“This Much I Know”: The Ghosting of the Past in Crimson Peak

Crimson Peak (2015) opens with the ending and then goes full circle: Edith Cushing says in the beginning of the film what she will say at the end of the film: “Ghosts are real, this much I know.” The circular plot design is integral to a major theme for the film, namely, that the past never ends: It was and is and will be something that never dies. Before the present becomes the past, perceiving it clearly is as difficult as witnessing a translucent spectre. When the past returns and returns again, it is like a haunting. Once the present is considered the past, envisioning and understanding becomes even more difficult, but there are characteristics of it that were not available in the present that can illuminate. In Crimson Peak, the bodies buried in the house continue to haunt the living, like the past, for the purpose of warning against making the same mistakes that others have made in the past, avenging the crimes committed against victims in the past, ensuring that the sins of the past are visited upon the scions, and acting out the anguish of having to exist in the netherworld between the living and the dead. This chapter analyses how ghosts in the neo-Victorian film Crimson Peak are metaphors for the aftermath of the past that never dies and how it haunts the living.