- Diagnosed by the Audience: Personality Disorders. Thomas, Lucille & Edith may represent Cluster A (Odd/Eccentric), Cluster B ("dramatic, emotional, erratic") and Cluster C ("anxious, fearful") respectively.
- Del Toro stated that he flipped the gender roles of the film, which is shown by the fact we have a female slasher and a heroine who saves herself, but Thomas also plays a genderflipped role - he's a male version of a classic Femme Fatale. He starts off with a hidden agenda, seduces the heroine for his own purposes, then truly comes to love her, but is ultimately punished for his crimes by being killed.
- Thomas and Lucille dress in fashions that are at least a decade out of date e.g. Edith comments on Thomas's suit being out of style and Lucille wears dresses with large bustles, as opposed to Edith's turn-of-the-century outfits. This is an early hint of their Impoverished Patrician status - as while they have good quality old clothes they can't afford to upgrade their wardrobe - but also a possibility of their emotionally stunted natures, as Lucille in particular constantly clings to the past. This is further compounded by the fact that these are implied to be their parents' clothes - the previous Sharpes continue to warp their children even after death.
- Outdated, ruined, covered in and leaking blood. Is this a description of Allerdale Hall or of the Sharpe siblings?
- The dog formerly owned by Enola Sciotti Edith befriends and owns until Lucille kills him is a Papillion. This ties into Edith's Animal Motif of monarch butterflies when you realize that "papillon" is the French word for "butterfly".
- This is a Del Toro movie and a ghost story set in Britain. Both are clues that even the creepiest ghosts don't mean any harm.
- Thomas' ghost is different from all the other ghosts Edith encountered throughout the film. A theory that has been floating around is that the red ghosts (Sharpe's wives) were violently murdered and cannot move on because of this. The black ghosts (Edith's mother and Lucille) are ones who refuse to move on. The white ghosts (Thomas) are ones that are about to move on.
- Edith wasn't chosen first. Eunice was. Thomas changed his mind after reading the story of, and falling in love with, Edith, whom he had no idea even was when he met her. Their plan went immediately off the rails and explains Lucille's initial anger at the new choice.
- Becomes Fridge Horror when you consider Edith's ability to see ghosts is unique to her and Lucille's plan requires the wife to have no living relatives.
- If you think about it a bit, Edith probably seems like a more convenient target to Thomas and Lucille when compared to Eunice. We see that at least Eunice's mother and brother are alive, meaning she has multiple loved ones who would have to be tricked or dealt with to avoid an investigation into her death or disappearance. She also seems to be more of a society girl than Edith and probably has plenty of friends and admirers who would notice her disappearance. Edith, in contrast, seems to be a much more solitary person and just has the one parent to be killed off. Assuming Edith and Eunice's families have roughly the same amount of wealth it makes sense that Thomas and Lucille switched to what they perceived as an "easier" target.
- Though this could also have been what Thomas had to say to get Lucille to go along with it. In the film, it's clear he's going off-script pursuing Edith instead of Eunice (he goes so far as to visit her house to convince her to go to the ball, and then publicly snubs Eunice for Edith as his Dance of Romance partner) which Lucille is visibly surprised and unhappy with. It's possible that Thomas pursued Edith because he was starting to fall for her (though probably not fully aware of it at the time), and the fact that she was a better target was the only reason his crazy jealous sister allowed it.
- If Sir Thomas was such a brilliant inventor, how was he able to waste three fortunes trying and failing to get his clay extractor to work? Simple: His heart was never in it. He didn't really care about the family fortune, or the estate, he was working on them out of obligation. He would have been much happier as a toy maker.
- At one point Edith refers to her novel as a story WITH ghost, not about them. It turns out she just gave us the plot of the movie, where ghost appear but are not the main focus.
- Right from her first scene, Lucille is seen wearing the Sharpe family ring on her ring finger, which foreshadows her incestuous relationship with Thomas – she views herself as his wife.
