The Lobster Dance

Ah, the days when you couldn’t just Google your dates.

brb gotta change my mooncup [Image: Edith from Crimson Peak with her hands, face, and dress bloodied] Via io9

Aspiring writer, Mary-Shelley fan, and adorable nerd Edith Cushing meets uh, vampire Loki British baronet Sir Thomas Sharpe and his creepy sister, and sparks fly, so she returns to Britain with him to the Murder Estate.

The costumes (such mutton sleeves) for this movie are fantastic. The manor with the rotted-in roof and the crimson-clay streaked walls is practically a character in and of itself. I love how clever Edith is. Yet something in the ending of the film seemed a little flat, and the violence was really too much for me. (As a fan of Hannibal, that’s saying something.) It’s a fast-paced gorgeous gothic romp, even if it is a bit predictable.

All the leads are white and (presumably) straight. I really did love Edith as the protagonist who continued to be a writer and science enthusiast throughout the film. Just because you’re a capable woman doesn’t mean that you don’t make the occasional bad hookup under stress. She’s more fleshed out than most gothic romance/horror protagonists, which I like.

This American not-heiress rolls her eyes a bit at the “OMG MY ESTATE” Downton Abbey panic, but I’m not a British aristo, so it’s pretty out of my field to begin with. Edith isn’t going to a title and wealthy home with servants and society, she’s moving into a murder house with a clay seepage problem and bad plumbing. But, oh, the sets of Victorian technology are just so spooky and visceral and the colors are so vivid and lovely.

Spoilers: 

Did the romance fall flat because Edith’s publisher said to add it to her book with a ghost that represented the past in it? How much more “past” can you get than a decrepit English manor with a bunch of ghosts? And using Chekov’s pen as a weapon–oh, clever, clever, Edith.

Rated R. Type: gothic. Contains very graphic bludgeoning, so much stabbing, gore, ghosts, spooky rotting English manors, incest, skeleton ghosts, weird revenant things, Hiddles’s butt, poison, domestic violence, gaslighting (mainly by the sister), dangerous bathrooms, so many scary injuries that I closed my eyes during.