CRIMSON PEAK : Unholy matrimony

Director Guillermo del Toro

Starring Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam, Doug Jones

Release 16 October 2015

Mia Wasikowska gets more than she bargained for when she marries Tom Hiddleston in crimson Peak. Guillermo del Toro guides us through his romance in a haunted house…

Guillermo del Toro is well established as the modern master of gothic fantasy. back in 2006 he released his breakout hit Pan’s Labyrinth, a fairytale tinged with horror and set against a post-Civil war backdrop in which republican guerrillas continue to fight Franco’s fascists. before that he’d made vampire tale Cronos and ghost story The Devil’s Backbone, making PL the third of the mexican filmmaker’s spanish-language films.

But interspersed with these smaller movies were hollywood productions Mimic, Blade II and Hellboy, and it’s to the large canvases that del Toro has dedicated the eight years since PL’s release. Hellboy II: The Golden Army (2008) and Pacific Rim (2013) saw the light of day; long-cherished lovecraft adap At The Mountains Of Madness and The Hobbit – or at least del Toro’s poetic vision of Tolkien’s book – didn’t.

It’s clear del Toro’s career hops between two paths: the smaller, personal movies and the studio spectacles – which makes his new venture Crimson Peak all the more exciting. oK, so it’s budgeted at $50m whereas Pan’s Labyrinth was $19m, The Devil’s Backbone $4.5m and Cronos just $2m. and it stars Tom hiddleston and mia wasikowska after the original pairing of benedict Cumberbatch and emma stone fell through (the former bailing because he felt, says del Toro, “he’d played characters like this before”, and the latter withdrawing due to a schedule conflict).

But it’s to the spirit of del Toro’s smaller films that his ninth feature it is undoubtedly wed. “This is closer to my european movies than my american movies,” says del Toro, on the phone from ontario, Canada, where the movie was shot.

Now immersed in post-production and working towards a lock date of late January/early February, he’s talking to Total Film at 5.30am before getting his head down for a long day’s work. “after Mimic, i made the decision not to attempt a thing like this in america, you know? with Mimic, i was trying to make a very unique movie but dimension wanted to do Alien3, and we ended up with Alien3½! So i thought, ‘well, i can have freedom within that template, as i have on the two Hellboys and Pacific Rim, but it still conforms to the idea of the big spectacle movie’. but Crimson Peak is a very peculiar movie in the same way that Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth are peculiar movies.”

Set in the 19th Century, Crimson Peak begins in an america on the brink of modernity, with young authoress edith Cushing (mia wasikowska) falling in love with charming englishman sir Thomas sharpe (Tom hiddleston), who’s travelling with his sister, lady lucille sharpe (Jessica Chastain). The couple promptly marry and edith accompanies the sharpes back to their old dark house in the north of england. in the words of del Toro, “it’s a gothic manor, crumbling, very edgar allan Poe.” safe to say the honeymoon is over…

“as you know, my interests are to toe the line between fairytale and horror,” he says, sounding more awake by the minute as he talks about his passion project. “There is a famous fairytale called Bluebeard. Crimson Peak was very much influenced by that tale – the woman who marries bluebeard, and bluebeard refuses to give her all the keys to the house, and his past is behind all those doors.”

Scripted by del Toro and matthew robbins in 2006, Crimson Peak initially failed to attract a budget of more than $30m, with financiers given the willies by the thought of a gothic romance weighed down by an r-rating. The director was unwilling to budge, determined to fashion a “twisted, adult horror tale and make it a carefully designed gothic production.”

For him, the clash of styles was the movie. “it’s great to be looking at a very sedate gothic romance and then you have a very violent moment interrupt the tone that you’re used to,” he points out. “i think it’s a very jarring effect, and that’s what attracted me to it. it’s a little like placing Pan’s Labyrinth against the background of the war – moments of visceral reality and moments of eerie, fairytale beauty.”

Enter legendary Pictures, the production company behind Pacific Rim. Far from adding to the director-as-puppet horror stories so often attributed to studios, legendary, founded in 2000, has fast built a reputation for fostering filmmakers, best exemplified by its work with Christopher Nolan (The Dark Knight trilogy, Inception, Interstellar).

