In These Rotting Walls: Guillermo del Toro's "Crimson Peak" and the Ghosts of the Industrial Revolution

“Ghosts are real. This much I know.” Those lines open Guillermo del Toro’s 2015 film, Crimson Peak. What brings restless spirits crawling from their graves to haunt the living? Crimson Peak’s answer is: exploitation. The trauma exploitation wreaks on the land and the body refuses to be buried. Shannon Payne will do a close reading of Crimson Peak as a film about the haunting of the industrial revolution, and begin to sketch out her MA thesis on monsters and climate change. Her talk for the Resident Members’ Series is also a contribution to a new, occasional series at Green College entitled Acting on the Anthropo(s)cene.

Shannon Payne is an MA student studying Literature with a focus in Science and Technology Studies. Her thesis, still in its early stages, focuses on how the most recent films of director Guillermo del Toro use monsters to talk about climate change. Shannon graduated from Dalhousie University in 2017 with an honours degree in English and creative writing and a university medal in both subjects. She's the recipient of several writing awards for both her academic writing and her fiction, and in her dwindling spare time she is writing a novel about zombies in space.