“My god, so much blood. All that blood is mine.”
Imagine being at the Cannes Film Festival in 1993 and sitting down to watch Cronos, the thrillingly audacious debut film of a young Mexican director named Guillermo del Toro (who was my age when he made the film, which is…depressing). Rather than a traditional vampire film, what unfurls before you is something baroque and sentimental. Cronos plays almost like a parable of the dangers of desire, but what makes it stand apart from traditional vampire films with the same theme is the undercurrent of sadness in every frame. It is a meditation on mortality and addiction, and over two decades later it still defies easy categorization.
Cronos begins like a fairy tale, with a booming voice telling the story of Umberto Fucanelli, a 16th-century alchemist who invents the Cronos Device, intended to grant immortality to its user. Fucanelli is killed when a building collapses on him – in the 1930s. From there the device makes its way to the antique shop of Jesus Gris (Federico Luppi), who accidentally activates it. The device springs out spindly legs and latches on to Jesus’s hand; later it will produce a metal stinger and take his blood. The design of the device is beautiful and imposing; it’s no bigger than Jesus’s hand, yet is always the thing in any scene to which our eye is drawn. Its ornate craftsmanship is indicative of a style that would become a trademark of del Toro’s, down to the clockwork gears and tiny insect inside; you can see the evolution of this in Pan’s Labyrinth and Hellboy II: The Golden Army.
In his original review of the film, Roger Ebert mused that immortality is rarely granted to those who deserve it. Jesus comes by his accidentally, whereas de la Guardia (Claudio Brook), a sick tycoon, is hellbent on finding the device. For this, he uses his nephew Angel (Ron Perlman) as a reluctant errand boy. Perlman provides the closest thing to levity that Cronos allows, but even 24 years ago, del Toro knew how to direct Perlman. Angel’s physicality is one of his defining traits, and Perlman knows just how to split his broad face into a menacing grin. He speaks Spanish poorly, by intention, as if to show everyone in Mexico just how highly he regards their culture. When he whistles “We Wish You a Merry Christmas,” it has the same effect as Peter Lorre’s whistling in M.
Vampire movies are always ripe for allegory – Dracula, for instance, is a refutation of Victorian ideals towards sex – and Cronos is in a unique position due to the strange way Jesus becomes a vampire. We see him late at night, going through physical pains akin to withdrawal symptoms: he downs nearly an entire pitcher of water, hungrily eyes a plate of raw meat; he’s restless and his hand is impossibly itchy. When he finally relents and uses the device again, he collapses on the stairs in nearly orgasmic euphoria, unaware that his granddaughter Aurora has been watching him. Later, when a man gets a nosebleed at a party, Jesus follows him to the bathroom and debases himself the way only a junkie can, by licking blood off of the tile floor. He doesn’t even notice Angel enter the room until he gets kicked in the head.
The allure of immortality is plain to see, but Cronos bucks conventions with its elderly protagonist, which is such a rare choice in mainstream entertainment that the only other two examples I can think of offhand are Up, Cocoon, and Stephen King’s Insomnia. Cronos is about our inability to accept the inevitable; de la Guardia has a display case full of organs removed from his body, and still refuses to yield to time.
Del Toro, unsurprisingly, has always excelled at horrific visuals. Working for the first time with the virtuoso Guillermo Navarro (who would later win an Oscar for filming Pan’s Labyrinth), del Toro doesn’t shy away from the visceral transformation Jesus goes through. After being seemingly killed by Angel, Jesus ends up in a funeral home, where del Toro mixes dark humor with squirm-inducing images like Jesus’s mouth being sewn shut. Later, there’s a great reveal when the attendant pushes Jesus’s wooden coffin into the incinerator; we see that it’s empty but the attendant does not. In an off-putting visual touch, Jesus spends the rest of the film in a backwards-facing suit, as if resurrection has forced him to go through life in reverse. When he returns home to Aurora, she makes him a crypt out of an old toy chest; when Jesus curls up inside, he looks fetal.
The most important relationship in Cronos is between Jesus and Aurora, who never speaks a word until the climax of the film. After de la Guardia and Angel have both been killed, Jesus looks as monstrous as he must feel: blood-soaked, wounded, his skin molting like a snake’s, he regards Aurora hungrily, seeing her only as prey. She says one word: “Grandfather.” It’s a lovely, unabashedly sentimental moment, and it breaks the spell cast over Jesus. He breaks the Cronos Device and goes home to meet the sun. As he lies in bed, he looks waxen and inhuman. He has gone as far as addiction will take him, and it has made him something else.
Cronos is not the scariest film we’ve watched in 31 Days of Fright (if I had to pick, that honor would go to The Texas Chainsaw Massacre), but it might be the most beautiful. Emotionally and visually, this is an occasionally disturbing film that wears its heart on its sleeve. Many directors are gifted visualists, and some are adept at making us scream (James Wan, for instance). Guillermo del Toro stands alone among his peers; he more than almost anyone working in the medium today can take those screams and from them draw genuine emotion.
10/1: Dawn of the Dead
10/2: Drag Me to Hell
10/3: Pet Sematary
10/4: The Descent
10/5: Repo! The Genetic Opera
10/6: Desierto
10/7: The Blair Witch Project
10/8: Blair Witch
10/9: The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
10/10: A Nightmare on Elm Street (2010)
10/11: Prince of Darkness
10/12: 30 Days of Night
10/13: Friday the 13th (2009)
10/14: Slither
10/15: Tremors
10/16: Pandorum
10/17: It Follows
10/18: A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night
10/19: Poltergeist
10/20: Paranormal Activity
10/21: Creepshow
10/22: VHS
10/23: Nosferatu the Vampyre
10/24: An American Werewolf in London
10/25: The Witch
10/26: The Rocky Horror Picture Show
10/27: Cronos
10/28: The Hills Have Eyes
10/29: The Hills Have Eyes (2006)
10/30: Tucker and Dale vs. Evil
10/31: Halloween (2007)
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