31 Days of Feminist Horror Films: CRIMSON PEAK + THE COMPANY OF WOLVES

CRIMSON PEAK is horror master Guillermo del Toro’s take on the classic gothic novel — it updates the trappings of the genre create an empathetic, feminist ghost story, anchored by Mia Wasikowska as our fierce heroine, Edith Cushing. In the mold of Mary Shelley and the Bronte sisters before her, Edith allows her own intuition and predilection towards the supernatural guide her work as a writer, and, less successfully, her love life. But, even given that, Edith, like del Toro’s heroines in CRONOS, MIMIC, and PAN’S LABYRINTH, is allowed to have the kind of action-packed, ghoul-filled adventure that’s usually only reserved for intrepid young men in cinema. CRIMSON PEAK is ultimately a story about the ghosts that get left behind when forbidden love goes wrong and breeds hateful jealousy, and how one woman is able to stop a cycle of abuse and murder.

Edith has been touched by the other side since an early age — the desiccated, ghost of her dead mother appears to her, and warns Edith to “Beware of Crimson Peak,” a cryptic, frightening message for such a young girl. Years later, just after she’s met the dashing inventor Sir Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston), her mother returns, and repeats the same message.

Edith’s enjoyed a comfortable life with her father Carter (Jim Beaver), but struggles to have her writing — which of course leans heavily on the supernatural — taken seriously, especially as she’s encouraged to write more traditional, romantic narratives. Thomas immediately takes a shine to Edith and truly respects her work, but Edith is reluctant about beginning any kind of romance with him, especially because Thomas’s sister, Lucille (Jessica Chastain, deliciously cruel) is less than welcoming. Carter is brutally murdered not long after turning down Thomas’s peculiar red clay harvesting machine, and of course, the one person who can truly comfort Edith is Thomas. Edith’s childhood friend (and, semi-unbeknownst to Edith torch-carrying suitor) Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunam) warns her about rushing off to a new life with Thomas, but grief has its hooks in Edith, and she’s eager to flee the ghosts of her dead parents, her stalled career, and her failed attempts at romance.

Every good ghost story needs a big spooky house, and Allerdale Hall, the Sharpe family home, is no exception. Allerdale has all the traditional trappings of a haunted house: dimly lit corridors, isolated bedrooms, decrepit Victorian furnishings and interiors, a forbidden basement. Edith is impressed by the scale and design of the house, but she soon learns its secret — the red clay that Thomas mines is seeping through the walls and the floorboards, literally oozing into the lives of the Sharps and sucking the house down into its muck. Aside from the obviously sinister underpinnings of such a phenomena, Allerdale’s bloody interiors make the house itself feel like one big, obvious vagina metaphor. Thanks to the women Thomas and Lucille have been killing for their inheritances (of course) there’s the stain of female blood throughout the house spiritually, and del Toro chooses to make it literal as the seepage grows worse and worse. Allerdale is of course the Crimson Peak that Edith’s been warned about all these years, and now she’s trapped there.

It feels like a feminist update to the spooky manor home tradition, with del Toro using Allerdale as a reclamation of symbolic female power that’s so often stripped from the heroines of gothic novels. Allerdale and the film as a whole feels like an homage to Angela Carter’s feminist retelling of Bluebeard, “The Bloody Chamber,” as Lucille gives Edith a set of keys to the house, but warns her never to go the basement, keeping that key for herself. Of course, the corpses of Thomas and Lucille’s victims are being kept down there in large vats of the red clay, their bodies primed to become ghosts — their attempts to give these poor women back to the earth fail, and Thomas’s dead brides refuse to rest quietly after being murdered only for the sin being a wealthy woman.

Mia Wasikowska is a commanding heroine as Edith, and del Toro pulls off a clever reversal of traditional gender roles in gothic horror by characterizing Thomas and Alan in ways that are classically reserved for women. Thomas is initially reticent to consummate his marriage with Edith, and his distance perplexes her — is she too plain in some way? But, after they’re stranded at an inn for a night, passions take over, and it’s Thomas, not Edith who is the sex object in this love scene. Del Toro aestheticizes Tom Hiddleston’s semi-nude body while keeping Wasikowska mostly clothed — an inversion of the male gaze, especially because the scene focuses on Edith’s sexual pleasure, not Thomas’s.

