Cronos
Guillermo del Toro is a film critic's horrormeister, ladling Ideas into his movies alongside his monsters. I've never been much of a horror fan, so I like his stuff well enough, but I can see where horror fans might take it or leave it.I've seen three of his movies. The Devil's Backbone seemed as if it could have used a little more schlock; it was likable but hasn't stuck with me too deeply. Hellboy kicked ass, and had high enough stakes to be satisfying (although the ass-kicking might have been sufficient).
Cronos was a weird little movie: kindly grandfather Jesus Gris finds a clockwork scarab in an old statue that, wound up, releases hooks that pierce his flesh and turn him slowly into a vampire, prolonging his life, releasing a craving for blood-tasty-blood, and freaking out his 8-year-old granddaughter, although not so much that she stops hanging out with him once his skin falls off and he comes back from the dead.
The takeaway from the movie is the climactic moment, when Gris has killed two antagonists, and, having dined on their blood, stares at his granddaughter Aurora, who has stood by his side through his whole descent. His eyes chill, he hovers on the brink of choosing monstrousness and getting his snack on with poor morsel Aurora. She stares into his eyes long enough to awaken the human Jesus Gris (resurrected! but not in black and white moral clarity!), who smashes the clockwork and takes to bed, feeling immortality drain away.
Hellboy recapitulates this exact moment, as Ron Perlman's friendly neighborhood satan-spawn (a much better use than as Thuggish Nephew in Cronos) is faced with the option of unlimited power, and rejects it. For Del Toro, monstrousness is not an inflexible state of being, but a very stark moral choice. (Stephanie Zacharek brought out the moral universe of Hellboy in her Salon review.) I'll have to ask Minky how this plays into Frankenstein, which she read. I like this gloss on horror better than that of The Sixth Sense, which reduces horror to overflow from therapy: ghosts aren't trying to scare you, they just have unresolved issues.
posted by Josh K-sky at
11:33 AM
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