Notes from what I read

The Ghost is just a Metaphor - Kindinger Analysis of Guillermo del Toro's Crimson Peak

- What is suggested here is that the real world and its social order are more threatening to a woman’s mind and body than the supernatural.

- The real horror, del Toro suggests, are not the ghosts but patriarchy, because it traumatises women and turns them into ghosts and monsters.

- Whether the Final Girl is a symbol for female emancipation has been discussed since Clover’s publication of ‘Her Body, Himself’, the article that inspired her monograph of 1992. While she acknowledges that the slasher is ‘a genre with at least a strong female presence’, she clarifies that thinking of the ‘Final Girl as a feminist development […] is, in light of her figurative meaning, a particularly grotesque expression of wishful thinking’. This ‘figurative meaning’ refers to Clover’s argument that:

The Final Girl is boyish, in a word. Just as the killer is not fully masculine, she is not fully feminine.

This gender transgression supposedly disqualifies the Final Girl from being an emancipatory figure within the rather misogynist slasher genre.

- She might choose to not participate in established rituals of femininity, yet this does not masculinise her. As Christian Knöppler argues with reference to Isabel Cristina Pinedo’s criticism of Clover, ‘if a female character has to be read as male when she is aggressive, there can be no female agency’.

- The slasher here ‘functions as a fantasy of female rage and an opening for feminist discourse because women are not only victims, but allowed to retaliate

- It is no coincidence that the plot is set at the turn of the nineteenth century, when film technology was invented: ‘with its ability to record and replay reality and its representation of images that resemble the world but as intangible half-presences, cinema has been described as a haunted or ghostly medium from early on.’ Del Toro stresses the ghostliness of ‘new’ media in the nineteenth century by referring to spirit photography and sound recordings that capture and recreate the past in the present, through images and sounds. Herewith he cites more contemporary movies such as Oren Peli’s Paranormal Activity (2007) and Gore Verbinski’s The Ring (2002) in which ‘ghosts inhabit contemporary technology’. As del Pilar Blanco and Peeren have argued with regard to these films, ‘the increasing ghostliness of new media influences the representation of ghosts in media’. In Crimson Peak, the ghostliness of old media demonstrates the continuity of media history and the horror genre.