Before Guillermo del Toro Made ‘Frankenstein,’ He Made This Horror Romance Stephen King Called “F*cking Terrifying”

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Thomas Sharpe (Tom Hiddleston) and Lucille (Jessica Chastain) stand close, facing forward in Crimson Peak

Back in 2021, Hannah’s love of all things nerdy collided with her passion for writing — and she hasn’t stopped since. She covers pop culture news, writes reviews, and conducts interviews on just about every kind of media imaginable. If she’s not talking about something spooky, she’s talking about gaming, and her favorite moments in anything she’s read, watched, or played are always the scariest ones. For Hannah, nothing beats the thrill of discovering what’s lurking in the shadows or waiting around the corner for its chance to go bump in the night. Once described as “strictly for the sickos,” she considers it the highest of compliments.

The release of Frankenstein marks a full-circle moment for Guillermo del Toro. The filmmaker has long treated monsters not as villains, but as reflections of grief, longing, and love turned sour. But years before Frankenstein’s stitched-together heart began to beat, there was another story where beauty and brutality intertwined in the darkness: Crimson Peak. Marketed in 2015 as a straightforward haunted house horror movie, Crimson Peak is something far more layered in actuality. It’s a decaying Gothic romance — a story where love and death are indistinguishable, where the house itself seems to breathe, and where the most dangerous monsters are the ones you can touch.

Stephen King once called the film “f***ing terrifying," but the terror of Crimson Peak doesn’t come from jump scares; it comes from the way del Toro weaponizes beauty, making romance itself the thing that cuts the deepest. If Frankenstein is poised to be del Toro’s ultimate monster romance — an elegy for loneliness wrapped in horror — then Crimson Peak is the lantern that lit the path there, a masterclass in turning love into something as dangerous and devastating as any creature.

'Crimson Peak' Chose Gothic Romance Over Haunted Horror

When Crimson Peak first entered the cultural conversation, it was largely miscategorized. Marketing leaned on jump scares, bloody ghosts, and haunted house iconography, but the film itself belongs to a much older and richer storytelling tradition. Del Toro doesn’t simply tell a ghost story; he crafts a masterpiece of a Gothic romance, the kind where love and death are entwined. Allerdale Hall, the crumbling manor at the center of the story, isn’t a backdrop; it’s the beating heart of the film. The snow falls through its open roof. Clay seeps up from the floor like a wound refusing to close. Its structure seems alive, groaning with the weight of history. Everything that happens within it is shaped by the house, and in turn, the house is shaped by the Sharpes. This is Gothic at its purest: architecture as destiny, beauty hiding rot.

The ghosts themselves are secondary. They don’t terrorize the characters so much as warn them. They aren’t villains, but tragic echoes. The real horror comes from the living — the lies they tell, the love they corrupt, the grief they let fester. In doing so, del Toro flips a genre expectation on its head. The supernatural isn’t what the heroine should fear most, it’s the people she’s come to trust.

Love as Monstrosity in 'Crimson Peak'

Thomas Sharpe touching his finger to Edith Cushing's chin in Crimson Peak

At the center of Crimson Peak are Thomas and Lucille Sharpe — played with aching fragility and ferocity by Tom Hiddleston and Jessica Chastain. Their relationship is the engine of the entire narrative, a love story so warped it becomes indistinguishable from cruelty. They don’t need to summon monsters; they are monsters. Lucille Sharpe is one of del Toro’s most chilling characters precisely because she isn’t supernatural. Her love is possessive, obsessive, and absolute. She has bound herself to both the house and her brother, unable or unwilling to imagine a life outside either. Chastain plays her with a kind of controlled violence — not the unhinged scream-queen villainy of pulp horror, but the quiet, patient rot of someone whose love has curdled over decades. Thomas, meanwhile, is a study in moral erosion. His tenderness toward Edith doesn’t absolve him of his crimes. If anything, it makes him more tragic. He’s a man whose capacity for love is buried beneath years of complicity. When he finally chooses to protect Edith, it’s too late — for Lucille, for him, for the house itself. Their love story doesn’t end in redemption, it ends in blood.

