; Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca; Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights (Stephenie Meyer’s favourite book, and an inspiration for Twilight, by all accounts: no more damning comment can be made of it).
When I was describing my affection for the genre to my partner the other day, I also mentioned Bram Stoker’s Dracula — Dracula lacks the female protagonist that these three classics have, but I would argue that the want and lust (and even love) between Dracula, Jonathan, and Mina (in each direction) more than amount to enough to fit the book into the genre.
It’s not as simple as desire or want or even love for another whilst horrific happenings go on around their heads — Gothic romance’s unique allure is in the darkness of people’s romantic desires, their sexual desires. Wanting what they should not want — wanting the pain and the grief and the fear as much as they want the sweetness, the comfort, the pleasure of love.
This stands out most of all in those Gothic works that delve into proto-feminist explorations of female empowerment — in Jane Eyre, in Wuthering Heights, in similar works that largely centre the horror of a young woman (or women) entering into marriage with a man that leads her to doom of one type or other, supernatural or mundane, what is ultimately being explored is the horror of these women’s lack of choices and agency.
If she will be terrorised either way, if she will live in fear, if she will be controlled no matter what she does and whom she’s married, why would she not seek out a controller, seek out a ghost or monster, whom excites her? To whom she is most deeply attracted? A man who she can — and will — terrorise in turn?
I think it’s why poor Jonathan Harker stands alongside these Gothic heroines in my mind, not merely in line with Mina because he’s her husband, but part of the line-up in his own right— he is desirous of Dracula and, like many of these women stumbling, or rushing headlong and passionately into, dangerous matches, he is heedless of every warning as he allows himself to be trapped in the faraway manse of this hypnotising man who will feed on him, and whom at the same time Harker feels a sort of hunger for even as his intentions and his nature become clear.
What is it, then, about Crimson Peak?
Here’s a Gothic romance that stands on its own two feet — like the best of pastiches, it near perfectly echoes the tone and the hypnotising ache of the best and most impactful stories in the genre, creating a story that could well have been penned centuries ago alongside contemporaries like Wuthering Heights.
In Crimson Peak, there are so many references to different staples of the genre — apart from the basic staples of the isolated manse in the middle of the dales, the strange and dark family with the sordid past, the young ingenue, intelligent and driven but at the same time naive, we see small references or direct mirrors to particular tropes or archetypes present in some famous Gothic tales.
Finlay, for example, the Sharpes’ elderly caretaker who seems confused and scatterbrained, is a mirror to the long-winded and sometimes incomprehensible Joseph of Wuthering Heights; Edith compares herself to Mary Shelley, a stalwart creator in the Gothic genre and one of its defining authors.
Like the best of pastiches, it is filled with its love for that which it’s imitating, delving into classic tropes of the genre — the sprawling and crumbling manse on the hill, apart from all the other houses, filled only with ghosts; the once rich and splendid family, now rendered impoverished and preying on others to survive; the aspects of natural horror, insects feasting on one another, the presence of this red in tooth and claw violence and the desperation to survive; the horrors of lonely, isolated children developing inappropriate and disgusting, incestuous intimacies with one another, those intimacies carried on into their adulthood; ghosts that at once horrify those they appear before and yet on some level crave to help them, to save them, or at least undo what has been done.
At the same time, every character but Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain) is desperate to escape the genre they’ve been born into.
Edith (Mia Wasikowsa), naturally, wants for a romance, but she also wants more for herself than her role as a woman in the society she’s in — much like the Brontë sisters did themselves, she wishes to disguise her gender so that her work is not immediately dismissed, exchanging her father’s gift of a pen for the machinised genderlessness of a typed hand, that she might be an author and create things for herself, just as her father built things before he owned them; Thomas (Tom Hiddleston) wants for a romance himself, craves the love and sweetness of a marriage whilst untangling himself from the horror it’s attached to with his sister, but he is also trying to drag himself out of the hole his house is creating with machinery designed to dredge out clay.
