Crimson Peak (2015)

Director: Guillermo del Toro

Music: Fernado Velazquez

Sound design: Randy Thom

It is an incredibly long time (literally, years) since I blogged about film music but today, in celebration of finishing the proofing on my cult TV book, I went to see Crimson Peak and for the first time in a very long time I am inspired to write. Not much has inspired me in film music of late. Crimson Peak is a marvellous gothic romp of a film, with ghosts literally coming out of the woodwork (and the floorboards) and more blood than you can shake a stick at: even the opening titles are drenched in a wash of red, and the film takes its name from the fact that the red clay of the hill on which haunted house is built turns the snow bright red in winter. The titles are accompanied by the sound of a child's voice singing an unaccompanied, haunting and slightly creepy song amidst massive electronically manipulated reverberation. Immediately, we are pointed toward horror: children's voices often feature in horror soundtracks where the film concerns a child in danger, so that the sound of a child singing from the soundtrack paradoxically indicates the threatening evil as much as the innocent child victim. Here, it's an interesting double bluff: in the first scene after the title we meet our heroine, Edith, as a ten year old at her mother's funeral, so the winsome child's voice is, we might suppose, Edith herself, the girl in peril at the centre of the narrative. But no, it's cleverer than that - oh, I do so love a clever score! Spoilers ahead. Much later in the film, we hear the same melody being played as a Chopinesque piano fantasia by Lucille, Edith's new sister in law, who turns out to be the  agent behind the evil and the horror driving the narrative. Lucille reveals that the melody is a lullaby she used to sing to her brother (now Edith's husband) when they were children; and near the end we learn that as a child, Lucille murdered their mother with a gigantic cleaver she has kept ever since as a memento of that happy occasion. The child's voice we hear in the titles is therefore arguably Lucille's and rather than the voice representing Edith, the child in danger that it usually does (for example, Alien 3, Sleepy Hollow), we belatedly discover that it is the voice of evil itself, the voice of Lucille as a child.

The other really interesting thing about the music of this film is that we effectively have two scores. On the one hand we have a sumptuous orchestral score that represents all things to do with the real world and the living, no matter how horrible, and the lullaby slips from diegetic to non-diegetic music throughout. On the other hand, we have sound design operating as music, using electronic sounds and electronically manipulated noises (drips, knocking sounds) to represent the Otherness of the many and various ghosts. The first appearance of this other sound world, when Edith's mother returns after the funeral to warn her about Crimson Peak (unfortunately, she should have warned her about Allerdale Hall as Crimson Peak is just a local nickname and Edith has already married and moved in before she hears it for the first time). In this first haunting, the sound design is at its most overtly composed, with very little obviously real sounds, and lots of electronics, but it establishes the extreme difference of the ghostly soundworld. In other haunting sequences, the boundary between sound design and musical composition is much less clearly defined, and the sound operates both as the sound of the ghosts themselves as they bump and slither around the house, and as a musical atmosphere and ambience for their presence. There is even, in the credits, a member of sound design team credited with "atmospheric sound design". This duality in the scoring strategy is itself a marvellously gothic construction: if the classic gothic castle is a site of decadent domesticity above with dank and dangerous cellars below in which God alone knows what lurks, then here the orchestral music presents us with the sumptuous world of the living 'above' and the noisy, unnatural and manipulated sound design of the dead 'below'. I really enjoyed this film: it's silly, over the top, quite revolting in places and having rather too much fun with itself at times but Mia Wasikowska as Edith does a knock up job of not just being a victim in need of being rescued (and turns out to be handy with shovel) and I could happily watch Tom Hiddleston reading the telephone directory, so watching him being tragic, bad and tormented all at the same time is a joy. And the music/ sound was deeply satisfying: inventive, interesting and rewarding to listen to. Hurrah!