This is the heartbeat of Crimson Peak: a love so twisted it becomes monstrous. It isn’t a ghost that drives Edith to the brink — it’s Lucille’s unrelenting need to possess what she loves, to crush it rather than lose it.

Edith Cushing and the Subversion of the Gothic Heroine

Classic Gothic romances often center on a young, naive heroine trapped in an imposing house. She is seduced by mystery, endangered by love, and forced into passive survival. Edith Cushing, played by Mia Wasikowska, begins the story in that familiar mold, but del Toro uses her to subvert it. Edith is not a helpless observer of her own doom. She’s a writer, a rationalist, and an active participant in her fate. She doesn’t simply wander into Allerdale Hall; she interrogates its secrets. She investigates its locked rooms, listens to its ghosts, and refuses to be gaslit into silence. She is drawn to Thomas, yes, but she isn’t powerless before him. That distinction matters deeply in a genre that has historically sidelined its heroines.

By the climax, Edith is not the damsel to be rescued — she is the force that confronts Lucille head-on. Their confrontation isn’t just physical, it’s ideological. Lucille clings to the house, to the past, to love as a weapon. Edith claims her own agency, using both intellect and fury to break free. This is Gothic storytelling evolved — where the heroine doesn’t just survive the house, she defies it. Edith’s arc also reflects del Toro’s larger view of love and monstrosity. She doesn’t emerge unscarred. She emerges with knowledge, with blood on her hands, and with the understanding that love can kill as easily as it can save.

Del Toro Uses Beauty as a Weapon in 'Crimson Peak'

Few directors wield visual language the way del Toro does. Every inch of Crimson Peak is meticulously constructed to seduce the viewer and then wound them. The red clay seeping through the snow isn’t just striking, it’s a metaphor for buried secrets bleeding through false purity. The ornate costumes don’t just signal class and period, they bind the characters, tightening like corsets as the story closes in. The house isn’t just a location, it’s a body slowly decomposing. This is what makes the film so unnerving. Del Toro doesn’t rely on sudden scares to unsettle the audience. He builds dread slowly, layering it beneath beauty, until the very thing that lures you in becomes a trap. It’s horror through seduction.

King wasn’t wrong to call it “f***ing terrifying.” The ghosts may startle, but it’s the elegance that stays with you — how something so beautiful can be so cruel. In this way, Crimson Peak is a perfect spiritual predecessor to Frankenstein. Both stories center on love and monstrosity, but where Frankenstein externalizes it — a literal creature built from grief — Crimson Peak internalizes it, turning love itself into the monster.

The Lantern That Lit 'Frankenstein's Path

Del Toro’s upcoming Frankenstein has been framed as a culmination of his lifelong fascination with monsters — an elegy for loneliness, love, and otherness. But the groundwork for that vision is already in Crimson Peak. Everything he’s poised to explore in Frankenstein — how love both saves and damns, how beauty can be a weapon, how monsters are born from the human heart — is present here in raw, operatic form. Both stories are tragedies at their core. In Crimson Peak, the monster is human. In Frankenstein, it’s something human-made. But the emotional architecture is the same: yearning, isolation, and the slow transformation of love into ruin. Allerdale Hall is Frankenstein’s lab by another name — a place where the boundaries between beauty and horror collapse entirely.

Revisiting Crimson Peak in the lead-up to Frankenstein isn’t just a thematic warm-up, it’s a glimpse into the mind of a filmmaker who’s spent his career romanticizing monsters without de-fanging them. Del Toro doesn’t ask us to love what’s monstrous because it’s misunderstood, he asks us to love it because it’s real — because it’s human. Crimson Peak remains a singular, seductive work of Gothic horror. It is a film about love’s capacity to destroy, to consume, and to haunt. If Frankenstein is the culmination of del Toro’s vision, Crimson Peak is where that vision first bled through the walls.

Crimson Peak is available to rent or buy on VOD services.