Headscratchers / Crimson Peak

• Lucille killed her mother when Lady Sharpe found out about the incest between her and Thomas. But according to the newspaper article that Dr. McMichael had, Lucille was 14 when their mother died and Thomas was 12.
  • This is well within the realm of physical possibility — it's also part of why Thomas is so stunted emotionally though.
  • This falls more under the category of Fridge Horror — it's more than possible for an older child to molest a younger one, especially if that child has been sexually molested themselves. Maybe there's a reason they don't talk about their father much.
  • Girls actually mature faster than boys, and even start masturbating earlier in life. So Lucille could indeed have started on Thomas as young as fourteen.
  • Per the character bios Del Toro gave the actors, the incest started as a mutual source of comfort when they were 13 and 11, and has always been something they both had equally enthusiastic part in. So Word of God nixes the molestation theory, but confirms that they DID start the relationship very young.
• Carter mentions that Thomas has "the softest hands he's ever felt", a sign that he doesn't work hard (with his hands, at least). Yet we see him making toys and inventions, so why are his hands so soft? Simple: he also works with clay, which makes your skin soft. So he works hard but, thanks to the clay, the skin of his hands isn't rough like Carter's.
• Why didn't Carter simply tell Edith the truth about Thomas; that he'd been married multiple times before, all his wives died suspiciously and, for that matter, he and his sister were implicated in their mother's murder? Granted, she might not have believed him at first, but he had plenty of evidence to back it up.
  • Most likely to protect her heart; since he succeeded in bribing Thomas to back off, there wasn't any apparent need to twist the knife and hurt her anymore.
  • The novelization also clarifies that Thomas had married Enola in Italy and Margaret in Edinburgh. It seems that Carter only inquired in England, and thus only knew about Pamela (and therefore wouldn't have known that he'd had other wives die suspiciously).
  • Possibly he meant to but Lucille killed him before he found the time to bring it up. Thomas was extremely nasty to Edith, humiliating her in public, so maybe he felt he should approach that more delicately.
• One wonders how the heck leaves were falling through the hole in the ceiling of Allerdale Hall (when Edith first enters), as there were no trees in sight near the house. Additionally, we never really got a good explanation for how the clay was coming out of the walls of the house at various points, nor why it was in liquid form beneath the house. Given that it resembled blood, Rule of Scary, maybe?
  • I think it was supposed to be flaking paint and other building materials.
    • Nope, they're leaves. In the middle of a moor.
  • The clay coming out of the walls is due to the (huge, heavy) building slowly sinking. The implication is that the hill is quite soft, and the clay very moist. The weight of the house is pressing the liquid out of the clay as it sinks, and since the house covers so much area, the liquid clay closer to the center can't be pushed out to the side, and instead gets forced up into cavities in the walls, where it eventually leaks out into the rooms. Between the exterior damage, and the hydraulic damage being caused to the interior structure, Allerdale Hall is doomed; even modern engineering likely couldn't save it by the point where we see it in the story. The cisterns of liquid clay are apparently part of Thomas' work in trying to commercialize the clay, as we see him show a bottle of the liquid to the engineers at Carter's company early on. They also make for a very convenient hiding place for bodies.
    • Still unlikely for mud to come up through the floor when the place has a cellar. Come to that, what even is that cellar? What would be the point in having wells full of mud under your house?
    • The ground floor is still built atop the clay, meaning it seeps through the wooden floor; the cellar is separate, presumably doesn't cover the same space, and has stone/brick walls meaning clay can't seep in. The wells are vats for the clay the family sells; we can see at the end that Thomas' machine is linked to one of the vats; they need the machine and the vats because conventional mining has failed/ceased to be effective.
• The big hole in the ceiling. Even if they had no money to rebuild the roof, they could at least nail a tarp over the hole so stuff can't fall in.
  • It's a part of the world where it rains at least once most weeks, too. Not nearly as romantic.
  • Rule of Symbolism. The household has big, serious fundamental problems that people are just ignoring because they're too bad to deal with. It also has a hole in the ceiling.
• In the very beginning, when Edith runs into Eunice and her mother, she has her angry lines about how a baronet is a "parasite with a title". You'd think this attitude would come up again, what with her marrying a baronet and signing over her estate and the people the clay extractor is supposed to help, but—outside of a throwaway mention by Alan — nothing. Not a peep.
  • Remember that when she said that she had never met Thomas before. It wouldn't be a stretch to assume she changed her mind after she got to know him.
  • She was probably parroting her father's attitudes, considering his disdain for the aristocrats.
  • Thomas is also very modern minded and ambitious, so Edith likely saw him as someone who was going to do some good in the world with his inventions.
  • The character bios mention that Edith supports women's suffrage but hates politics; it's possible her sociopolitical convictions generally take a backseat to personal convenience.
