31 Days, 31 Horror Reviews Day 3: Cronos

Spooky Day 3: 1993

This project is about revisiting all the years I've been alive, but also I want to see new movies from this era. Sure, I've seen a lot of horror movies, but certainly not all of them. There's new and weird stuff out there. I need to keep experimenting and exploring. So here’s a Mexican horror movie, Cronos, the first film directed by Guillermo del Toro.

Unfortunately, I'm only pretty sure I haven't seen this. I don't remember seeing it. Yet, it felt deeply familiar. Felt a lot of déjà vu. 

My grandma is getting close to eighty-years-old. She's still fine, but she forgets movies she’s seen all the time. Meanwhile, my memory is still prety good. I can remember truly awful crap like Corky Romano which I saw once in 2002, on Pay Per View. Still, I’m thirty now, sometimes I just forget everything about a movie. Most of the Friday the Thirteenth movies are a single mush of vagueness in my mind now. I cannot tell you anything distinct about Part II vs Part III.

In this case, Cronos, I cannot tell whether I’ve seen it or not. That scares me. I could definitely imagine having seen this movie before. It seems like a movie I would have rented in college on Netflix mail-in DVD. It’s a sad drama in Spanish, so maybe I lost interest and started playing my Nintendo DS halfway through. Or I saw it with friends and we barely paid attention. Who knows? All I can tell you is my brain is failing me. These are the signs of aging: gray hair, an inability to stay up after midnight, and completely forgetting stuff.

Fortunately, this all works thematically, because while Cronos is a vampire flick, it's themes are about aging. It forces its characters to confront their age, while teasing fantasies of youth, but then crushing those hopes with the inevitability of death. Nobody is living forever, the end is the same for all of us. Some people hang on to the bitter end in desperate struggles to fight time. Some people can just live their lives happily. It makes no difference. Vampirism can promise immortality. However, eternal life comes at a monstrous cost.

Cronos is the story of Señor Jesus Gris (Federico Luppi), a dapper antiques dealer in Mexico City. He is a warm caregiver to his tiny granddaughter, Aurora (Tamara Shanath). Señor Gris finds a small golden mechanical device hiding within an angel statue. The discovery puts him at odds with a cocky American businessman (Ron Perlman), who wants to purchase the device for his uncle, Deiter (Claudio Brook). The device is some kind of insectoid bloodsucker, which injures Jesus’ hand. But later, Jesus feels younger, healthier, and might have a bit more color in his hair. Yet with the vitality comes terrible cravings from raw meat and blood. Aurora gets to watch her grandpa descend into an almost-drug addiction to the device.

While Cronos is a vampire story, the script never uses the V-word. Still even little Aurora knows the rules. She helpfully makes her grandpa a coffin from an emptied toy chest. Ultimately, though, Cronos is not interested in being a traditional vampire tale. Señor Gris never runs around Mexico chewing on the supple necks of young socialites. Just when you think the movie is heading one direction, things are literally thrown off a cliff to become something much sadder. Vampirism here is not empowerment. It's a humiliating decay and horrifying transformation. Jesus doesn't need to eat people to be isolated. Once he’s no longer human, the world sees him as merely a nuisance, leftover trash to be disposed of.

Guillermo del Toro fills Cronos with clocks: the antiques in Jesus’ shop, a silly costume at a New Years’ party, and a billboard that serves as the setting for the film’s finale. The scarab-shaped device is full of clockwork gears, spinning and turning as they drain Señor Gris’ blood. The film is named after the God of time in Greek mythology, Chronos. Jesus is not clinging to time as desperately as his foe, Deiter, who lives in a clean room. Perlman's character: "That fucker does nothing but shit and piss all day, and he wants to live forever?" The minute warning has been called for all these characters. Time is running out.

Jesus should live longer. He should see Aurora grow up. He is a good man with plenty more to live for. The tragedy of Cronos is that time is finite, regardless of how well you'd spend it. Señor Gris deserves more time. We all deserve more time.

Next time: we travel to 1994, the year of Tonya Harding, The Lion King, and our next movie, Phantasm III: Lord of the Dead.