‘Crimson Peak’s connection to the “women’s pictures” of the ’40s and ’50s, and particularly Hitchcock’s ‘Rebecca,’ is instructive in reading it as a feminist film. Del Toro takes the tropes of a goodhearted, innocent protagonist, an oily older suitor, and a dangerous female rival whose hostility to the heroine is in part motivated by an “inappropriate” sexual desire, and recontextualizes them.