Cronos [1993]

In 1992, Mexico was off the radar as far as horror cinema was concerned. El Santo had apparently grappled every monster then faded into retirement, while the Brainiac, la llorona, the Aztec Mummy and el Vampiro had become dim memories.

Then came Guillermo del Toro's Cronos.

First, the film - which flirted with a more explanatory English language title, The Cronos Device - was a festival hit. I saw it at the London Film Festival in the autumn of 1993. A month or so later, at Sitges, I was on the jury that gave it two awards, Best Screenplay [del Toro] and Best Actor [Federico Luppi]. The Sitges award is particularly desirable, a two-foot high statuette of the robotrix from Metropolis, but del Toro won many other Best Direction, Best Film and Best Debut gongs, even at Cannes. As a predominantly [though not exclusively] Spanish-language film, it was released in the US to specialised venues in major cities and barely dented box office charts. The see-sawing of del Toro's career between arthouse and multiplex was established early. Low-budget even by independent American standards, Cronos was Mexico's most expensive film up to that time, and a major commercial success on its home territory. A popular, indeed populist, picture, it is made with the craft, care and dedication perhaps only a first-time director can manage for a project he has initiated and waited years to make. It took a while for fans to get enough access to earn Cronos a reputation in genre circles, but Hollywood sat up and took notice, whisking del Toro North for Mimic and a career that is, a decade on, still flourishing. Having alternated personal projects [The Devil's Backbone] with hired gun gigs [Blade 2], he has just pulled off the trick of a personal project with a mainstream feel, Hellboy, and is still listed among the last best hopes of horror.

Cronos is an original vampire movie, which manages to cram in almost every possible reading of the myth and pay homage to previous films in the sub-genre while developing a wholly new take on the concept of living forever by drinking other people's blood. The film opens by establishing its invented mythology with a centuries-spanning montage covering the extended life of the alchemist Fulcanelli - a real and mysterious person, the model for the architect Varelli in Dario Argento's Inferno - who is persecuted by the Inquisition in 1536 and flees to Mexico. He invents the Cronos device, a delightfully intricate prop that combines the inner works of a pocket-watch, the trickiness of the Hellraiser puzzle box and the decoration of a Fabergé easter egg and houses a blood-sucking insect whose venom transforms anyone who allows themselves to be bitten into a near-immortal who can return from the dead but gradually takes on a white, marbled look and has the kind of desperate junkie craving for blood seen in other 1990s vampire movies like The Addiction and Habit. Fulcanelli dies in a freak accident in the 1930s, a falling beam piercing his heart, and his invention disappears only to show up in the late 1990s [the film is set a little while into the future, prophesying a more multicultural, monied Mexico] in an antiques shop owned by Jesus Gris [Luppi]. Dieter de la Guardia [Claudio Brook], a Howard Hughes-style ancient American capitalist who lives among his own extracted organs, is after the gadget, hidden inside an angel statuette, and despatches his brutish clown of a nephew Angel [Ron Perlman - a recurrent del Toro star] to secure the thing, keeping back the information that if it works Angel will never come into the inheritance he has been waiting around for.

Jesus Gris is stung and surrenders to the bug's influence, sprucing up but succumbing to unhealthy thirsts. In an astounding sequence which echoes the lapping of vital juices from floors by Udo Kier in Blood for Dracula and Tom Tyler in The Mummy's Hand, the dignified Luppi is reduced to licking blood from a stranger's nosebleed off the floor of a toilet. Killed by Angel, Jesus rises again [in a reverse tuxedo from his funeral] to confront his tormentors, but is persuaded to retain some humanity by the undimmed affection of his granddaughter Aurora [Tamara Shanath]. As well as a potent slice of personal horror, there's a nationalist theme contrasting American greed for more life-power-money, no matter how degrading, with the unwilling monster's Mexican ultimate acceptance of gentle death. It's no insult to the masked wrestlers, who get an almost-subliminal tribute in a poster in the little girl's room, to say that Cronos is a deeper look into Mexico's horror traditions, tapping into the family themes of the Crying Woman cycle - she's crying, remember, because she's done the terrible thing Jesus Gris is strong enough to hold back from, murdering a child of her own blood - even as it stakes out insectile vampirism as del Toro's own personal horror fiefdom. It's more affecting than terrifying, too sympathetic to its monsters to go all out for fright, but it brought back a beating heart to a genre that was in peril of surrendering to clockwork mechanics.
KIM NEWMAN

First Published In: Fangoria [issue unknown]

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