- Edith describes her story as not a ghost story, but a “story with a ghost in it.” This actually describes the movie itself: the genre of the movie isn’t really a supernatural horror, but a gothic romance with supernatural undertones. It also demonstrates how the ghosts in this story will not be the antagonists, like it is in a typical ghost story.
- The title of baronet is the lowest level of the British aristocracy, and was invented by James I back in the 1610s as a desperate fundraising venture. Baronets were purchased titles, sold to wealthy gentry who aspired to aristocracy and wanted to call themselves nobles. A Sharpe ancestor bought their baronetcy several generations ago—and the family has been struggling to keep up appearances and scrambling for money ever since.
- Thomas looks very uncomfortable when viewing Carter Cushing's badly-beaten body in the morgue. Initially it seems to be out of guilt for brutally murdering him. We learn later that he's looking at his sister's violent handiwork.
- If we believe Lucille's claim that Thomas never slept with any of his wives, then Thomas has legally never been married at all. Failure to consummate a marriage is grounds to receive an annulment, and the Catholic church and churches of England and Scotland do not consider a marriage to be valid unless it has been consummated. So technically, Thomas only fully "married" Edith, and none of his previous marriages were valid.
- Thomas is only shown spending the night with Edith twice, and only once in their actual bedroom at Allerdale. Part of that is because he's actually spending the night with Lucille, but may also be because that was his parents' bedroom, and the same bed where his abusive mother spent the last months of her life.
- Each of the ghost wives is missing a ring finger. Lucille cut them off each time when she took back the wedding ring.
- She also kept the fingers—they are visible in Lucille's chest, kept neatly next to their locks of hair.
- There is also an extra finger and lock of gray hair in the chest, presumably having belonged to Lady Sharpe. Lucille took the ring from her mother to begin with.
- Which gets horribly Squicky: after his father died, Thomas became the baronet of Cumberland. Lucille took the family wedding ring that belonged to Lady Sharpe—she promoted herself from the daughter of a baronet to the wife of a baronet.
- This one comes after reading the artbook, with the revelation that Lucille killed her own baby. Though the artbook does refer to the child as "deformed and twisted", the photograph Edith finds makes it look like the baby was outwardly fairly normal. It's possible that when Lucille decided the baby was "born wrong" she was referring to it being sickly, which is what Enola was nursing it through. Lucille killed the baby when she couldn't stand its crying any more. It's possible that Lucille's twisted idea of what a baby should be may have led her to murdering a perfectly normal child, thinking it was a monster for crying so much.
- This would mirror the Sharpe siblings' own abuse, too — locked away in the attic nursery in an era where children were meant to be seen and not heard. She was replicating her own parents' unrealistic, neglectful attitudes, and maybe acting out her own guilt about her incestuous relationship.
- Lucille's Madness Mantra repetition of "I won't stop until you kill me or I kill you" during her final showdown with Edith is creepy enough on the surface, and gets terrifying when you realize there's absolutely no way she intends to survive the encounter either way. She's just killed the only person she's ever loved, and she has nothing to live for (brilliantly symbolized by the way she unflinchingly goes for the Bare-Handed Blade Block earlier in the showdown, to the point where her hands are visibly not working right by the final round; she's letting Edith destroy her ability to play music, pretty much the only thing that brings her any happiness). All she wants now is to either kill Edith or turn her into a killer, and in that context the coldness of Edith's post-killing one-liner is pretty disturbing.
- It somehow gets even creepier when you realize that Edith, who went through that entire fight on a broken leg before taking a nasty cut to the face, in a time and place where any medical attention outside basic first aid is unlikely to happen any time soon, is almost definitely going to end up using a cane for the rest of her life (just like Lady Beatrice) and some dramatic facial scarring (just like Lucille). No one gets out of Allerdale Hall unscathed... and technically, she's Lady Edith Sharpe now.
- Both Lucille and Thomas agree that Thomas never killed anyone, and he insists that he loved Edith and never wanted to hurt her. But he made Edith's first cup of poisoned tea, not Lucille.
- It's possible that Thomas did this to subdue the amount of poison put in the cup of tea, but obviously this is unknown.
Fridge Logic belongs on the
Headscratchers page.
