Summer is For Watching Scary Movies

The Summer is for camping outings and paperback novels, for local Summer Stock theater and B movies, for long books on a day too hot to move, read under the fan, with a glass of ice water just out of reach.  My Summer was gleefully, and somewhat guiltily, given over to Bad B horror films.  These are not the Friday the 13^th part 20, but something darker, more randomly satisfying, and infinitely more pleasing.  Milking a good list or two, and my Netflix accounts tandem disk/watch on demand options, I rather overdid it. 

Right, so after years of reading gothic fiction and hoarding bad B horror films, I awaited Gillermo Del Toro’s Crimson Peak with a kind of longing saved for holidays and diet-breaking chocolate desserts.  I was hoping for the kind of lush lavishness of Pan's Labyrinth or the heartbreaking ethereal charm of Mama.  While this film has some stunning moments, it drowns a bit in its own storyline – one more easily guessed at than it should be -- and painted in too much red to see well.

The story begins well with a plucky heroine, Edith Cushing, played by Mia Wasikowska being wooed by a handsome and landed inventor, Thomas Sharp (Tom Hiddleston), and her pragmatic American father (Jim Beaver) stepping in to chase away the insolvent suitor before he lures the glowing Edith away to the English countryside, his crumbling manor, and decaying family.  The House of Usher has nothing on these folks.  Before he can succeed in saving his daughter, though Mr. Cushing’s skull is crushed by an ungentlemanly intruder into his club.  The wooing and wedding go as planned, and Mrs. Sharpe joins her husband and his sister in the family home, the only place her mother’s spirit has forbidden her to go.  It is a place where the red clay bleeds so effectively through the white snow, that the front yard and grounds look like a butcher’s shop after a busy week. 

Once ensconced in Crimson Peak’s lovely yet crumbling family estate, Edith finds that she is often visited by spirits with warnings, by things that go bump in the night, and subterranean levels rivaling Dante’s best visions.  The real terror, however, is Jessica Chastain’s coldly calculating Lucille, who has her own secrets and her own ways of keeping them. 

This was one of the first of my foray that I watched, and did so the same way that people engage in illicit sex:  privately, in a darkened living room at daytime, with a fist full of Vienna Finger cookies.  While this wasn’t the lowest budget film that I saw this Summer, it verged on being the campiest.  Crimson Peak, or no, the color saturation of the exterior shots is too much.  Edith’s wardrobe, wrought of golden colors and heavy fabric also seems heavily handed, and overly rich.  Occasionally you find yourself feeling a bit adrift, like you’ve wandered into Tim Burton’s Alice in Wonderland again, with a slightly subdued Mad Hatter, and a better dressed Alice.  While the set shots are beautiful, and Wasikowski’s wardrobe is beautiful, together they’re too much. 

Edith’s mother is rendered like Del Toro’s Mama with long fingers and snaking black tendrils that glide sinister and grasping towards the heroine.   There are scenes of real delight, however campy some of this film gets.  When Edith first sees the interior of her future home, a half-destroyed entry hall, and stairwell, leaves are carelessly fluttering through it.  It’s  a marvelously atmospheric scene that sets an achingly creepy and melancholic setting for Edith’s brightly colored bride.  It’s a masterful moment that comes off beautifully. 

Now naming Edith’s family Cushing with this first comeback of the Hammer House films is a lovely touch.  Jessica Chastain is eerily and coldly frightening.  You know that something is going on, and eventually, Lord Sharpe is told of his bride that he should “get rid of her.”  While we know that this deviousness is just a hint of what Lucille Sharpe is capable of, the garishness with which we are given some back story only matches the heavy hand with which the outer landscape is sprayed red, supposedly due to natural clays, but I suspect more so because this is a Hammer production, and that’s one of their signature touches.

Not that I didn’t enjoy this, but it lacked the subtlety of Del Toro’s earlier ghost stories that I deeply enjoyed:  The Devil’s Backbone, The Orphanage, Pan’s Labyrinth, and Mama.  It’s that it feels as if someone took a magic marker to an old Tenniel plate, and in the spirit of livening it up, ruined it.