Crimson Peak (2015)

“Ghosts are real, that much I know. I've seen them all my life...” — Edith Cushing

Take a postmortem tour of the imposing Allerdale Hall, the decaying English estate also known as Crimson Peak due to the blood-red clay that stains the snow in wintertime. This is a place possessed by its past. The walls bleed. The building breathes. Its residents, both living and dead, haunt its endless hallways and rooms.

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 manor on a ghostly journey, passing 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. 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.

A discussion with title designers RON GERVAIS and DAVE GREENE of IAMSTATIC.

Give us a little background on yourselves and your company.

Ron: We are Ron Gervais and David Greene, creative and directing partners at IAMSTATIC in Toronto. We started in university as a web-based art collective at the dawn of Flash animation in the early 2000s. We would create code-based interfaces and animations and curate online and offline exhibitions of similar work. After a couple years working agency-side, we evolved into a production and design studio and directing duo.

So how did you become involved with Crimson Peak?

Ron:…

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