Throughout the film, Edith’s beauty comes not from sexualizing her, but from her rigid sense of dress and appearance, including a high-necked white nightgown that becomes stained with the blood as the film’s iconic look. Del Toro understands that he can update the genre by making Thomas the center of the film’s lustful gaze. Likewise, Alan is allowed to portray the ultimately heroic if occasionally wilting flower next to Edith’s iron will — he does follow her to Crimson Peak, concerned about her safety, but Thomas (doing Lucille’s bidding) stabs him soon after her arrives, basically incapacitating him for the film’s climax. Edith must then not only be her own heroine, but Alan’s protector too, as they evade and eventually defeat the Sharpes. Del Toro allows CRIMSON PEAK’s narrative to fully belong to Edith, not the men in her life — they’re vital to progressing the story, but Edith ultimately depends only on herself to survive.

The men of CRIMSON PEAK are no match for its female leads, and of course, Edith’s biggest antagonist is Lucille, the true originator of Crimson Peak’s evil legacy. Cruel, manipulative, and seductive, Lucille has used her incestuous hold over Thomas to convince him continually marry and take part in killing innocent women for their money, to protect the secret of their coupling and depleted fortunes. Lucille also murdered their own mother, a sick child that was made by their union, and Edith’s father — Thomas is certainly complicit in their scheme, but Lucille is the one often doing the meat work of the murders. When Edith begins her astute, relentless detective work in uncovering the secrets of Crimson Peak, Lucille begins poisoning her tea to silence her and get her brother back — Edith of course becomes wise to this too, and realizes that Lucille is her true enemy.

Poison is historically a woman’s weapon, and placing it in tea further cements its status as a feminine source of violence. The animosity between Edith and Lucille over who will win Thomas’s heart drives much of the film’s conflict, and just when it seems that Lucille has bested a weakened Edith by getting her to sign over her fortunes, Edith fights back, and stabs Lucille with her pen — a reclaimed phallic symbol which shows that Edith’s voice will not be silenced on the page or off of it.

After Thomas comes to Edith’s aid as she escapes, Lucille is crushed, and kills him too. It’s ultimately jealousy for another woman — not finances, social reputation, or family legacy — that dooms Lucille. Edith eventually kills her with a shovel on the bloody earth of Crimson Peak, thanks to a little help from Thomas. But Lucille gets her greatest wish: to stay at Allerdale as a ghost, doomed to practice piano for eternity. Edith is genuinely sad to abandon the ghost of Thomas as well as the lonely female ghosts of Allerdale, but she knows she cannot stay with her dead love, and leaves Crimson Peak with Alan at her side…and with raw material for one hell of a gothic novel of her own.

Obviously indebted to classic spook-fests like THE INNOCENTS and THE HAUNTING, CRIMSON PEAK is a loving, thoughtful reimagining of the gothic horror genre that places a brave, brilliant heroine at the center of its story. Edith forges her own trail, even if she’s momentarily sidetracked by a bad romance, and uses the pain of her experiences to create great art. CRIMSON PEAK is an immersive experience, with feminine detail present in every costume, set, make-up and hair choice throughout the film, further proving that this ghost story is all about women, both alive and dead.

CRIMSON PEAK is available from iTunes and other streaming services.

CRIMSON PEAK and THE COMPANY OF WOLVES make an ideal double feature because both remix classic folk tales to create feminist updates of familiar stories. CRIMSON PEAK feels heavily influenced by the work of British writer Angela Carter, and THE COMPANY OF WOLVES is an actual adaptation of her story “The Company of Wolves,” written by Carter herself. Both films reverse the inherent misogyny of many fairy tales by focusing on powerful heroines who refuse to let the men in their lives author their own stories. Del Toro and Jordan also embrace the underlying sexuality and sexual politics of CRIMSON PEAK and THE COMPANY OF WOLVES’s folk roots, with Edith and Rosaleen both reclaiming and owning their own desires and lustful feelings.