Offering to let del Toro do his thing if he could do it for $50m – $20m more than he’d previously banked on—it meant that he could tell the story he wanted, in the style he chose. a large part of that was having the funds to go away and build the crumbling abode that is a character unto itself. “i view the house as a butterfly trap,” he says. “it’s something that encapsulates the characters.

There are very big spaces, a feeling of fairytale grandeur, but at the same time you need to feel suffocated. The house is constantly encircling the characters. it’s intricately designed. we fabricated the mouldings, we printed the wallpaper, we handcrafted the furniture. in many ways, Crimson Peak is the most deliberately designed movie I’ve done. a lot of those quirks hide, or carry, some of the storytelling. The house is full of tricks. There is a corridor... we triplicated the mouldings, so even when you look at the corridor and it’s in focus, it looks out of focus. we used negative spaces in the archways to indicate a human shape. it’s empty, but it looks like someone is there.”

Ah, we haven’t yet mentioned that the house is haunted. and we mean really haunted, del Toro promising a “gallery of ghosts”. having shot with all of the spectres “physically there”, the phantoms are now being treated in post-production to render the effect, or rather effects, that del Toro is after.

Given that this is the guy who, in The Devil’s Backbone, gave us one of the most memorable ghosts in the archives of cinema – a small boy named santi whose death by drowning is evoked by a veil of tears – we should expect something special.

Not that del Toro’s ready to offer any spoilers on that particular front. but he is happy to discuss the film’s overall style and influences, a conversation that unspools after we namechecks The Shining. after all, it sounds like Crimson Peak’s attention to detail reaches Kubrickian levels of exactitude.

He chuckles down the line. “i admire the hell out of that movie, and there is one decidedly big wink to it,” he confirms. “but there are also winks to Jane Eyre, Dragonwyck... i always have admired Jack Clayton’s camerawork on The Innocents...

I love the lavishness of roger Corman’s Poe movies. i know them very well, just as I know very well the gothic romances, like Uncle Silas by [J. Sheridan] le Fanu. The movie is very influenced by that, and it’s very influenced by [pioneer of the Gothic novel] ann radcliffe. all the gothic romances, from the classics to Northanger Abbey. all that is in my dna.”

His biggest touchstone, however, remains the work of italian horror master mario bava, whose work in the ’60s and ’70s also inspired such names as dario argento, martin scorsese and Tim burton. it was, in fact, bava’s sublimely shivery ghost story Kill Baby, Kill that was one of the key influences on The Devil’s Backbone. “bava is the most pervasive influence, I think,” he stresses. “I’m trying to do in this movie a sort of post-acidic Technicolor. we’re going for very saturated colour. The movie’s divided into the New world and the old world. The New world [America] is all golden and pastels and sepia, and then the old world [northern England] is gold and cyans and blues. it’s a stark contrast that allows the movie to have a very wild palette. it looks like a fairytale. it could be Beauty And The Beast, almost.”

While stressing time and again that Crimson Peak is a gothic romance first and a haunted house movie second, there remains one thing that we just has to know. is it scary? Given this is del Toro talking, the answer is a little more psychological and philosophical than a simple, ‘You betcha’.

“it has some definite thrills and jumps and scares,” he says. “but it’s more eerie and creepy than scary. atmospheric. a lot of the scares that work today depend very much on the Judeo- Christian belief of good and evil. what a lot of people find scary is possession, evil spirits, the pervasive and absolute nature of evil. This movie is the opposite; it examines the relativity of evil.

You may end up liking evil characters, finding humanity in them. but it is very creepy. It consciously follows and subverts all the rules, in the same way that The Devil’s Backbone is and isn’t a classic ghost story, and Pan’s Labyrinth is and isn’t a regular fairytale.” and with that, del Toro must depart to work on his ghosts. The tour of Crimson Peak is over, but one thing’s for sure: we can’t wait to spend the night. TF

Crimson Peak opens on 16 october 2015.