Guillermo Del Toro’s CRIMSON PEAK Premieres Teaser, Poster

Is it just me or does Guillermo Del Toro seem to be a man divided? I mean, I have nothing against Pacific Rim but personally it’s just not my thing. I could say I was disappointed by it but it wasn’t really my thing. Well, mainly it was the barely tolerable orgy of CGI that wasn’t my thing more than, you know, kaiju-punching giant robots because how could that not be your thing? But I think I speak on behalf of all horror fans that, after the entertaining but awkward Hellboy films, we were hoping for a return to the Del Toro of old, the The Orphanage and Pan’s Labyrinth mastermind who lured his unsuspecting prey into his films with dabs of gothic fantasy before swallowing them whole. It’s not that we can’t share him with non-horror fans; it’s just that we refuse.

Thankfully, with Crimson Peak, he’s agreed to our demands, and we didn’t even have to take anyone hostage! I, for one, am pretty sure this means he really likes us, you know, like likes us. And if the teaser you’re about to watch– YES YOU, CLOSE ALL THOSE OTHER TABS THEY MEAN NOTHING– well, this teaser and the accompanying poster seem to promise a Guillermo Del Toro who was kidnapped from 2003, before he started work on Hellboy II, and handed the budget he would’ve had for that movie with a polite yet insistent request that, this fairy tale Gothic thing here that you did in The Orphanage, more of this please. Now.

As for the teaser itself, well… it immediately establishes the Weird, with a capital ‘w’, tone of the film by placing a bedraggled-looking protagonist Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) in the midst of a snow-blanketed graveyard of machinery. Something’s clearly gone awry, but what. From then on, we get a brief summary of Cushing’s entrance into the haunting (and literally haunted) home of enigmatic Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleson) who appears to have chosen her to live with him. One of the first parts that caught my eye was a scene with a wall painted with maudlin figures and what appears to be Cushing investigating the wall itself. The whole visual immediately recalls Suspiria‘s iconic “hidden passage” scene, so there’s that. But Del Toro also wants to actually scare us so cue an unsettling little mechanized man nonsensically spitting golden balls from his mouth into a cup. What? Uh, yeah, one of its eyes has that creepy diamond-shaped makeup thing going on. Nice one, Del Toro.

Calling this his “ultimate masterpiece” is a bit blustery and kind of distracts, though. I mean, “ultimate”? Like, sure he’s got a decade or so of movies ahead of him, right? And if the phrase “confined to the nursery in the attic” doesn’t raise the hairs on your neck, you’re probably too jaded to even care about this movie. After a brief hint of some sex and some accompanying voyeurism, we glimpse a return to the machinery we witnessed earlier. Apparently, there’s a funeral? That’s when the real creepiness kicks off, with a blood-shrouded ghost lurking in a bathtub, a machete being unwrapped, leather gloves being donned menacingly (more giallo-isms!), a reappearance of the notably crimson colored ghost emerging from a hallway floor, and finally a cliche done right; scared-stiff Edith lying in bed, facing the camera as a notably not-crimson ghost hand slowly grips her shoulder from behind.

So, what can we gather from all this? Surprisingly, not damn much. We don’t know if the funeral kicks off the story or is part of the rising action but given that there’s a scene of a white-glad woman falling to apparent death, it’s probably the latter. In which case, perhaps the one of the two ghosts we see is this expired character? There’s something key to this machinery that Hiddleston’s character fiddles with; it shows up twice, despite not having any obvious function. Is this the “crimson peak” we are warned about by a voice over? Is Hiddleston’s Sir Sharpe perhaps not as benevolent as he first appears? Is there a mustache in Mexico?!

If I had to speculate on the plot of the film (and I don’t but I will anyway) I think that just maybe Sir Sharpe’s machinery is an immortality machine, which he must fuel with the deaths (but not the souls) of women like Edith Cushing. The first ghost, the crimson one, could be the last doomed soul he sacrificed, whose specter he must wrestle with as recompense for murdering her with the machine. The dark ghost is maybe the ghost of his sister, who we see plummet to her death in the teaser. But this is a pretty straightforward interpretation of the teaser and, knowing Guillermo Del Toro, the plot is way weirder and less predictable. Either way, as a modern update of the old dark house genre, I’m tickled pink at what I see here. Eat your heart out, Tim Burton!