I watched Guillermo del Toro’s homage to Victorian Romance (notice the capital R) Crimson Peak on Saturday. I know, I know, the movie came out in October 2015, so I’m a little late to the game on it. In my defense, I really wanted to see the movie when it came out in theaters! The subways were plastered with the cryptic neon posters depicting Mia Waskiowska’s ethereal crimson body hovering medusa-like in front of a seriously gothic looking house, or my boyfriend Charlie Hunnam’s stoic stance, fist in hand, surrounded by angel’s wings, or Tom Hiddleston’s (sorry, I don’t really understand the appeal of that guy) looking right through me, staring deep into my soul with the skull overlay, and especially my girl Jessica Chastain’s haunting face staring at me through a gross moth’s wings.

So I finally watched it, and I’m so glad that I did. The internet seems a little confused about the genre of this movie. Is it horror? Is it romance (lower-case r…for LOVE)? Is it a ghost story? Is it a captive story? What the heck is it supposed to be? You guys, it’s Victorian Romance. It’s gothic decadence. There are ghosts and lovers and a rapidly decaying house and seriously intense sibling relationship. There are missing wives.

Okay, let me back track. Every aspect of this movie seems to pay homage to the great gothic decadent stories and writers of the Victorian age. Waskiowska’s character, Edith, is a novelist struggling to get her novel—which features ghosts as a metaphor for the past but is NOT a ghost story—published because she is a female writer trying to break through in a male-dominated industry. Her editor simply can’t understand why a woman has written a story that doesn’t feature romance. Ladies love LOVE, amirite? That’s all we women can relate do, right? Wrong, guys. It’s wrong. Edith meets Hiddleston’s Sir Thomas Sharpe as he arrives for a meeting with her father to pitch a contraption he invented to harvest some crimson clay from his family’s land in Cumberland, England.

**SIDE NOTE** In the very beginning of the movie, Edith tells us about her mother’s passing twelve years earlier. She was visited by the ghost of her mother who told her to BEWARE THE CRIMSON PEAK. This is important. She seemed to be like “AHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH A SCARY GHOST!” which is definitely an acceptable reaction, but she didn’t really pay much attention to the message.

Anyway, Edith—whose very name makes any book-loving viewer think of Edith Wharton—shares her novel with Sir Thomas. She tells him that her editor wants her to include a love story, to be more like Jane Austen (“She died an old maid, didn’t she?”), but she wants to be more like Mary Shelley because “She died a widow.” I loved it from the get go. I got excited.  I could imagine the kind of writer that Edith was setting out to be and the kind of story that we, the movie viewer, were going to get.

**SIDE NOTE** Literally the day she meets Sir Thomas, she is again visited by the ghost of her mother, again WARNING her to beware the crimson peak. She was again shaken, but continued to be a little meh about the content of the message her mother delivered.

That night, Sir Thomas shows up at her house and requests her company to a dinner party that she had previously declined an invitation to—even though the very handsome Dr. Alan McMichael (Charlie Hunnam) was attending. I mean, RUDE, right? To make matters worse, when she arrives at the party, she immediately meets Lucille, played but a magnificent Jessica Chastain, who, by the way, is wearing crimson head to toe (REMEMBER WHAT SHE HAS TO BEWARE). Lucille is a bit rude to her, as is the party’s hostess, but I can’t really blame her because Sir Thomas was supposed to be courting her daughter and definitely blew her off for Edith.

You get the gist, you can watch the movie. Long story short, Edith ~conveniently~ finds herself orphaned after her father suffers a fatal ‘accidental’ blow to the head the morning after he pays Sir Thomas and Lucille to leave forever. Sir Thomas swoops right in on Edith’s grief, bestowing upon her an enormous CRIMSON ring (BEWARE, BEWARE, BEWARE!!), and next thing you know, the two are wed and stepping off of a carriage in at the Sharpe’s decrepitly palatial home.  He introduces her to some random guy as his wife and the guy was like, “I KNOW! YOU’VE BEEN MARRIED FOR A LONG WHILE!” and to this we’re all like huh? I’m sure it hasn’t been a while. That guy is nuts.

