Crimson Peak (Guillermo del Toro, 2015)

Cast: Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam, Jim Beaver, Burn Gorman, Leslie Hope, Doug Jones. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, Matthew Robbins. Cinematography: Dan Laustsen. Production design: Thomas E. Sanders. Film editing: Bernat Vilaplana. Music: Fernando Velázquez. 

In Crimson Peak, Guillermo del Toro takes all the elements of the Gothic romance and turns them up to 11, which is the best thing he could have done with such familiar, not to say cheesy, material. There's the dewy heroine who makes a dubious marriage, the sinister rival female, the doughty but dull spurned suitor, and of course the Old Dark House. This one makes Thornfield Hall, Manderley, and even the Castle of Otranto look like a suburban tract house: It's a great malevolent beetle of a mansion, squatting on a bleak landscape, decaying steadily and grossly while sinking into the mine above which it sits. It's inhabited by the cash-poor aristocrats Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and his sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain), along with a sizable contingent of ghosts. To it, Thomas brings his bride, Edith (Mia Wasikowska), whose father has recently died (rather violently, as we have seen), leaving her the family fortune. Edith is spunky and imaginative, an aspiring writer of ghost fiction, having had her own encounters with ghosts who warned her to "beware Crimson Peak." What she doesn't know, of course, is that the place to which her husband has brought her is called Crimson Peak, for its blood-red clay, by the locals. Anyway, the truth will out, and in a variety of gruesome ways. What makes the movie work is that del Toro is willing to go over the top entertainingly, stretching credibility to (and sometimes beyond) the breaking point, without smirking about it and camping it up. So we have, for example, a duel between Edith and Lucille, with both wearing flimsy, flowing nightwear. (Kate Hawley's costume designs are splendidly excessive.) We have apparitions in various states of decay and a plethora of insect life. The ghost of Edith's mother appears in a form that looks something like a cross between a tarantula and a woman with dreadlocks. There are vats of disgusting red murk in the cellar in which things are submerged. It's all a bit much, but the actors know how to take it in their stride. Having played Loki in the Marvel movies and the vampire Adam in Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Hiddleston in particular knows how to make a character both attractive and disquieting at the same time. Del Toro isn't up to anything of great moment in this movie, but it's good to see the material handled with a distinct sensibility and an avoidance of the tried and true. 

The Devil's Backbone (Guillermo del Toro, 2001)

Junio Valverde and Fernando Tielve in The Devil's Backbone

Cast: Marisa Paredes, Eduardo Noriega, Federico Luppi, Fernando Tielve, Íñigo Garcés, Irene Visedo, José Manuel Lorenzo, Francisco Maestre, Junio Valverde, Berta Ojea, Adrián Lamana, Daniel Esparza, Javier Bódalo. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro, Antonio Trashorras, David Muñoz. Cinematography: Guillermo Navarro. Production design: César Macarrón. Film editing: Luis de la Madrid. Music: Javier Navarrete. 

It's October, which means that all the purveyors of classic movies like TCM and the Criterion Channel are rolling out their horror films and ghost stories. Guillermo del Toro's The Devil's Backbone falls more into the latter category than the former, for although it has moments of high tension and bloodshed, its focus is largely on the haunting of an isolated Spanish orphanage by a young boy who wants to get revenge on his murderer. It's set at the end of the Spanish Civil War, which gives the film an underpinning of historical reality, and it adds some realism in the portrayal of the relationships that develop among the boys who have been sent there after the deaths of their parents in the conflict. It's as much high melodrama as horror movie, with a handsome villain, Jacinto (Eduardo Noriega), who murdered the boy Santi (Junio Valverde) to conceal his attempts to break into the safe where the operators of the orphanage, Carmen (Marisa Paredes) and Dr. Casares (Federico Luppi), are hiding gold that is meant to support the loyalist cause. Murder will out, largely with the help of young Carlos (Fernando Tielve), the latest arrival to the orphanage, who learns to communicate with the ghost of Santi. On this simple framework, del Toro layers a good deal of Gothic oddities, including some fetuses preserved in rum, an unexploded bomb in the orphanage courtyard, a murky cistern, and Carmen's artificial leg. Atmosphere is everything in a movie of this genre, and del Toro is a master at creating it, using the contrast of the sunny Spanish landscape and the shadowy interior of the orphanage to great effect. The film is not so unrelenting a creepshow as some of del Toro's other films, like Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017), which are more highly regarded but which I actually like less than The Devil's Backbone.

Cronos (Guillermo del Toro, 1993)

Cronos (Guillermo del Toro, 1993)

Cast: Federico Luppi, Ron Perlman, Claudio Brook, Margarita Isabel, Tamara Shanath, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Mario Iván Martínez, Farnesio de Bernal, Juan Carlos Colombo. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro. Cinematography: Guillermo Navarro. Production design: Tolita Figuero. Film editing: Raúl Dávalos. Music: Javier Álvarez.

Guillermo del Toro's Cronos, his first feature, is a "horror movie" with the hard moral clarity of a folk tale, a characteristic the writer-director has maintained into his more celebrated films like Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017). In fact, I think I prefer Cronos to these later films because its moral vision is not distracted into social or political directions. Granted, we can interpret Cronos as a tale about the cultural contamination of Mexico from the age of the conquistadors to the age of multinational corporations, but that takes more work than the film itself demands. What we have in Cronos is a fable about the hunger for immortality, as basic as it is to any vampire movie, but with the difference that in this film the vampirism, with its blood lust and photophobia, isn't spread in the usual plaguelike fashion, but confined to those eager enough to seek it out. The fable of the consequences of human overreaching, as old as Genesis, gets a fairly sophisticated reworking in Cronos, where the horror movie tropes are more insidiously displayed than usual. Del Toro is less out to shock us than to infest our dreams.

Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)

Pan's Labyrinth (Guillermo del Toro, 2006)

Cast: Ivana Baquero, Sergi López, Maribel Verdú, Doug Jones, Ariadna Gil, Álex Angulo. Cinematography: Guillermo Navarro. Production design: Eugenio Caballero. Film editing: Bernat Vilaplana. Music: Javier Navarrete.