Somara won last week’s coin toss since the choices were this or Bridge of Spies plus I wanted her to come to my spy flick, therefore sitting through Horror is the compromise in marriage. Crimson Peak was a pleasant surprise given how the genre tends to Eli Roth’s gorenography being the dominant style, overshadowing the rich legacy encompassing the Universal Monsters. Then again, I only know del Toro’s work via Pacific Rim, Hellboy and the turgid Hobbit trilogy. Hollywood marketing may turn this into an undeserved flop, eventually joining Nathan Rabin’s string of movies he will either call a failure, secret success or fiasco. Keep in mind, he thinks Freddie Got Fingered a secret success, ugh, Tom Green needs to be deported back to Canada.
Moving along, Crimson Peak is more along the lines of Edgar Allen Poe or Nathaniel Hawthorne but set a couple generations after them. The heroine Edith is an only child to a construction magnate in Buffalo, NY sometime after 1900 yet before WWI due to there being early cars present. Edith believes in ghosts thanks to an encounter she had with her dead mother’s spirit when she was about 10. Now she’s in her early twenties on the fast track to spinsterhood. This doesn’t bother her. Edith is writing a novel like her heroine Mary Shelley.
Enter the Sharpes. They’re a pair of aristocratic siblings (brother and sister) from the UK. Thomas has come to America to find funding for a mechanized digging machine to harvest the red clay in his part of England. It’s supposed to have superior qualities with construction projects. His older sister Lucille provides counsel and whatever unmarried women were stuck in then. Initially Edith finds the Sharpes to be parasites since they’re people who born to titles which provides privilege without hard work; her father is a rags-to-riches story. Thomas proves to be charming, sincere and plays to Edith’s sympathy. Obviously, they marry. It’s in the trailers. Besides, there wouldn’t be much of a movie if they didn’t.
The trio returns to the Sharpe estate, a rickety mansion which creaks, groans and oozes the infamous red clay from its walls (aka, symbolic blood). It’s also sinking. Soon Edith starts to piece together the reality of the situation through all of del Toro’s scary techniques and effects.
I did like Crimson more than I planned. There were a couple moments I jumped and another in which I was unnerved. This is good Horror. There was no gratuitous violence, sex or whatever the hacks use to attract teenagers to the theaters. It’s beautiful time-period piece too. All the bright colors namely. I’ve been away from the Midwest for years yet I could sense the cold, dryness in the old house. Being a del Toro movie though, some of his past regulars make brief appearances: Charlie Humman (England’s poor-man sub for a Hemmsworth brother) and Burn Gorman (I keep forgetting he isn’t English thanks to being a member of Torchwood); sadly no Ron Perlman or Jeffrey Tambor.
I would say check it out. It’s a grown-up Horror movie, not a crazy slasher killing teenagers who have sex in the woods. It’s not the worn-out zombie film. It’s not a giant monster going on a rampage. It lastly, it’s thankfully not another re-make of the monsters behind the genre being made into sympathetic characters. The Horror element is what made The Blair Witch Project initially work but follows through; What’s scarier? The wolf you see or the unknown number of wolves behind the door?
Alamo Extras: A silent movie showing ballet; a haunted house commercial from New Jersey circa the Seventies or Eighties; a silent movie showing early special effects incorporating ghosts set to a song about a haunted house; Scenes from a couple Italian horror movies: The Whip & The Body and Kill Baby Kill (del Toro was aiming for this in Crimson‘s color palette); trailer for The Night of the Doomed; some unknown Horror short film; a Joanna Newsom video which wore on everyone’s nerves…not even Kate Bush’s worst stuff is as boring as this was.