As pretty much his entire filmography will attest, Guillermo del Toro clearly loves Gothic horror, doomed romances, ghost stories, lavish production design, tangible creature effects and heightened fantasy, so he hardly needed to tell anyone that Crimson Peak was a passion project for him.
The filmmaker initially sold his spec script that he’d co-written with Matthew Robbins in 2006 after the success of Pan’s Labyrinth, but del Toro’s jam-packed schedule meant that it would be almost a decade before the movie hit the big screen. And when it did, Crimson Peak landed with a relatively dull thud at the box office after earning less than $75 million on a $55 million budget.
Reviews were strong, though, with the performances and visuals being widely praised, not to mention an old school atmosphere of tension and lurching dread that modern horror regularly fails to conjure. The plot follows Mia Wasikowska’s Edith, who marries Tom Hiddleston‘s Sir Thomas Sharpe, and they reside in their remote mansion along with his sister Lady Lucille, played by Jessica Chastain.
Naturally, there are some dark secrets lurking just under the surface, and Edith uses her ability to communicate with the dead to try and discover why she was warned to stay away from Crimson Peak. The movie’s ghosts are largely achieved practically with CGI enhancements rather than fully-digital creations, and del Toro regular Doug Jones is obviously involved along with creature veteran Javier Botet, who’s previously been buried under prosthetics in the likes of REC, Mama, The Conjuring 2, It, Slender Man and many more.
Crimson Peak is coming to Netflix this week on April 16th, and while horror has hardly proven itself to be a favorite when it comes to dominating the Top 10 most-watched list, the stacked cast alone could be enough to entice some curious subscribers.
