Horror Movie of the Day: "Crimson Peak"
This week on Cosmopolitan.com we’re celebrating all things horror (check out our list of the 25 all-time scariest movies here) and each day we’re going to spotlight one of our favorite female-fronted entries in the genre. Now that we’ve covered nightmare caves and witch ballet school, it’s time to take a trip to Victorian England with Crimson Peak.
When Crimson Peak came out last year, some viewers and critics complained that it wasn’t that scary, or worse, that it wasn’t that good. Those people have bad taste and are wrong, because Crimson Peak is almost the best movie that came out in 2015 (it narrowly - narrowly - loses to Mad Max: Fury Road). If you’ve seen even a few horror movies, it’s true that Crimson Peak is not that scary, but then cheap jump scares aren’t really the point of Crimson Peak. The point of Crimson Peak is Jessica Chastain stroking Mia Wasikowska’s face with a dead butterfly.
Mia plays Edith Cushing, a young American woman who dreams of becoming an author. When Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) arrives in town, Edith immediately becomes smitten, to the chagrin of her much hotter childhood pal Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam). Thomas and Edith begin a very Victorian relationship - a lot of wrist touching, a lot of lingering stares - but Edith’s dad suspects something is up with Thomas and his extremely pale sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain). Edith’s dad is right, but before he can warn her to stay away, he ends up brutally murdered. Thankfully, the ghost of Edith’s mom does the job for him and repeats a warning she gave Edith as a child: “Bewaaare of Crimson Peeeak.” (And yes, that warning doubles as a great calendar alert for your period tracker.)
With Edith’s dad dead and buried, Thomas is able to marry Edith and move her to his and Lucille’s English mansion, Allerdale Hall. This, as you might have guessed, is the Crimson Peak mentioned by Edith’s ghost mom, and it is a delight. There’s a hole in the roof that causes it to snow indoors basically all the time, and because it’s perched atop a red clay mine, the pipes spit out rust-colored water and the walls look like they’re bleeding. Thomas keeps a table full of decapitated doll heads in his office, for seemingly no purpose. There’s a rickety old elevator leading to a basement Edith has been told never to visit. And, of course, the house is haunted as fuck. Edith’s obviously in danger from the moment she sets foot in the dilapidated entrance hall, but you can tell she’s stoked about how much great material this will provide for her writing. If you’re a budding gothic novelist, you really can’t do better than “bleeding Victorian mansion with a hole in the roof and also ghosts.”
It takes Edith a shockingly long time to figure out that (1) something is off with her new husband and (2) her new house is the one her mother warned her about, but the movie is so visually striking that you won’t even feel like yelling at her to get out of there. Aside from the fact that everybody’s always dressed in flowing velvet and lace, there’s the aforementioned bleeding mansion, plus beautifully designed ghosts that are so gorgeous you can’t look away even as you’re terrified. Crimson Peak might not keep you up at night, but it will certainly make you think twice about marrying the first English “sir” who wanders into town with a proposal and the deed to a mine. It’s not worth it, girl! Just stay home and write your gothic novels in peace.
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