Crimson Peak was “doomed” from the start, and Guillermo del Toro knew it. “I was saying, ‘You should promote the romance, and you should promote the mystery. The last thing you want to do is promote it as horror,’” he told Vulture in a recent interview.
But promoted as horror it was, and so the gothic ghost movie flopped at the box office, earning only $74 million worldwide against its $55 million budget. The marketing — which emphasized its gruesome creature effects and jumpscares — didn’t just hurt the box office numbers. Reviews were also tepid, dinging the movie for its lack of real scares. But the scares were never really the point of Crimson Peak.
Made in the style of lavish gothic movies like Rebecca and Wuthering Heights, Crimson Peak is a deliciously macabre romance that sees del Toro working at the peak of his creative prowess. It’s visually sumptuous and wonderfully moody, but its torrid romance put off a lot of viewers expecting a straightforward horror movie. Which is a shame, because Crimson Peak is perhaps the purest cinematic representation of gothic horror, in that its beautiful, atmospheric visuals hide a rotten core.
Del Toro always knew what kind of movie he was making, and knew from the start that the studio, Universal Pictures, would have trouble marketing it. “The thing that will always, pun intended, haunt that movie is that it was sold as a horror movie,” del Toro told Vulture. “But I remember distinctly, when we had the meetings [about promotion], they were all targeted toward getting the horror audience for the opening weekend... We were opening in October, and October is the month of Halloween, so I understand why it happened.”
Looking back on the film eight years later, after it’s accumulated a following of “people who love it at an almost molecular level,” del Toro finds a surprising companion with Alex Garland’s Civil War. “Seeing Civil War, the Alex Garland movie, getting misinterpreted, even after its characters clearly stated the mission of the movie— ‘We don’t sanction, we don’t qualify, we just show,’ right? That’s basically the definition of Garland’s movie! Well, I tried the same thing in Crimson Peak by having a character actually saying, ‘It’s not a ghost story, it’s a story with a ghost in it.’ The movie itself was trying to give clues about what it was!”
To this day, many people write off Crimson Peak for “not being scary,” which is a shame given that it’s one of del Toro’s greatest films. Hopefully, as another October draws closer, streaming audiences will come to appreciate its Gothic undertones rather than expect pure horror.
