Cronos

Dir: Guillermo del Toro

1993

*****

Director Guillermo del Toro began writing a script about vampires in 1984. Back then he called it Vampire of the Grey Dawn and almost a decade later it was made but renamed Cronos. It is, in my personal opinion, the greatest contemporary vampire film of all time. It is one hell of a feature debut. It is unbelievable that it wasn’t excepted as the Mexican entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 66th Academy Awards and shocking that it was only released in only two cinemas around the world outside of Mexico. Universal approached del Toro months after the film was released to discuss the possibility of buying the rights to the film so that they could remake it into English. The writer/director was unimpressed. Cronos stared veteran Argentinean actor Federico Luppi, so del Toro’s response was "Who wants to see Jack Lemmon lick blood off a bathroom floor?". Of course that wouldn’t happen, the film would have been different but either way, a remake would have been pointless and stupid. I’m glad del Toro continues to have the same integrity he did right at the beginning of his career. The film is everything a good horror film should be. It is visually stunning, rich in originality and mythology and has many interesting religious references. It has the perfect balance of drama and horror but I can’t think of any horror film or style quite like it. As well as staring veteran Argentinean actor Federico Luppi, it also stared American actor Ron Perlman in his fifth feature film following success staring in TV’s Beauty and the Beast which was a cult hit in the late 80s. It would mark the beginning of a celebrated collaboration of films and the director and actor became good friends. No Cronos, no Hellboy. The film is brilliant from beginning to end as it spans several hundred years. In the year 1536, an alchemist in Veracruz develops a mechanism that can give eternal life. In 1937, an old building collapses and the alchemist, who has marble-white skin, is killed when his heart is pierced by the debris. Investigators never reveal what else was discovered in the building, namely a basin filled with blood from a corpse. In the present, an old, somewhat religious antique dealer, Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi), notices that the base of an archangel statue in his shop is hollow. He opens it and finds a 450-year-old mechanical object. After he winds the ornate, scarab-shaped device, it unfurls spider-like legs that grip him tightly, and inserts a needle into his skin which injects him with an unidentified solution. An insect - entombed within the device and meshed with the internal clockwork - produces the solution. Gris eventually discovers that his health and vigor are returning, as is his youth. His skin loses its wrinkles, his hair thickens and his sexual appetite increases. He also develops a thirst for blood. This at first disgusts him, but he eventually succumbs to the temptation. He then uses the device later that night, but says his nightly-prayer as he does. His granddaughter Aurora notices this, and begins to worry about him. Meanwhile, a rich, dying businessman, Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook), who has been amassing information about the device for many years, has been searching for the archangel statue with the Cronos device. He has appropriated several archangels already. He sends his thuggish American nephew Angel (Ron Perlman), who allows his uncle's abuse on a daily basis for an inheritance, to purchase the archangel at the antique shop. In a now iconic scene I horror, Gris sees blood on a men's room floor during a party and decides to bend down and lick it. Angel finds Gris and tries to beat him into giving up the device. When Gris faints, Angel places his body inside a car and pushes it off a cliff. Gris briefly awakens and prays for survival, but seemingly dies. He later revives in an undertaker's establishment and escapes before he can be cremated. He returns to his home where Aurora lets him in. Dieter beats Angel for not ensuring Gris's heart was destroyed, and sends him to check on the body. Gris works on a letter to his wife in which he comments on the changes to his body, and tells her that after completing some 'unfinished business' he will return to her. He notices that his skin burns in the presence of sunlight and sleeps in a box to avoid it. Eventually, he and Aurora bring the device to Dieter's headquarters, where the businessman offers him a "way out" in exchange for the device. Gris comments on his damaged skin and the businessman tells him to peel it off because he has new skin underneath, which is marble-white like the dead alchemist. Gris threatens to destroy the device, but is told that he will die should that happen. Gris agrees to hand it over in exchange for knowing the "way out", whereupon Dieter stabs him. Before being able to strike the killing blow to the chest, Dieter is incapacitated by Aurora. The mortally wounded Dieter is found and killed by Angel, who is tired of his abuse and waiting for his inheritance. Angel confronts Gris on the rooftop of the building and beats him severely. Gris throws them both off the roof, killing Angel. Aurora finds Gris unconscious, and uses the device to wake him. Noticing that her hand is bleeding, Gris is tempted to feed off his granddaughter, but he eventually controls himself. He then painfully destroys the device, despite previous warnings. Surprised to still be alive, he believes God to have saved him because of his attempted self-sacrifice. He returns to his home and lies in bed with Aurora and his wife, waiting for the rising sun to see if he is free of the effects from the device. However, the film fades to white and then the credits roll before this can be determined, leaving Gris's fate ambiguous. There is a wonderful poetry to the film, something you don’t often see in horror but something often failed within the vampire genre. Francis Ford Coppola’s Bram Stoker's Dracula had come out the year before to great success and Interview With the Vampire came out the year after – both films eclipsed del Toro’s film and both still do even though Cronos is by far the greater film. The other films are dated while Cronos still feels fresh and exciting. It is a timeless masterpiece and one of the very best of the genre, that fact that it is still overlooked by mainstream audiences is beyond me.