Emma Stone to Join Guillermo del Toro's CRIMSON PEAK
Emma Stone is currently in negotiations to join Guillermo del Toro's new haunted house horror thriller Crimson Peak. The project is set up at Legendary Pictures, and it's going to be the directors next movie gig. Stone isn't officially attached yet, but she is expected to sign up for it.
The movie is an original ghost story that Del Toro wrote with collaborator Matthew Robbins. Before it goes into production it will go through a re-write with Lucinda Coxon. There aren't many details on the story, but the director previously described it as “a very set-oriented, classical but at the same time modern take on the ghost story. It will allow me to play with the conventions of the genre I know and love, and at the same time subvert the old rules.” When talking about the inspiration for the this project he said,
To me that is Robert Wise’s The Haunting, which was a big movie, beautifully directed, with the house built magnificently. And the other grand daddy is Jack Clayton’s The Innocents. I’ve always tried to make big-sized horror movies like the ones I grew up watching. Films like The Omen, The Exorcist and The Shining, the latter of which is another Mount Everest of the haunted house movie. I loved the way that Kubrick had such control over the big sets he used, and how much big production value there was. I think people are getting used to horror subjects done as found footage or B-value budgets. I wanted this to feel like a throwback.
This is a project that Del Toro's very excited about making it. He was also asked about the project in a recent interview with The Playlist in which he said,
There are so many ways to tell a ghost story. "Crimson Peak" is a gothic romance. I don't mean that there's going to be a guy who appears with a dozen flowers singing in the balcony, what I mean is that, in the most classical definition of the term, it's a gothic romance. It's got a lot of darkness and sound and fury and drama and stormy; but at the core of it is a scary movie.
It's going to be great to see Stone and Del Toro working together on this horror project. I can't wait to see how it turns out!