Crimson Peak

Guillermo del Toro’s Allerdale Hall is not a facade but a three storey house built on a Pinewood Toronto soundstage. A ComingSoon reporter touring it mid shoot found a working elevator up to the third floor. It was not one piece, though: the basement clay mine and Lucille’s room were built on other stages. Production designer Thomas E. Sanders calls the red clay seeping through the cracks the blood of the earth. The ghosts are hybrids. DDT Efectos Especiales made the makeup, Doug Jones and Javier Botet performed in it, and Mr. X later added transparency, skeletons and a smoky ectoplasm. A green patch on Botet’s head let part of the skull be removed afterwards. The effects team says no ghost was shot against greenscreen, and only Enola Sciotti’s is entirely digital. In 2013 del Toro called the project an almost classical gothic romance ghost story with two or three scenes disturbing in a very modern way, a proper R rating. That is how it plays: long costume melodrama broken by a few very graphic killings. A good fit if you want a mansion genuinely built floor by floor and ghosts that guide rather than menace. Not for anyone expecting the ghosts to be the danger, or impatient through the long Buffalo section before the house.