Monster movie-maker Guillermo del Toro has conjured up demonic superheroes, fantastical fawns, colossal robots and even larger Kaijus, but his latest Frankenstein creation is not only an unnervingly lovely beast but also the set of his film. Possibly the most elaborate monster Del Toro has ever constructed is the labyrinth-like Gothic mansion in “Crimson Peak.”
Perched atop a red clay mine in a remote English hillside, the derelict manor is an ideal representation of Del Toro’s ability to meld the grotesque and the beautiful, the alluring and the dangerous. Allerdale Hall is a grand monster with an impressive foyer that opens wide, revealing archways lined with rows of jagged teeth carved from wooden beams.
The practical three-story mansion set was erected in Pinewood Toronto Studios in Canada. It wasn’t a fractured set, as much of the building was connected. And functional. The vintage-looking elevator that ran from the first floor to the top was fully operational, as were the fireplaces. In fact, the only part of the Allerdale Hall that was green-screened was “just the hole in the ceiling,” Del Toro joked. “We have no sky.”
And from that sky-less crack snow and leaves would fall.
“I needed to have something that was practically very difficult to repair,” the director explained. “It’s not easy to repair a hole like that. It really requires huge amounts of workers. It was very symbolic for me to have these aristocrats with a 90-year-old servant, a single servant, to have a mansion that has a hole on the top. It just tells you how down on their luck they are. How they may appear to be civilized and poised, but they are really rotting away.”
The crumbling remains and the leaking ceiling became the physical representation of the time Del Toro set his Gothic horror story in.
Even the props were created to be an enticing illusion. The same pieces of furniture were built in two sizes. An oversized piece of furniture would be swapped in to make a character sitting in it look weak, while the smaller version would make a character look strong.
And it doesn’t stop there. The wallpaper, a design of butterfly wings and moth, has the coded word “fear” hidden within the pattern. Everything inside Allerdale Hall has been beautifully constructed to be terrifying. It is references stacked on references.
The director himself professes that he “tries to treat the movies like an artifact. I try to treat them like a cabinet of curiosities,” and each nook and corner of the house or dialog from the film is laced with a reference.
“The reality is,” the director said, that “my secret hope is that people that do like what I do, that they end up watching the movie more than once. The beauty is even my family, my kids and my wife when they watch the movies for a second or third time, they say, ‘Oh, we didn’t notice this’ or, ‘We didn’t notice that.’ The movie is a minefield of details.”
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