Cronos (Guillermo del Toro, 1993)
Cast: Federico Luppi, Ron Perlman, Claudio Brook, Margarita Isabel, Tamara Shanath, Daniel Giménez Cacho, Mario Iván Martínez, Farnesio de Bernal, Juan Carlos Colombo. Screenplay: Guillermo del Toro. Cinematography: Guillermo Navarro. Production design: Tolita Figuero. Film editing: Raúl Dávalos. Music: Javier Álvarez.
Guillermo del Toro's Cronos, his first feature, is a "horror movie" with the hard moral clarity of a folk tale, a characteristic the writer-director has maintained into his more celebrated films like Pan's Labyrinth (2006) and The Shape of Water (2017). In fact, I think I prefer Cronos to these later films because its moral vision is not distracted into social or political directions. Granted, we can interpret Cronos as a tale about the cultural contamination of Mexico from the age of the conquistadors to the age of multinational corporations, but that takes more work than the film itself demands. What we have in Cronos is a fable about the hunger for immortality, as basic as it is to any vampire movie, but with the difference that in this film the vampirism, with its blood lust and photophobia, isn't spread in the usual plaguelike fashion, but confined to those eager enough to seek it out. The fable of the consequences of human overreaching, as old as Genesis, gets a fairly sophisticated reworking in Cronos, where the horror movie tropes are more insidiously displayed than usual. Del Toro is less out to shock us than to infest our dreams.