The master of the macabre, filmmaker Guillermo del Toro, took cinemagoers on his latest foray into modern horror, unlocking the doors on a Gothic haunted house fantasy in Universal Pictures’ and Legendary Pictures’ Crimson Peak. I shall be analysing the title sequence of the movie, which is the credits at the end of the film.
Guillermo del Toro has always been great at morphing genres into his own deliciously baroque stew. Crimson Peak was magnificently turned into the Gothic romance and haunted ghost story on their heads in classical fashion. For cinematographer Dan Laustsen, who last worked with del Toro on “The Mimic,” it was a refreshing return to a brightly-coloured palette after a string of desaturated movies (including “Brotherhood of the Wolf”).
The main colour scheme of the intro is black and gold, and the shadows are very prominent. Each shot, however, does have a definitive light source. This colour scheme gives the intro, and therefore the movie, a mysterious and macabre mood since everything is so dark and old looking.
Fun fact: The film is very personal for del Toro and was made with a profound reverence for the gothic romance genre and its literary roots. Del Toro cites Jane Eyre and Rebecca as tonal influences for this movie.
The sumptuous main-on-end titles for Guillermo del Toro’s Crimson Peak are a lepidopterologist’s dream. Butterflies and moths — one of the film’s key motifs — are the viewers’ guide, filling every room, every corner of every frame; fragile and fluttering, pinned and mounted, witness to countless horrors. The camera glides through the house on a ghostly journey, going through a series of strikingly arranged tableaux, various objects and ephemera arrayed to reflect the players in this Gothic romance.
The sequence, created by Toronto-based design studio IAMSTATIC, is a cover-to-cover review of the film, literally and figuratively closing the book on the tale that precedes it — a conscious nod to the storybook movie openings and endings popular in the 1930s and 40s. Del Toro’s film is a tough act to follow, particularly when it comes to matching the film’s lavish production design.
ORIGINAL STORYBOARD FOR THE “CRIMSON PEAK” TITLE SEQUENCE.
In an interview with the title designers RON GERVAIS and DAVE GREENE of IAMSTATIC, Ron mentioned that:
For this project we wanted to center the titles around the film’s gothic themes and try to match mood and tone. We wanted the titles to tell an eerie little mini-story that gave some hint to what was ahead. As the film was coming together it made sense to move the titles to the end. I think [an opening title] would have given too much away and it felt better as a sort of visual recap…
Moving onto typography. The font used to display crew names and job titles are in serif typeface and Roman. The titles follow the same point size patterns, and the letters are proportional. The titles for cast members are all a grey-white colour, while the title of the film appears as part of the narrative as the title of a book and is red. The title does not use axial balance, but it is largely centered on the screen when its transition ends. The cast member titles are centered vertically, and shift left or reader depending on what is on screen. The pictorial elements are very macabre, mostly consisting of macro (and very CGI) shots of a moth. Each shot has an element that represents the title person being displayed, i.e.: On the costumer designer’s title shot, there is a pin cushion, symbolic of someone who works in fashion.
The composer of the songs was Fernando Velázquez. The music is non-diegetic and heavily in violin and other string instruments, as well as piano and cymbals. Because of the violin and piano, the intro takes a very classical feeling, like the music that would be played at a party in the 1800s. The violins are the most prominent instrument used, and thus add to the mysterious ambience of the intro sequence. But aided by Fernando Velázquez’s score, a whisper of moths, trinkets, tools, and a whole lot of atmosphere, the end titles perfectly capture the broad brush strokes of this dark tale, sending the audience home to ruminate on their time at Crimson Peak.
