Guillermo Del Toro has built his career on terrifying and delighting his audience. From making the impossible and surreal look incredibly life like in films like Pan’s Labyrinth and the Hell Boy series, the Mexican director has always been able to convince us to believe and absorb monsters and beasts like we’re children hearing scary campfire stories for the first time. It’s a pursuit that has seen him shake up cinematic expectations for three decades, as he’s grown to become a cult favourite amongst genre and horror fans alike.
However, his latest movie, Crimson Peak, might just be his most spine-tingling yet, as he leaps even further into the depths of the supernatural by exploring the horrifying world of gruesome ghosts.
Set at the turn of the 20th century, the film traces the story of heiress and aspiring author Edith Cushing (played by Australian Mia Wasikowska), who in the aftermath of a family tragedy at a young age, begins to have interactions with spirits from beyond the grave. After her father dies a gruesome and mysterious death, she is romantically whisked away by an enchanting English aristocrat, Sir Thomas Sharpe (played by Thor’s Tom Hiddleston) to live with him and his controlling sister Lucille (Zero Dark Thirty’s Jessica Chastain) in the gothic mansion Allerdale Hall in the remote, English country side. Set a top a mine, the home is seemingly alive and oozes blood-red clay, earning the nickname ‘Crimson Peak’ from locals, and within its walls lies mysteries and danger around every corner.
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Despite its stellar cast, which also includes Sons of Anarchy’s Charlie Hunnam and Deadwood’s Jim Beaver, it’s hard to argue with the fact that it’s actually the ghosts who are the true stars of the film. Mangled, decomposing, disturbingly accentuated, their appearances are chilling, leaving you never quite sure when you’ll leap from your seat. And unlike recent trends of rendering such characters using digital effects, Del Toro delights in explaining to me over the phone from London that it was traditional techniques that gave his nightmare creatures such realistic presence.
“It’s actually 90% physical,” he boasts. “It’s actors in make-up effects from head to toe and then we did the skeletons inside them digitally. But these are actors in the set.”
“When you see the ghosts,” he continues, “there is a point where your mind should tell you very subtly these ghosts are real – they are done physically on the set. At least this is my hope. And that moment the audience kind of realises there’s a lot of handiwork and a lot of effort and commitment from the film makers into giving you the experience of the movie.”
For Del Toro it seems, the challenge with contemporary audiences is getting them to let go of their preconceived notions of modern cinema.
“We are in a poker game with the audience and the audience tends to think that you’re bluffing; that it’s all digital. They go to it as a default, almost.”
It’s that expectation Del Toro strives to combat with every element of his film. Not just the elaborate costumes of the ghosts, but also the titular Crimson Peak house itself, which becomes an eerie character with walls, floors and crevices that breathe and moan and howl, while sickly red clay rises through the floorboards like a partially exposed wound. It’s an idea Del Toro explains he borrowed from one of his gothic horror heroes, Edgar Allan Poe.
“There was a great story by Edgar Allan Poe called The Fall Of The House Of Usher and in it the house is sinking in the swamp and I always thought that was great because it kind of represents the mental state of the characters.”
“Then I came up with the idea of the clay looking like blood,” he adds. “I thought it would be great if we made the house bleed and breathe and I gave it windows that looked like eyes and I tried to make it into a personage – a character.”
Indeed the set of Crimson Peak is another one of the triumphs of the film, such is its exquisite detail and ghastly attributes – from a black moth infestation to a rusty, internal elevator seemingly designed to give the user tetanus. And just like the costumes, almost every element of the set was physically made by Del Toro and his team.
“The majority of the film was shot in studio. The exteriors were shot on in a little city in Canada called Kingston, but the house was entirely built on the studio. And then we had a couple of interiors and period buildings in Toronto, but we fabricated a lot of the sets because I didn’t want to use any digital extensions – I wanted the sets to be completely real.”
Wasikoswka as the film’s lead Edith also does a remarkable job of portraying a character that defies convention as a female lead in a horror film, and to Del Toro was an obvious choice for the role after turns in similar fairy-tale and period pieces like Tim Burton’s Charlie And The Chocolate Factory and Jane Eyre.
“She’s always a strong, never a weak character but she’s weakened by her romanticism. That she always says “I’m not romantic,” but she is.”
“It’s like me,” he jokes, “I’m fat but I’m always on a diet. You know? It’s the same with her, she always says, “I’m not a romantic, I’m not a romantic,” but of course she is. And that dooms her a little bit by falling in love with the wrong guy.”
Another way in which Del Toro has been able to bash away modern expectations of audiences in the past has been his use of brutal violence. The famed bottle to the face scene from Pan’s Labyrinth is an image that disturbs and stays with anyone who has ever witnessed it. And Crimson Peak too has its fair share of painfully violent acts that he says are designed to trigger a visceral reaction, even for the most desensitised of audiences.
“When there’s a moment of violence I try to direct it to places that are not normally used on film. If you stab somebody in the belly, you have seen it even on a Disney TV show,” he laughs heartily.
“I’ve seen it everywhere and it doesn’t hurt. But for example if you injure the palm of their hand or you stab them in the arm pit, it’s such an unhealthy place to get stabbed that your mind does the work for you. It goes “Oh that must hurt!””
He’s even coined his own phrase for the lacklustre nature of modern film violence.
“You stab somebody in the belly – it’s almost what I call a Bruce Willis wound. It becomes a cinematic wound, it doesn’t count.”
And yet despite the gore and the bloodshed, the characters and plotline within Crimson Peak remain surprisingly relatable, as villains become sympathetic as the movie progresses, leaving you never quite sure who you’re rooting against.
“You actually like or come to like parts of the villains,” Del Toro confesses.
“At the same time you make the ghosts more human in a very strange way and more pathetic than scary.”
It’s not an easy route to take, but with Del Toro nothing’s ever done the easy way.
“All these things go counter to the normal gothic romance and yes it makes it a lot harder to make a movie than if you were making the conventional things.”
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‘Crimson Peak’ opens in Australian cinemas October 15th, win a double pass via our competition here and head to the official site for more info.
