Year Of The Vampire: Guillermo Del Toro’s Cronos Reimagines Forever As A Gold Invention – /Film

"Cronos" was the first in a trilogy of Spanish-language horror films from del Toro, to be followed by "The Devil's Backbone" and "Pan's Labyrinth." But it was also the first in a trilogy of vampire-related projects from him that would include "Blade II" and the FX series "The Strain." It brought the maestro (and namesake of Guillermo on FX's "What We Do in the Shadows") to the genre along with a renewed arthouse sensibility in the tradition of Bill Gunn's "Ganja & Hess," where a ceremonial African dagger does the "biting" instead of a beetle, and Carl Theoder Dreyer's "Vampyr," a movie that del Toro once called "as close as you get to a poem in film."

The movie is open to interpretation; the iTunes description of it, for instance, describes it as "an allegory about US/Mexican relations." You can certainly see how one might arrive at that interpretation. Perlman's English-speaking American, Angel de la Guardia, whose name translates as "Guardian Angel," brutalizes the kindly old Gris and pushes his car off a cliff. He and his uncle Dieter (Claudio Brook) want the thing that Gris has and they're not afraid to savagely beat him to get it. Angel even strikes a baseball bat pose, as if to signal that America's true favorite pastime is bullying.

Speaking to The New York Times back in 1994, however, del Toro said "Cronos" wasn't meant to be political. This is the same interview where he identified himself as "a raging atheist" and related some of his formative experiences growing up with a half-deaf Catholic grandmother who made him "walk to school with bottle caps in his shoes," as the Times put it. Having background knowledge of biographical details like these helps illuminate the perspective that informs "Cronos."

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Year Of The Vampire: Guillermo Del Toro's Cronos Reimagines Forever As A Gold Invention - /Film