A thoroughly feminist reimagining of Little Red Riding Hood and other folk tales, Neil Jordan and Angela Carter’s adaptation of her own story, THE COMPANY OF WOLVES, is packed with unforgettable feminine imagery, violent sexuality, and some truly disturbing updates to classic fairy tale tropes. Using an unconventional matryoshka doll structure, the film blends a traditional narrative with dream-within-a-dream folk vignettes to provide a variety of perspectives for our heroine Rosaleen (Sarah Patterson) who’s struggling to deal with her own blossoming womanhood. Rosaleen’s both a teenage girl in present-day England, and a folk heroine in olden times as she dreams of the fantastic, frightening possibilities of adulthood.

After being berated by her older, more beautiful sister (Georgia Slowe) Rosaleen retreats into the fantasy of her dreams to further put off the transition she’s facing from childhood — she plays with make-up, but won’t wear a fancy dress, and Beatrix Potter books and Cure posters are displayed in her room with equal prominence. After traveling though a cobweb-filled forest filled with life-sized, warped versions of her childhood toys (including a headless teddy bear and a dollhouse with rats inside) Rosaleen arrives in her folk fantasy land, and like Dorothy Gale, meets her family as alternate versions of themselves. Her sister, a floral-crowned maiden, has just been buried following a wolf attack here, so Rosaleen is the center of her family’s attention now — sisterly jealousy causes Rosaleen to invent a scenario in which she’s the fairest, most beloved of them all. Rosaleen spends the night with her grandmother (Angela Lansbury), and as she knits a red cloak for her granddaughter, Granny shares the first spooky tale with Rosaleen as a warning about trusting men who’s eyebrows meet.

In Granny’s first story, a young bride (Kathryn Pogson) sees her handsome husband (Stephen Rea) go missing on their wedding night after becoming angry when a hedgehog appears in their marriage bed as a prank. The union goes unconsummated…though we see far more of Rea than his bride in this moment. The woman remarries, soon finding herself overwhelmed by the drudgery of domestic tasks and three very young children, as conveyed by comically exaggerated hips. But her first husband returns from the wood one day, and demands food from his first wife — “If I were a wolf once more, I’d teach this whore a lesson,” he screams at her just before she scalds him with a hot pan. Then, the first husband transforms into a wolf in one of the goriest moments of werewolf FX outside of AN AMERICAN WEREWOLF IN LONDON: it’s all blood, viscera, and breaking bones.

Just before he’s ready to pounce, the woman’s new husband returns home and decapitates him with an axe — his head, which becomes human again, splashes into a bucket of milk. The blood that clots on the milk’s surface creates a singular horror image, one that’s deeply emblematic of innocence lost. Of course, the woman’s wickedness is blamed for such violence, and her new husband strikes her. “I’d never let a man do that to me,” Rosaleen tells Granny at the tale’s completion, to which Granny answers “They’re nice as pie until they’ve had their way with you, but once the bloom is gone, the beast comes out.” Rosaleen struggles to make sense of why the woman was punished in the tale for simply doing what she’s tol, and asks Granny if “wolves strike their bitches,” — but domestic violence, of course, is strictly human territory. Granny then tells Rosaleen she won’t be a little girl much longer, which Rosaleen soon sees for herself, after catching her parents having sex.

In the second tale, The Devil (Terence Stamp, of course) arrives in an anachronistic Rolls and sells a young boy a puberty potion, but the potion traps the boy in the forest forever, his legs bound by vines. Present-day Rosaleen sees him trapped in her bedroom mirror, but soon returns to the folk fantasy — Granny warns Rosaleen to stay away from naked men in the woods. While at church back in fantasy land, spiders fall into a now-red-cloaked Rosaleen’s bible, symbolic of her fading innocence. She agrees to walk through the woods with a local boy (Shane Johnston), but he’s very forward towards Rosaleen, so she climbs a tree to get away from him, finding a nest filled with make-up, a mirror, and robin’s eggs that hatch to reveal human fetuses inside — this kind of surreal, feminine imagery is pervasive throughout the film.

