When Tobe Hooper and Steven Spielberg dragged the haunted house movie out of creaky Victorian mansions and into suburban America in Poltergeist, it was a revelation. But their 1982 horror classic also instigated a bit of a revolution, and now a film like Crimson Peak – which yanks the supernatural back to gothic locales by its very hair – feels like the real novelty.
The latest trailer for Guillermo del Toro’s first serious horror film in almost a decade is scratching an itch we didn’t know we even had, which sounds pretty soothing until you realize it means we’ve actually been suffering for years, and lacked the self-awareness necessary to even realize it. The film stars Mia Wasikowska (Stoker) as Edith Cushing, a young woman seduced to a giant, dilapidating house resting “atop a mountain of blood-red clay” by Sir Thomas and Lady Lucille Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain).
Related: Guillermo del Toro’s Video Tour of ‘Crimson Peak’
But as you can see from the new trailer (above), all is not well, and the shadows and basements conceal dark secrets. We’re not entirely confident that we needed to see CGI spooks in the trailer for Crimson Peak – since plausible deniability of horror is an enormous part of the haunted house genre – but time will tell if that’s the marketing department screwing the pooch by ruining the suspense, or all part of Guillermo del Toro’s game plan. With production design as “in your face” as what we’re seeing in Crimson Peak, subtlety may not be on the menu.
Related: Guillermo del Toro on the Set of ‘Crimson Peak’ (Interview)
But despite his reputation as a master of horror, subtlety isn’t always what Guillermo del Toro cares about. His Hellboy movies are about as understated as a punch to the face. He hasn’t delved into serious nightmare territory since 2006’s Pan’s Labyrinth, and he hasn’t touched a haunted anything-to-speak-of since 2001’s The Devil’s Backbone. Maybe he’s after something wholly different here, a blend of the overt and understated. Or maybe there’s more – or less – to Crimson Peak than it appears at a glance.
In any case, this new trailer for Crimson Peak offers a fun peek at a promising horror film, and one that we hope will evoke a lot more of The Haunting (1963) than The Haunting (1999). We’ll find out for sure when the movie opens on October 16, 2015.
William Bibbiani is the editor of CraveOnline’s Film Channel and the host of The B-Movies Podcast. Follow him on Twitter at @WilliamBibbiani.