Edith and Thomas both reach for tools of the industrial age, reach with grasping hands for modernity, as if these can save them from the classic ghost story they’re trapped in.
And yet there are further depths to this gift — in giving Edith the gift of this pen, Carter (Jim Beaver) is giving her a sort of phallic symbol. He is a patriarch giving his daughter a metaphorical extension of masculinity and masculine power — in essence, he is saying to her: “Edith, you are not just my daughter, not just a woman as in the eyes of the patriarchal society around us, but you are my firstborn. Uncaring of the gendered nature of your position, and the ways in which this dispossesses you, I am giving you an appropriate tool for your trade.”
And what does Edith do? Immediately reject his pen, because his approval and his extension of this power to her is not enough — she exchanges the tool for the typewriter because she craves the anonymity it will give her, and its modernity.
Appropriate, that Carter Cushing should take such a dim view of Sharpe’s prototype and dismiss it as little more than a child’s toy, whilst talking about his own hard work leading to the empire he later built — talking about hardening his hands before he built larger structures, before he owned property himself.
This is the same opportunity he is attempting to offer Edith in giving her that pen: for her to have a tool to build with before she owns his empire, and yet she rejects it. In turning down this offer of power from Carter Cushing, representative of his allotting her more personhood than one might expect to be offered to a woman in this period, her head is then turned by Thomas Sharpe’s proposal.
She is, in a way, taken back to the past when she returns with him to England — social mores are not so flexible in England as they are for a woman like Edith in America, and even if they were, she is isolated from anybody but Thomas and Lucille (and the ghosts in their home), so she is robbed entirely of opportunities for self-empowerment or agency.
In Allerdale, it is Lucille that carries all the power, Lucille that holds the a ring of metaphorical phalluses on her belt, taken from all her victims — Lucille holds the keys to the house, and denies them immediately to Edith, who by all rights should now be lady of the house as Thomas’ new wife.
She holds power in her hands, wielding these keys, and of course, Edith takes the one that had belonged to Enola Schiotti to unlock her trunk — the same ghost who unlocks another door for her, no key needed, to give her some power within that home on the sly.
It’s appropriate that Edith finally wields her father’s pen when Lucille pushes her to sign the contract that will sign her life away — a concern Carter no doubt always had about Edith marrying any man, even were Thomas not so suspicious a character — and uses it as a weapon to attack Lucille and defend herself, to allow herself to reach once again for freedom.
There are so many layered meanings and ideas within the text, and it’s so richly written and developed compared to many contemporary films I might think of — it’s miserable to think of, but Crimson Peak really is one of those films where you feel that every part of the story has its place, where the whole thing has been wholly considered, carefully mixed and edited, where every scene, every line, every movement of the camera is for a reason, and adds to the greater narrative, elevates that narrative.
In the beginning, for example, we hear Edith say that her mother died of cholera, and that it was a closed casket, that her father begged her not to look — when Carter himself is on the block in the morgue, she is compelled to look although she doesn’t wish to, and seeing him dead there, she cannot conceive of the reality of the situation. She never sees her mother dead, but she understands she is dead, and then sees her as a ghost — never able to fully digest the death of her father, she denies it even as she touches his cold hand, and she is never haunted by him.
Edith mentions that she sees Thomas Sharpe as a parasite with a title before meeting him, and she is entirely right to think of him as such, because that is precisely what he is — there is a continuous and constant theme of living things feeding off one another. Lucille compares Edith to a butterfly, the two of them sitting side by side, one brightly yellow and the other dark and pale: Lucille tells Edith, distant and dreamy, that the moths she’s so familiar with eat butterflies (like her).
“It’s a savage world of things dying or eating each other, right beneath our feet.”
Even the house itself at Allerdale is being consumed by the mountain below, being devoured by the red and bloody clay that had once given the family within it their fortune — having been fed upon by this family over generations, it now feeds on them in turn, both in the absorption of Allerdale House, and incidentally in the drowned victims of those the Sharpe siblings feed into the cellar vats.
