Crimson Peak

Guillermo del Toro – 2015 – USA

Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak is the conscious antidote to the supernatural (mostly found-footage) trend that has had the horror genre in a sleeper hold for the past few years.  Aside from teaching us that people should be able to hold a camera steady while fleeing for their lives in terror, that genre most importantly demonstrates that cheap scares are way too easy and not enough to consider any sort of accomplishment.  The horror fans who endlessly complain that everything good isn’t “scary” need to wake up and realize that being startled isn’t the same as being unsettled.  A kid with a balloon and a pin can startle you.  That’s never been the ambition of the storytellers who specialize in true horror – from Poe and Lovecraft to Romero and Carpenter.  They endeavored to explore what really disturbs people and to tap into their deepest fears; like the unknown, the darkness, isolation, pain and death.  The makers of the Paranormal Activity and Insidious franchises don’t get that, but Guillermo del Toro does.  Being a real artist, unlike them, he doesn’t find it acceptable to crank out yet another assembly-line jump-fest   Del Toro isn’t looking to his contemporaries for inspiration; he’s looking back to Val Lewton, Roger Corman and Hammer Films, as well as specific exemplary works like The Innocents (1961) and The Haunting (1963), where atmosphere and an almost choking decadence instill a lasting sense of unease.  As if speaking directly to the audience about the film, the heroine, Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), an aspiring author, describes her novel as not being a “ghost story” as much as a story with ghosts in it.  Edith is the perfect combination of romantic and level-headed, and as such fails to become the naïve victim of mysterious British aristocrat Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his crafty sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), who expect her to fall in line behind a string of spinsters who have been murdered for their fortunes.  Gothic, stately and visually sumptuous, del Toro superbly manages to strike a middle ground between homage and freshness.  Elements loosely conjure the Brontës, The Heiress (1949) and even Hitchcock’s Notorious (1946), and yet also comfortably share space with motifs so characteristic to del Toro; insects, clockwork devices, warm, golden color tones, etc.  In the short term, it seems that Crimson Peak isn’t being as well-received as much as previous del Toro films, but I think it will be remembered as one of his most mature and personal.