Guillermo del Toro got his start directing low-budget horror flicks that, due to his years of experience as a special effects man, featured astonishingly rich and tactile worlds. Since then, he’s applied his talents to more commercial, action-packed narratives—the Hellboy series and Pacific Rim, for example. But his new movie, Crimson Peak, looks like a grotesque return to his Spanish horror roots.
The film stars Tom Hiddleston as Sir Thomas Sharpe, a mysterious hero who whisks new wife Edith Cushing (Mia Wasikowska) off to his crumbling, antiquated Victorian mansion. It’s only there that Edith meets his sister Lucille (Jessica Chastain), and she soon realizes that husband and house are not what they seem. It may not be the “ultimate masterpiece” the trailer promises, but Peak does have all the hallmarks of old-school del Toro: perverse, adult-oriented fantasy, a set teeming with Gothic imagery, and lots and lots of blood. It hits theaters in October.
