In the folktale of Bluebeard’s wife—reimagined often in fiction, opera, film, and song—a nobleman marries a young woman and brings her to his castle. He entrusts her with the keys to his castle that will unlock every door, yet he warns her not to enter one forbidden underground chamber. With that warning, Bluebeard departs on business; the wife, (predictably) overcome with curiosity, unlocks the chamber to find the corpses of Bluebeard’s previous wives, all slaughtered for their disobedience. 

Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 Crimson Peak is a richly intertextual piece of Gothic horror, and although it changes some of the details, the film borrows perhaps most heavily from the story of Bluebeard. Young Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska), an American heiress, is wooed by Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), an English baronet whose title is at odds with his dwindling fortune. After the sudden and mysterious death of her father, Edith hastily marries Thomas and returns with him and his icy sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), to Allerdale Hall, their ancestral home atop a barren hill in Cumberland, England. In del Toro’s film, Lucille is the keeper of the keys, and the proffered reason for Thomas forbidding her to go below ground level is due to the dangers of the red clay mine upon which the manor sits. When Edith rather inevitably ventures belowground, she discovers a trunk bearing the name Enola; she subsequently steals the key from Lucille and opens it, and Edith—like Bluebeard’s wife before her—discovers the grim evidence of her husband’s previous brides.

Yet Crimson Peak is steeped in a rich tapestry of allusions that act as part cultural shorthand, part excessive affect. Lucille’s habitual presence in the attic coupled with the slow revelation of her madness evokes Bronte’s Jane Eyre; the siblings’ childhood confinement to that same attic along with their incestuous relationship and the narrative enthusiasm for poisoning echoes V.C. Andrews’ Flowers in the Attic. There are also a plethora of visual references to Nosferatu, Rebecca, The Haunting, The Pit and the Pendulum, and The Innocents woven throughout the film, which—along with the stunning ruin of Gothic Revival architecture embodied within Allerdale Hall (complete with bleeding walls)—establishes the film’s Gothic bona fides as it explores the nature of how the past haunts us. That Crimson Peak is itself haunted by both literary and filmic Gothic precursors underscores this point.

In “Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past,” Carla Freccero suggests that “being haunted is also a profoundly erotic experience, one that ranges from an acute visual pleasure to a mystical jouissance” (202). The spectral figures that haunt Edith, though disturbing, nonetheless exhibit a kind of grotesque beauty, formed from the red clay that relentlessly erupts from the house. The manor itself, with its textural and architectural richness—the elaborate carved stone and wood, the fluttering moths that inhabit it, even the decaying oculus through which leaves and then snow drift to the inlaid floor of the grand foyer—is a space where the past acts as a palimpsest; the entire structure is overlaid with the trauma that occurs within its walls. Freccero argues that “the past is in the present in the form of a haunting”—time collapses and overlaps in Allerdale Hall, and the space—with its bleeding walls—is literally shaped by the trauma that haunts it (194). She goes on to posit that “the past and the present are neither discrete nor sequential” (196). As the apparitions manifest themselves to Edith in order to warn her, that spectrality bridges past and present, disrupting temporality at the same time that they try to stop history repeating itself by alerting Edith to the danger posed by the Sharpes. As Edith slowly uncovers not only the plot to kill her for her money but also both the existence and fate of Bluebeard’s previous wives, she takes on the role of what Helen Hanson describes as the “investigative figure” who, in the Gothic genre is required to “navigate a series of positions conditioned by her speculation” (53).

This means that as Edith uncovers the monstrous motivations of the Sharpe siblings, we as viewers—along with Edith—come to view not the specters but rather Thomas and, to a larger extent, Lucille as the real monsters of Allerdale Hall. 

Works Cited

Crimson Peak, directed by Guillermo del Toro, performances by Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, and Jessica Chastain. Legendary Pictures, 2015.

Freccero, Carla. “Queer Spectrality: Haunting the Past.” A Companion to Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Studies, edited by George E. Haggerty and Molly McGarry, Blackwell, 2007, pp. 194-213. 

Hanson, Helen. “Reviewing the Female Gothic Heroine: Agency, Identification, and Feminist Film Criticism.” Hollywood Heroines: Women in Film Noir and the Female Gothic Film. IB Tauris, 2007, pp. 33-62.