Dangerous Desires & Gothic Pastiche: Crimson Peak

The official film poster for
Crimson Peak (2015).

There is something alluring about the Gothic. The Gothic is a malleable, fluid category of the scary story, one focused rather broadly on the aesthetics of isolation and gloom, the fascination with the things that terrify and attract us, and on the hold that the past has on the present. It is about the monstrous thing that is right before us, about taboo desires, and about that heady mixture of pleasure and fear bubbling just beneath the surface of everyday life.

For many of us who study the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century novel, the Gothic genre, adaptations, and/or literary gender studies, a film like Crimson Peak marks an exciting addition to the category of the Gothic, in part because director Guillermo del Toro has been very candid about his literary influences and these influences are palpable in the film.

Among others, del Toro has mentioned the novels of Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis, Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, and Great Expectations. There are also links in the film to the story of Bluebeard, Edgar Allan Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and to Rebecca—and undoubtedly many others.

In an interview, del Toro said that he has taken many of the ideas of the earlier Gothics but added contemporary gender politics into the mix. While the horror genre, writ large, has offered in recent years more opportunities for strong female protagonists to fight actively against the evil that threatens them, much of the classic Gothic genre features female protagonists who must be saved by others.

Illustration from The
Mysteries of Udolpho.

Classic Gothic texts like The Castle of Otranto, The Mysteries of Udolpho, Frankenstein, and Dracula feature women who are threatened, locked up, and either killed or saved by male characters. Although Charlotte Brontë’s Jane is ultimately able to run away from the bigamous Rochester and finally accept him on her own terms, her financial independence that allows for the final reunion comes from an inheritance from her uncle. Even Emily Brontë’s virulent, violent Cathy can only control Heathcliff once she is a ghost.

By contrast, the protagonist and central antagonist of Crimson Peak are both women—the independent-minded, aspiring writer Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) and the gifted pianist but very creepy sister-in-law Lucille Sharpe (Jessica Chastain), respectively. Tom Hiddleston’s character of Sir Thomas Sharpe resists recreating the traditional Gothic villain, as he is equal parts romantic suitor, child-like inventor, and partner-in-crime to Lucille, whom the film ultimately paints as the instigator of evil at Allerdale Hall.

The character of Edith obviously draws on past Gothic heroines through her initial innocence, symbolically represented by her bright yellow flowing hair and her elaborate fin de siècle dresses and coats, as well as through her romanticization of Sir Thomas, a man her father does not wish her to marry. (The 1901 American setting and Edith’s imposing businessman father remind one vividly of Henry James’s “Washington Square.” This is unsurprising as del Toro has mentioned James as a major influence and has said that Edith’s name is an homage to another fin de siècle writer, Edith Wharton.)

 

Like many a Gothic heroine, Edith is innocence embodied;
it's her curiosity that will get her into trouble--or possibly save her?

Still, Edith manages to come into her own, even as she yields to other Gothic conventions: she allows herself to be swept away to an isolated, decaying old English manor hour; she cannot overcome the curiosity to explore the house that has been forbidden to her; and she refuses to see the dreadful secret of Sir Thomas and his sister until it is too late.

On the other hand, Edith is sexually assertive in her relationship with her husband, and the film keeps its female bodies clothed, resisting the spectacle of female nudity (though not necessarily that of male nudity!). In the second half of the film, once Edith must acknowledge the danger of her situation and the various threats to herself and her survival at Allerdale Hall, she fights back. The mixture of Gothic conventions with those of contemporary slasher flicks in the last twenty minutes of the film allow for Edith and Lucille to meet on the battlefield with no men to interfere (at least, not physically).

Thematically, of course, the film is borrowing from and embroidering various Gothic themes that exist even in texts where the female characters don’t have much power: the monstrous feminine, transgressive female desires, the fear of female sexuality, familial violence and revenge, etc. Crimson Peak is pastiche homage to the Gothic, giving us the spectacle of female power that is not wholly unique, but irresistible nonetheless.

In part, the gender politics of the Gothic, which are often both conventional and transgressive, traditional and queer at the same time, are part of the genre’s allure.

Eva Green's "Vanessa Ives" is another
Gothic heroine remade from the Gothic
novels the show draws on.

The literary elements of the film, as well as the film’s homage to various Hitchcock films, old B horror dramas, as well as classic Gothic films of the twentieth century (such as The Haunting of Hill House) make Crimson Peak, like other Gothic imitators (The Woman in Black and Penny Dreadful come to mind) alluringly familiar as they walk the fine line between high drama and camp, sexy and sexually perverse.

Why do we return so often to the Gothic? In part, it must be because the Gothic embodies so clearly the idea of the sublime, which crystallized in the Western imagination around the same time as the Gothic itself. The idea that we can experience terror and that we can explore certain taboo subjects within the “safe” confines of literature (and now also film and television) is alluring, exciting, and seductive.

The Gothic is also better dressed than many of its horror relatives; it is as much about the spectacle of interiors as it is about interiority, as much about velvet and lace as it is about spiders and ghosts. It holds out to us the possibility of elegance now lost, fashions of the dusty past, and those elaborate arabesques of Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s eponymous yellow wallpaper.

Finally, the Gothic is a genre (if I can go so far as to call it one) in which gender and sexuality are at the front of center of the story. Gender roles, sexual desires, and the body are elements of every Gothic story, and even the most seemingly conservative of such stories, like The Castle of Otranto or The Mysteries of Udolpho, for example, hold out the possibility of transgressive femininity, an idea that excites and terrifies even now in 2015.