Afterwards, Rosaleen’s mother gives the teenage girl a bath, despite intense protests, and warns her of to stay away from boys, just like Granny. With that in mind, Rosaleen becomes the storyteller, and tells her mother of a pregnant sorceress who got revenge on her baby’s father by turning him and his guests into wolves at his wedding banquet (which looks like a bizarro world MARIE ANTOINETTE.) The woman then forces the wolves to serenade her child each night, the baby’s bassinet swaying from a high, dead tree in the forest. Images like these are what make THE COMPANY OF WOLVES a truly unique horror film — they’re sinister but not entirely unappealing, thoroughly feminine, and absolutely unforgettable.

Hormones do eventually get the better of Rosaleen — she meets a sophisticated man with a unibrow (uh oh) while walking to Granny’s house, and their interactions are charged with real, adult sexuality. The handsome Huntsman (Micha Bergese) plies Rosaleen with alcohol, gives her a hard time about believing in old wives tales, and goes right up to the edge of actually seducing her. The Huntsman dares Rosaleen to race him to Granny’s house, but of course, he arrives first — “What have you done with my granddaughter?” she demands. “Nothing she didn’t want,” answers the Huntsman.

Granny tries to fight him off with a hot poker, but the Huntsman shatters her into porcelain, and a bloodmoon appears overhead just as Rosaleen arrives, knowing that her Granny has been killed by the very kind of man she so strongly warned her granddaughter about. He makes one final attempt to seduce Rosaleen by cutting her cloak off with a knife, in a sexually-charged take on the “what big eyes you have” moment from Little Red Riding Hood. But Rosaleen turns the tables on him: she picks up his rifle, makes him strip, and tells the Huntsman “Jesus, what big teeth you have…they say the prince of darkness was a gentleman, and it turns out they were right.” Jordan eroticizes the moment before the Huntsman turns back into a wolf — his bare back glistening with sweat, a huge tongue swinging from his mouth — and doesn’t objectify Rosaleen at all. Once the Huntsman is a wolf again, Rosaleen takes pity on him and begins her final tale.

Rosaleen tells the wolf of a she-wolf who tried join the “real” world, but soon returned to the underworld below, naked and bloodied as when she entered. Her tears turn a white rose blood red, symbolizing her own and Rosaleen’s emerging womanhood. Villagers have been hunting wolves throughout the film, and the stalk the Huntsman to Granny’s house, only to find that Rosaleen herself has become a werewolf while telling her tale, like the lonely she-wolf in her own story. Rosaleen is able to evade them, and joins the pack as a lone wolf, running off into the night and far away from the human world.

Back in present day, the wolves that have been causing Rosaleen to toss and turn in her sleep leap from her subconscious, and tear through her house, eventually crashing through her bedroom window and destroying her childish things while Rosaleen recoils in horror. And that’s the end of the film — no happy ending, no easy resolution, no explanation for what’s just happened to Rosaleen, just the final lines from Perrault’s version of Little Red Riding Hood (which Carter did a translation of.) It’s a memorably jarring finale, one that makes the audience question the logic of what they’ve just seen, and wonder what kind of monsters are their hiding in their own subconscious.

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES is a necessary update to classic fairy tales, one that places the power firmly back in the hands of its female leads. It’s filled with gorgeous, dreamy imagery that symbolizes every stage of womanhood: naive girlhood all the way through becoming a wise grandmother. But even with the film’s beautiful sets, costumes, and lighting, Jordan and Carter also know that being a woman means experiencing all manner of violence, especially from predatory men. The film commits to extreme, bloody horror when the stories call for it, which gives these classic tales the 1980s, practical-effects edge that they so deserve.

Carter, an incredibly prolific writer gone too soon, is fascinated by intersection of sex, violence, fantasy, and feminism — her female-focused, macabre update of classic fairy tales, The Bloody Chamber, should be required reading for high schoolers. THE COMPANY OF WOLVES is a feature-length metaphor for the horrors of female puberty, and what it truly means to be an independent woman in a world filled with big bad wolves — in this film, Rosaleen must become a wolf herself in order to survive.

THE COMPANY OF WOLVES is available from Amazon.