ABSTRACT
This chapter considers the relationship of Allerdale Hall to the daughter of the house, Lucille Sharpe, and the damaged daughter figure as representative of the ghostly inadmissible that lies at the heart of the nightmare of presence. The scarlet hue of ghosts arises from the pragmatic reason that the Sharpes dispose of their corpses in the clay vats of the cellar, and the corpses thus become suffused with the redness from the clay. Lucille is at the end trapped within the house permanently, a ghost like all of her victims, condemned to play her piano forever. While the closing of Edith Cushing’s book, as the final image of the del Toro's film, might seem to award to her a total domination of ghostly narrative, that narrative is nonetheless dependent on the theatrical organization of space that del Toro has devised. The ghosts of the film were always to be expected of a house that used a skull for its crest.
