ghost
Sometimes watching a movie can feel like a duty. Maybe that’s because I take movies too seriously sometimes (okay, maybe all the time). But explaining why a movie fails is fraught with questions about my own expectations of a movie as they relate to the quagmire of unknowns about the creators’ intentions, let alone the practical budgetary constraints and other contingent aspects of an independent or studio production.
While most genre filmmakers have a hard time choosing between style and substance, Guillermo Del Toro has become the best filmmaker in the fantasy genre by giving equal weight to the visual design and emotional weight of the narrative; both complement each other in the best of his work. Even in a simple blockbuster movie like Pacific Rim, the substance is always there to be seen due to the clear love for the old-school Kaiju movies that inspired it – to date it is the only major studio tentpole blockbuster that feels like the personal passion project it was devised as. Crimson Peak is Del Toro’s return to gothic fantasy, his first film in the English language that could be comparable to his two Spanish Civil War fairy tales, The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth.
Miss Giddens (Deborah Kerr), the new governess for two orphaned children in Victorian England, arrives at their idyllic country estate in the beginning of the psychological horror film, The Innocents (1961). The naive young woman, who has a lived a solidly middle class existence as a vicar’s daughter, marvels at the stately home and spacious grounds. Everything, including her two young charges, seems innocent and perfect.