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. 

Vampire's Kiss: Renfield Un-(Nicolas)-Caged

I never thought I would preface a blog post for an English class with this, but man, Nicolas Cage doesn't get enough credit. It doesn't occur to many that some of his roles are actually pretty convincing (he won an Oscar, you guys...) but if you want a role that is simultaneously his best and worst, here it is. If you've ever seen the viral video "Nicolas Cage Losing His Shit" and were wondering where the ridiculous "I'M A VAMPIIIIIIRE!" soliloquy and the infamous scene where he recites the alphabet to his confused psychiatrist came from, this is it. The 1989 film Vampire's Kiss can best be described as an over the top psychological thriller with blackly comic overtones. I appreciate it that much more having read Dracula, especially with the parallel to that novel's depiction of male vampirism through Renfield.

He bought plastic fangs because they were cheaper.

An undercurrent of sexual repression runs through Cage's protagonist Peter Loew, who gets tired of his day job as a top publishing agent, berates his poor secretary Alva to no end, has fruitless sessions with psychiatrist Dr. Glaser, and, in one of his many one night stands, ends up bedding Rachel, a girl whom he thinks is a vampire just because she bites his throat a little. But apparently, in his words, "she's a goddamn vampire!" It seems as if screenwriter Joseph Minion, who also wrote Scorsese's crazy neo-noir After Hours, wanted to take the obvious metaphor of throats in Dracula and drag it in a little bit further. But with that said and done, one question is in the back of my head whenever I look at this film is the question: is Loew really a vampire?

A real twist on the Renfield/Dracula relationship, I'm sure.

Any sane person would say the obvious answer is no, because vampires aren't real. But Loew's sanity reaches a tipping point when he finally gets some excitement in his life, when Rachel bites his neck. Again, throats embody phallic symbols in Dracula, and it doesn't take much searching to find out that Loew, by all means a bitter guy who makes his secretary do a bunch of work and talks VERY openly with his psychiatrist about his job failures and sexual encounters, needs just one last bit of action to regress into a role he can't get out of. It makes me wonder what could have happened if the vampiresses actually bit Jonathan Harker at the beginning of Dracula.

Loew, dancing like he doesn't care.

Even then, I'm certain even Jonathan wouldn't go full Renfield and eat a cockroach on camera, turn his studio apartment into a makeshift vampire pad, get dark glasses and plastic vampire teeth (he couldn't afford the fiberglass fangs), or bite people. When he finds Rachel, she doesn't care at all...and neither does he, as he proceeds to curse her out very profusely. Indeed, Rachel is shown mainly as a figment of Loew's wild imagination up to that point, feeding on him and making him lose it that much more.

I'm not kidding about the cockroach, either. That's real.

And then there's poor Alva. Before Loew has another soulless one-night stand that turns out to be a feeding frenzy, he bites her on the throat, sexually assaults her, and almost kills her. Alva gets her brother to avenge Loew for his mistreatment, and in the final scene, where Alva's brother enacts his revenge by stabbing Loew in the chest with a crude stake from the leg of a chair in Loew's studio apartment/makeshift lair, Loew finally frees himself from his vampirism, repression, madness, and above all, ennui.

In other words, he's Uncaged! And that's a really big stake...perhaps some repressed masculinity on his part?

I may be reading a bit too much into Vampire's Kiss, even as I draw parallels to the major characters in Dracula - but especially Renfield. Loew and Renfield differ in many ways, though. Stoker does not place much of his major focus on Renfield, while Loew is this film's protagonist. Accordingly, the other characters take a backseat to him. Dr. Glaser is most definitely not the Seward type, and the motive of Alva's brother can be categorized as straight up revenge. Finally, Renfield is confined, while Loew is a publishing agent, and thus, the latter is most definitely in the 1%. Thus, it says a lot that a guy spending $$$ on therapist visits, club outings, rent for a studio apartment in NYC, and plastic vampire teeth can be compared to a man who spends his days confined in the squalid conditions of a Victorian asylum.

"R" is for "Renfield would NEVER recite the alphabet like this to Seward!"

In the end, I actually consider Vampire's Kiss to be a forerunner of psychological thriller films such as American Psycho, Nightcrawler, and Gone Girl, which all go deep into the psyches of unlikable characters and get their black comedy from the crazy stuff they do. Yet, what separates Vampire's Kiss from those would, no doubt, have to do with Cage's miraculous overacting. Nothing can hold a candle to his cockroach-eating, pigeon-catching, plastic fang-bearing work here. Nothing, I tell you.

And this film has been immortalized in another way, too: anyone with Internet meme cred knows this as his "YOU DON'T SAY" face.

Sleep all day. Party all night. Never grow old. Never die. It's fun to be a vampire.

The transition from Dracula to Edward Cullen seems to be lacking in some pivotal points. How did teenagers become a central role in the vampire theme? Obviously Dracula by Bram Stoker is aimed towards an older audience with its not-so subtle bisexual tendencies, New Age women, and overall sexual tension. The films featuring vampires after Dracula such as Nosferatu (1922), The Last Man on Earth (1964), or even Fright Night (1985) weren’t exactly geared towards a particular teenage population, much less the teenage girl which soon became the typical consumer. So what caused a shift in mainstream vampirism to become attractive to a younger audience?

The Lost Boys (1987) happened. This movie totally introduced a new era of viewers to the vampire genre as a whole. The movie features classic 80s heartthrobs such as Jason Patric, Corey Haim, Jami Gertz, Alex Winter, and Corey Feldman, and it also has an amazingly 80s soundtrack. Despite having a mostly teenage cast, the movie doesn’t shy away from central vampiric themes like classic campy gore and violence

good old fashioned heteronormative romance/sexual tension

a little bit of homoeroticism

and your classic oiled up, beefy strongman blaring Tim Cappello's "I Still Believe" on the saxophone.

So, how did this movie exactly become so well-known and a cult classic? Thank the Brat Pack for that. The Brat Pack refers to specific teenage actors and actresses in the 1980s such as Molly Ringwald, Judd Nelson, Ally Sheedy, Andrew McCarthy, Emilio Estevez and Demi Moore. The most famous Brat Pack movies were The Breakfast Club (1985), St. Elmo's Fire (1985), and Sixteen Candles (1984). Brat Pack movies were usually coming-of-age films about typically white teenagers growing up in the disillusioned 1980s. The Lost Boys fit this description in an unusual way with the addition of vampires, but it paid off in the end. The story of awkward, good-looking, wise-cracking kids only becomes more complicated and twisted with the taste for blood thrown in the mix. This film was released at exactly the right time for teenagers to become engrossed in the world of vampires. While The Lost Boys did make its debut at Brat Pack peak, it certainly wouldn't be regarded as one of those films, mainly because none of the true Brat Pack members are in the movie, and its distinction of fantasy and horror in the film. True Brat Pack films were more grounded in reality with few exceptions.

Many modern vampire shows, books, and movies owe their fame in the young adult world to this cult film. In my opinion, media that has had success concerning the teenage consumer such as Blade (1998), Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003), Twilight the novel series (2005-2008), and True Blood (2008-2014) would not have had the same success if The Lost Boys hadn’t been created in the style it was and at the time period it had been.