Except he’s NOT, guys. Remember, this is paying homage to the Gothic greats. Think Jane Eyre. Think Rebecca. Think anything by Poe. My boyfriend was like what’s with that guy? And I was like o0o0o0o0o0o0o does Sir Thomas have a crazy wife in the attic? Maybe.

Edith and Sir Thomas enter the house, which is enormous and reminiscent of Hitchcock’s iteration of Rebecca’s Manderley and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher.” The house is huge and you can feel the draft as the hole in the ceiling allows wind to blow leaves through the foyer. The house is also sinking into the crimson clay that the Sharpe’s seem to be overrun with. The clay seeps through the floors and walls, creating a slow and thick bloodlike sludge. The house is slowly bleeding out in every scene. I mean, Edith is literally surrounded by crimson things and her mother’s warning STILL doesn’t resonate. It’s insane. I was like GIRL WAKE UP! ALL THAT STUFF IS CRIMSON!

There was no lack of gothic imagery. As she followed her sweet Papillon through the house, Edith would pass by stray wheelchairs in the attic (again leading me to believe that Sir Thomas was harboring a crazy wife in the attic) or scary looking dolls. She starts to be visited by the bloodied and wailing ghosts of Sir Thomas’s former wives, his mother, and his baby. The effects were a little much and I found myself yearning for the awesome and creepy monsters from Pan’s Labyrinth. I had a general idea of how the movie was going: Sir Thomas would marry a woman for her money and she would then ~mysteriously~ disappear. Pretty common story, right?

Right, except this time del Toro turned the story on its side. Just as soon as Edith realizes that there is a phenomenon called the crimson peak in which the crimson clay seeps through the snow and OH MY GOD EVERYTHING HERE IS CRIMSON I NEED TO LISTEN TO MY MOTHER, she starts realizing that she is in danger if she remains in the house. See, Sir Thomas was complacent in the poisoning of his former wives, but he was not the villain of the story. Enter Lucille. She was magnificent. Eventually we come to understand that Lucille brutally murdered her mother with a gigantic butcher knife as a teenager and was sent to an asylum while Thomas was sent to a boarding school. Later, they reunited and continued an incestuous relationship. Since their home was going under(ground…literally) and they had lost their family fortune, she devised a plan for Thomas to marry orphaned women from all around the world. They would inherit the woman’s money and then slowly poison her to death. After all, no one would be looking for her, right? Right.

I love a female villain. I love that the story was really a story within a story. Like Edith’s novel, Crimson Peak is a story of Victorian decadence—the world is literally falling apart around them—with small iterations of ghosts acting as metaphors for the past and, of course, a very small love story. Edith and Lucille’s final scene is beautiful and frightening. Lucille again wields the butcher knife with the intent to kill Edith for daring to fall in love with her beloved (and now deceased by her own hand) brother. Edith just wants to stay alive and leave that place forever. The men are either dead or incapacitated. In an effort to save Edith from being murdered, Alan arrives only to be stabbed in the gut and left in the basement while Edith has to fend for herself. In an effort to save Edith from being murdered, Thomas goes to reason with Lucille, telling her that he’d fallen in love without meaning to, only to get fatally stabbed in the cheekbone.

It’s up to Edith to save herself, which is something I really loved. While Crimson Peak pays tribute to the great Victorian Romances, Edith is not a damsel in distress that needs to be saved by a man, and Lucille is not a woman driven crazy by a man (she was driven crazy by herself, obviously. She is just crazy.)

I know that a lot of people didn’t know how to take this movie. I know that the effects, at times, were silly. I know that some things were obvious (like, HELLO, Edith did you not notice all the crimson shit all over the place???). But I also know all of the stories that I grew up loving and I was delighted to see the effort on Guillermo del Toro’s part to bring them back with a feminist twist.