the groundhog day project

Guillermo del Toro has a couple modes when it comes to horror films; there are those that prove he is enamored of old gothic horror and those that break the mold and do something a little more original. The former tends to be more predictable, the latter more interesting. Crimson Peak falls squarely into the former camp. Because it is del Toro, though, it is certainly well made, and looks far better than most horror films. It has a solid cast—Mia Wasikowska, Tom Hiddleston, Jessica Chastain, Charlie Hunnam—and a sound design that is, at its best, an evocative score that brings to mind some of the greatest horror and, at its worst, seems trite and clichéd, bringing to mind the most stereotypical of horror. The plot hinges on common tropes from gothic romance and gothic horror, an isolated house on the English moors—one so old that it is quite literally falling apart—an enigmatic nobleman, an impressionable young woman, ghosts that—MINOR SPOILER—barely affect the plot at all but sugges...

"The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetic topic in the world." - Edgar Allan Poe, "The Philosophy of Composition" To understand why we like horror, we have to understand a couple other things: 1) gothic horror led to modern horror, particularly the slasher film, and the slasher film led us to so-called torture porn and, 2) there's a thin line between horror and pornography (hence the nickname for that last subgenre there). After all, as Clover (1987) puts it, "horror and pornography are the only two genres specifically devoted to the arousal of bodily sensation. They exist solely to horrify and stimulate, not always respectively, and their ability to do so is the sole measure of their success" (p. 189). A good horror film is a scary horror film, generally speaking. And, a good porn film is an arousing porn film. The writing, the directing, the acting--these are secondary to the scare/arousal. Too on-the-nose? (Watching S...