• How did Lucille get out of an insane asylum if there was evidence that she'd brutally murdered her mother?
  • Perhaps she'd behaved well enough to convince the staff that she wasn't Ax-Crazy, she'd just been driven to it by her mother's cruelty.
  • Or Thomas signed her out when he reached majority on the pretext that he was going to lock her up at home: it's still handwavily early enough for them to have assumed she'd be the family Madwoman in the Attic. Of course the doctors couldn't have realised that he would be completely under her control instead.
    • According to the artbook, it was decided she had served out her sentence and she was released. It also seems to also imply that her sentence was shorter because she had been a juvenile when the crime was committed. In any case, it seems that her time at the asylum was the alternative choice to prison, so she'd always had an eventual release date.
  • Lucille being a woman and aristocracy probably also had a hand in it. Lizzie Borden for example was found not guilty even though the evidence pointed to her, because a jury couldn't believe a Proper Lady could commit such a brutal murder. And she killed two people!
• If the Sharpes had just announced the deaths of the three wives publicly they wouldn't have been taking so many risks.
  • Lucille's poison seems to give symptoms that look like a lung infection. Or at least Victorian Novel Disease. Nobody would be surprised if the damp rotting house would give the newcomers lung diseases, and that would have left Thomas free to remarry legally.
    • The novelisation implies that, in at least one case, Lucille got a bit ahead of herself and ended up brutally murdering the wives when she felt the poison was taking too long.
    • The artbook partly confirms this. Margaret took a massive blow to the head (hence the missing parts of her ghost's face) and Pamela was strangled. It doesn't say how Enola died, but it does reveal that Lucille killed her own baby after she couldn't stand its crying anymore. It seems likely Enola was dispatched at around the same time.
• Thomas says that the house is 'hundreds of years old'. Except it can't be. Sure there's probably been Sharpes on that bit of land for hundreds of years but the house is in the Neo-Gothic (a.k.a. Victorian Gothic or Gothic Revival) style, which means it could barely be 80 years old in 1899!
  • True, the Neo-Gothic style referenced much older buildings, from about the 12th to the 16th centuries — but these buildings wouldn't include a country villa like Allerdale because at the time the aristocracy didn't live in houses like that- they were mostly unstable times in Europe and the nobility almost invariably lived in castles (some of which were Gothic in style in Europe, but Gothic in England was almost exclusively for sacred buildings.) Applying it to an actual house would be a very 19th century idea.
  • Most likely the house had been refurbished and partially rebuilt several times over across centuries, especially considering how unstable the foundation is.
    • In the UK, it was fairly common for smaller landowners and titleholders to live in Halls, not castles, if they did not have land in need of defence. These would initially have been large, main room structures with a few additional rooms leading off. Over the years they would typically be renovated, most commonly adapting the hall to have two stories and a lower ceiling, and further wings and rooms. If you had enough money, you might choose to abandon this centuries old wreck to build a separate house somewhere else on your estate when it became too dated... if you did not, you could just keep adding to the old hall to keep up appearances and basic expectations. A family who lived in one of these houses would consider the 'house' to be hundreds of years old even if the actual structure meant that a kitchen or a ballroom was the original house and everything else a later addition.
  • Look up Jacobean interiors. Per the art book, Allerdale was built in the early to mid-1600s, and while a bit more Gothic than that style in some areas, the house still draws heavily on the correct time period.
• One is wondering why the ghost of Mrs. Cushing knew what would happen at Crimson peak years before the Sharpes started their whole "marry and murder" thing and how she knew it would happen to Edith specifically, since Thomas was originally after Eunice.
  • The idea was that ghosts are timeless and to them there is no clear distinction between the past, present and the future.
• How did Lucille only get pregnant once if she's 36 (working out her age from the newspaper clipping's date and the date in Carter's checkbook) and has been sleeping with Thomas since she was 13 (based on the official character bios)? Even assuming she didn't start menstruating until she was in the asylum and stayed there until Thomas turned 18 and could get her out, that's still a solid 16 years of presumably unprotected sex. She clearly CAN get pregnant, and since she wanted to keep the baby, that implies that she wouldn't have terminated any previous pregnancies. I can see her making herself miscarry if it happened again after that whole fiasco, but she was 30 when she had the baby (based on when Enola was present). Which still leaves ten years during which she somehow never conceived despite, again, regular unprotected sex.
  • She was only pregnant once that she knew of, and in the days before pregnancy tests, poor nutrition and health could make one miss a period. Women often didn't know they were pregnant until about four months along. Perhaps Lucille did get pregnant more than once but miscarried early on before she knew what was happening to her. The dampness of the area and their financial struggles would mean bad health or at least not ideal ones, so if she had morning sickness or missed a period, she could just assume it was a brief illness.

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