The Woman in the Attic: Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak

[BelgradeBeauty]

If you haven't seen the trailor for Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak, then I recommend taking a quick look. Set in a period which is reminiscent of the late Victorian era, the cinematography has a dark air of enchantment to it. It's a time-worn Gothic story about an impreesionable woman, who falls in love with a mysterious and charming stranger, who in a whirlwind romance convinces her to marry him. He whisks her away to his distant and brooding manor where he lives with his lone sister.

The filmic visual landscape is one that might remind you of something Tim Burton might create, yet it's more sinister and less familair. From the trailer I'm hoping this won't be a typical horror story, and that del Toro's keeps his promise to the viewer. That it won't be a hollow shell of style, but rather an intelligent interpretation of what this story has been, and could be.

To me, its twisted and gnarled roots seem to grow out of another gothic story, the novel, Jane Eyre. The overwhelming sense of reserved sadness, quiet suffering and the ever-present overhanging dark secret that haunts her is perturbing as you slowly read through it. The unlikley love-story between her and Mr. Rochester at times is painful, fraught with tension and ominous. In del Toro's film the heroine seems to offer that same innocence that Jane had, which is starkly marked against the ehcoing screams of the ethereal 'woman in the attic'.

This story is not actually about love more than it is about the unravelling of a woman's mind and the fear a man has of her. How in her ultimate form 'she' is a fair and virtuous maiden willing to be an undyingly faithful wife to a man who harbours a wicked past. A woman that would unconditionally embrace any flaw or shortcoming he may have and complete him. Then there is her opposite, the form of the feminine which is the most terrifying, a destructive, sinister and unforgiving force that must be conquered, hidden or locked away. An apparition that keeps on haunting him by coming back.

This theme doesn't go unnoticed, of how the dark sides of women's minds are too scary to explore, that the feminine element is not only mysterious but ravneous and ravishing, with an insatiable urge for annhilation and destructive. In this film it'll be represented surely by the demons and ghosts that live in the nursery (the base and cradle of women's status in society). It's hard not to see how the heroine, the 'angel of the house' as every Victorian wife was expected to be, comes undone so utterly and completely. Since then, even as now, women are the centers of families, the vital energies that infuse love into the house - at the root of this descent of a woman into madness - is the innate threat to society itself. For without her, without a domesticated and pacified woman, society would surely crumble. Right? Only men are allowed to have secrets here, a woman may have none of her own. And I fear that that is the true horror del Toro is aiming at, the innate fear men have of 'Woman' and her inpenetrable secret. Not of the ghosts hiding upstairs in their closets. Just as the heroine says in the opening line of the trailer: "Ghosts are real." I believe she is speaking of her own...

[oldanddecrepid]

Love those types of movies... the era, and how just the lighting and styles can feel so creepy!