Edith as a protagonist notes details — she’s keen and clever, investigates, considers; she notes that Alan keeps Arthur Conan Doyle on his shelves; she speaks on the specificities of Thomas Sharpe’s wardrobe and how its dated appearance reveals that his fortune is waning or has entirely waned; she follows clues, she researches, she deduces. Like her father, she reaches for information, arms herself with it.
We see her horrified again and again by the ghosts that plague her, and at the same time, she works so hard to understand them — she works hard at every opportunity to comprehend the incomprehensible, to know the unknown, to understand everything that cannot be understood.
There are so many other wonderful elements to the film — it’s beautifully shot, of course, and has some of my favourite costuming that I could name in any period piece. Every dress, every suit, is perfectly tailored, effortlessly lit, every piece moves and flows, every piece of jewellery or accessory is set to fit the period, the setting, each individual character.
Even the ghosts, with their smoky essence, with the unnatural shift and angularity to their movements embroiled in a constant and preternatural fog, seem so real, have such a texture to them that makes them so easy not only to visualise, but to imagine you can feel, that you can reach out and touch — or not touch, even as you reach.
And like any good Gothic piece, but especially a Gothic romance, Crimson Peak is a film that exudes sex.
Every glance between Edith and Thomas is full to the brim with want and lust and desire — Thomas’ gaze lingers on Edith’s face and her body, on her hands, on the movement of her skirts and the shift of her waist; Edith follows after Thomas where he moves, leans toward him like a candle flame drawn to a draught, and you can see her hold her breath whenever he draws closer.
Whenever there is a distance between the two of them it feels fraught with electric tension: when that distance is slowly closed, bit by bit, and yet repeatedly denied and interrupted — by Alan, by Carter, by Lucille, by everyone around them — it seems that it should crackle and pop, flash and burst into flames.
Lucille’s desperate control of Thomas is in part dependent on their sexual dynamic, on the older Lucille having groomed him into a partnership when she was only 14 and Thomas even younger at 12 — and Thomas’ soft murmurings, almost to himself, with Edith, are so revealing of his vulnerability.
“You’re so different,” he whispers in one scene, and quickly brushes off Edith’s bafflement at the comment; he is frightened to lay hands on Edith, even to be alone with her at times, for fear of Lucille’s wrath, and when finally permitted the opportunity to fall into bed with her, he’s desperate in his desire for her.
His most sympathetic moment is no doubt where he says to Alan through carefully gritted teeth that Alan is a doctor, that Alan knows where to direct Thomas’ blade, that he might finally do violence upon someone — what Lucille has always wanted from him — and yet still save himself from having committed a murder.
Lucille damns everyone she touches, kills everyone she can — her mother; Carter Cushing; the dog; each of her brother’s wives; Thomas Sharpe himself.
And yet she’s not unsympathetic.
We see Lucille’s desperation — under her cold demeanour is an agonisingly lonely woman, isolated and abused for the whole of her life, robbed of any real and obvious power of her own, and forced to wield power only through her brother’s name, her brother’s movements, her brother’s actual, legal power, which as a woman she cannot wield.
Lucille and Thomas were locked alone in their attic and denied access to anywhere else in the house, apparently denied any other companionship or loving contact — their mother was also an abuse victim, and became isolated after what their father did to her, but she just carried on the cycle in abusing her own children. Is it any wonder she should grapple so desperately for purchase in a world literally slipping out from under her, the sliding stone and brick stained red with crimson clay?
Is it any wonder that she should mix blood in with it, when she has nothing in the world, as far as she sees it, but her brother?
As cold and brutal and violent as Lucille is, she acts on instinct to protect herself and who she holds most dear — even in killing Thomas himself, it’s a desperate action in the hopes of keeping him bound up with her, terrified of his rejecting her when he has been the one constant she has ever been able to rely on.
God, what a film.
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