Sightlines · how to watch
How to watch Crimson Peak
2015 · Guillermo del Toro · Crimson Peak on Sightlines
5 things to watch and listen for on a first viewing, without spoilers, and 4 more once you have seen it. Each names something you can see or hear, the pattern it belongs to, and what noticing it gives you. How these keys work.
On a first viewing
Watch the color change when Edith arrives at the house. (light)
Dan Laustsen shoots Buffalo in warm gold and amber. Allerdale Hall comes in cold blue, sick green, and a recurring bruise of red. Candlelight sits in small pools against shadow that swallows the rest.
Payoff: The palette is not reporting on the weather. It tells you which world Edith is standing in before anyone speaks. In the reading: affective colour. The reading calls this affective colour: color that absorbs a whole scene and its feeling instead of describing a place.
Look at the red clay seeping up through the floorboards. (setting)
Del Toro had the hall built at full scale with a floor engineered to ooze. Red comes up from below, snow falls in through the torn roof, and the walls seep. The actors stand inside the thing.
Payoff: The Sharpes are broke and living on top of the substance that is eating their house. That is the situation, stated in material. In the reading: originary world. The reading calls the clay an originary world: raw appetite under the furnished one, running the building by its own laws.
Notice the camera craning up through the great hall. (camera)
Laustsen keeps moving: craning through the vertical space, gliding along galleries, traveling the staircases. The house gets covered the way a body gets examined, top to bottom, rather than shown room by room.
Payoff: The movement is what makes you feel the building as a single organism instead of a set of rooms.
Listen to the house creak and settle in the wind. (sound)
Timber groans, wind comes through the roof, clay moves wetly under the boards. Velazquez's score runs to a waltz rather than horror stingers, so the loudest thing in most scenes is the building itself.
Payoff: You hear Allerdale as much as you see it, and the waltz keeps tying the romance to the dread.
Watch Chastain keep her face and voice under tight control. (performance)
Everyone plays melodrama here rather than naturalism. Chastain holds Lucille glacial and exact for most of the picture. Hiddleston plays Thomas seductive and guilty at the same moment, never resolving into one or the other.
Payoff: These people are not deciding things. They are being driven, and the acting shows you the pressure they are holding down.
Once you have seen it
Watch what the ghosts do instead of attacking. (staging)
Doug Jones performs them in prosthetics with digital tendrils added, so they have real weight in the room. Then they point, they warn, they wait. They almost never come at anyone.
Payoff: Horror trains you to brace when a ghost appears. These break the habit and ask you to read them instead. In the reading: demark. The reading calls them demarks: images that refuse the expected reaction and force you to interpret them instead.
Look at the butterflies and moths in costumes and decor. (setting)
Hawley's costumes move Edith through changing colors and silhouettes as her situation darkens. Butterflies are eaten, moths do the eating, and Lucille keeps company with the moths throughout.
Payoff: The design states the food chain of the house early and then the plot simply obeys it.
Count how early you know the Sharpes are dangerous. (structure)
Vilaplana cuts a slow burn, front-loading courtship and then accelerating. The film never hides the menace. Tension comes from watching Edith read her way toward what you already worked out.
Payoff: This is built on revelation, not surprise. The suspense lives in her reading, not in withheld information.
Look up at the hole in the roof. (staging)
The one part of Allerdale nobody repairs is the one that lets weather in. Snow falls through the great hall all film. The house cannot seal itself against outside.
Payoff: The flaw in a closed world is the way out of it, and the art department put Edith's escape route in the ceiling.
Carry this in: Ignore the ghosts and watch the floor. Red clay comes up through it the whole film.