Cronos: Guillermo del Toro's Anti-Vampire Movie

I'm doing another film analysis for my final blog post, but this one is rather different. See, this is most definitely a film about vampires, too, and a rough contemporary to Francis Ford Coppola's weirdly excessive Bram Stoker's Dracula. Yet, Guillermo del Toro's brilliant debut film Cronos turns the concept of a vampire on its head without even using the word "vampire" and foreshadows the talent of a master at Gothic horror (if you've seen The Devil's Backbone, Pan's Labyrinth, and Crimson Peak to name a few, you know del Toro has a knack at this genre). Especially compared to True Blood and Dracula, among others, del Toro's twist on the vampire genre really opens up the nuances and themes that most self-described "vampire" films often lack.

In the 15th century, an alchemist creates a device that looks like a scarab beetle from the outset and contains the innards of an insect with a bite that bites back in more ways than one. The device makes those who use it immortal, but with several caveats. First, their body's old skin sloughs off to form new skin with a marble white hue. Second, they end up being able to cheat death, especially after the device is used near the heart. And finally, they have an undeniable thirst for...well, just take a wild guess.

The Cronos device.

Anyway, fast forward to Mexico in the nineties. Jesus Gris, an eccentric antiques dealer who lives with his wife Mercedes and granddaughter Aurora, finds the device inside an old statue of an archangel, and ends up getting struck by its needle. But he's not the only one after the device, as a millionaire named Dieter de la Guardia, who learned of the Cronos device from a manuscript he found of the alchemist's notes four decades’ prior, wants to find it for himself. So, him and his nephew Angel (played by fantastic actor and very frequent del Toro collaborator - Hellboy himself - Ron Perlman) end up engaging in a game of cat and mouse that Jesus, quite frankly, does not want to take part in. And then, over the course of the rest of the film... (spoilers follow, I apologize, but they're necessary here) Jesus grows thirsty for blood, cheats death at Angel's hands, has his granddaughter take care of him, destroys the device, kills the de la Guardias, and becomes immortal.

Jesus Gris, when he discovers his thirst for blood.

What I love about del Toro's approach in Cronos is its remarkable subtlety. I mean, sure, the imagery gets unnerving, and that has to do with del Toro's mantra of visuals first, with plenty of examples to choose from. There's the naked corpse and buckets of blood in the alchemist's house after his death. The creaking gears and giant bug inside the device are hard to not notice. The body horror of Jesus' transformation gets downright disturbing, too. But as far as the portrayal of Jesus goes, he's an everyman, not a Romanian royal like Count Dracula, a French elite woman like Carmilla, or a Civil War hero like Bill Compton. Jesus is just a nice old man who loves his antique shop, his car, his wife, his granddaughter, and above all, just the little things. When his shop gets raided by Angel, he wonders what's wrong. He gets absolutely disgusted when confronted with both the prospect of using the Cronos device itself and the possibility of quenching his thirst for blood, but gives in because he must. And when he cheats death, he writes a letter to his widowed wife telling her that he loves her, but has unfinished business to take care of. I guess Jesus is just that much more relatable, unlike the other protagonists and vampires we’ve seen.

This is true, even when he becomes something else entirely.

You know what makes this magnificent film, probably my favorite horror film from the '90s, that much better in terms of movies with vampirism? Well, Cronos has no actual sex in it. (Then again, aside from the remarkably discreet but absolutely twisted sexuality in Crimson Peak, del Toro usually keeps that down in his films, but I digress.) I think the closest things, though, would be the tied up naked body in the Alchemist's home, and to a lesser extent, the first time Jesus gets bitten by the Cronos device. Sure, he gets bitten on the hand, but the blood spurts out just enough to make it somewhat sexual. Indeed, he uses the device several times throughout the film, perhaps giving it an addictive quality similar to how True Blood utilizes vampire blood, or "V," as a drug.

We don't get to see much of the device's innards, but it's clear there's a bug in it.

And to add to that, the whole "blood as semen" metaphor that pervades much vampire lit here doesn't really work for Cronos, which also provides a fresh perspective there, too. It is not Jesus' bloodlust that is inherently problematic, but the fact that a fearsome gangster whose rich uncle is looking for immortality is chasing him and threatening his life, when really, he's just an antiques dealer who found something forged by a 16th-century alchemist. Even the scene where Jesus Gris feeds off of his nemesis, the elder de la Guardia, lacks the Freudian elements of Dracula, for example, as Jesus doesn't really have fangs that pierce in descriptive ways that would make Freud blush (oh, Dead Until Dark...), and as far as villains looking for immortality go, Dieter is every bit the entitled type. There's a cathartic element to the film's second and last feeding scene, in other words, especially when Jesus' granddaughter Aurora, who's already pretty awesome up to this point, acts like a total badass and strikes him in the head.

And then Angel (Ron Perlman) gets it too. Yes, this is Hellboy, Reinhardt the...vampire (how ironic!) in Blade II, and the practitioner of traditional Chinese medicine in Pacific Rim. He works with del Toro a lot.

Many of del Toro's works have been criticized in the past for not having enough in the way of straight up scares. If it's any consolation, though, Cronos creeps me out more than Coppola's Dracula, with its John Lennon shades, Keanu Reeves, and VERY subtle sexual metaphors, and certainly far more than Charlaine Harris' campy vampire smut. Cronos thrives on its impressive visuals showcasing a brand of dark fantasy only del Toro could come up with, which take precedence over any excessive cliches. Jesus, this film's extremely sympathetic protagonist, just wants out of the whole vampire thing. Along the way, del Toro raises good questions about the prospect of immortality and how it relates to the repressed manifestations that pervade many depictions of vampires, from Carmilla and Dracula onward. At any rate, what makes Cronos so compelling, to the point where I consider it my favorite cinematic depiction of vampirism, is del Toro's emphasis on discretion. After all, he does all of this without mentioning the word "vampire" even once.