The Depths of Pretension #4 - Cronos

There can be a lot of things that come to mind when you mention vampires in a conversation, whether it be the classic archetypes most people associate with them in the 19th century thanks to Bram Stoker's Dracula, which took a lot of archetypes from sources in European folklore and in turn made one of its own, or even the subversion of those things that many horror films have tried to do in order to establish their own rules and guidelines, or for lack of a better word, mythology. One of the elements that Stoker did establish in his book that many have worked on going into their own directions with it would be the romanticism of the whole ordeal, either through the way vampires are portrayed in media as usually being very attractive or appear to be so, or through the thought of being immortal along with no longer aging, to remain beautiful forever. The former will usually lend itself to a lot of material that pertains to the whole ordeal of turning a victim into a vampire, the ordeal of mixing up blood and other bodily fluids, as an allegory to the animalistic nature of humans and sex. The latter, though could probably have more of a focus on the whole aspect of immortality and the price of that process (again, being blood) while also losing a lot of what had made the characters human in the first place, now as creatures whose only motivation is the act of feeding on others. That part of vampirism is the part that the film I shall be talking about today, Cronos, mostly focuses on.

The movie, which was also the debut of director Guillermo Del Toro, has a story that revolves around an elderly antiques dealer who uncovers a 450-year old golden device in the shape of a scarab from the base of an archangel statue, which ends up latching itself onto him and injects him with a solution that ends up making him feel younger along with giving him a taste for blood. Along the way, there is another man named Dieter de la Guardia, a rich, dying businessman who has been searching for the statue himself for years so that he himself can combat his illness. For the most part, the character of the antiques dealer, Jesus Gris, does show some signs of vampirism after the incident with the device, mainly with how his appearance changes for the better, such as his wrinkles going away and his thirst for blood developing, yet it isn't until he is killed by Dieter's nephew Angel when some of the more tell tale signs come to fruition such as the disdain for sunlight and in a strange turn, the pale skin aspect of the vampire comes from peeling off the old skin, which decays from the body. And for the most part, no one actually uses the word vampire in the movie at all

The thing that makes it rather different than other stories about vampires is that the curse does not come from the bite of another of the cursed, but from the cronos device itself. The introduction of the film talks about the alchemist behind its creation who developed it in 1536 and did not pass away until around 400 years afterwards when the building he was in collapsed and he was pierced in the heart by some of the debris. Another thing I did not catch upon the first viewing directly was that there was blood hidden away that was never found by the investigators. There is not much detail given into the nature of the device or how it worked aside from some assumptions given by Dieter who mentions that it filtered the blood which may or may not be correct. There are moments where one can look inside of the device where there appears to be some sort of insect that was combined with machinery inside of it.

It never really explains how the device is able to make people immortal yet it could be assumed that the insect that resides in the device may be some sort of supernatural being, maybe serving as the analogue for the original vampire since it was able to survive nearly 50 years without any blood of its own to feed on, which could view the relationship between the device and the user as being in a symbiotic relationship that starts off initially as parasitic with the device harming the user while taking blood for itself. Throughout the movie, Jesus applies the device to himself multiple times, the most important being after he escapes nearly being cremated and he has become the undead. This does distance itself from the traditional way that a newborn vampire and its master maintain a relationship, as it would be that the master would turn the newborn and soon would have to teach it to survive its new form. Instead, the two of them have to coexist where Jesus finds blood to feed on so that the device can apparently create its immortality solution to give to Jesus so he may recover from being killed. The coexistence plays a lot more into the ending of the movie when Gris destroys the device after nearly attacking his granddaughter. 

Yet the whole context of immortality is played off both of Jesus and Dieter, one who is unwillingly given the gift and wants nothing more than to get rid of it and the other who wants to become immortal by any means necessary. It does a rather decent job in playing off both of those points in the movie itself, which I would give a recommendation to watch since for a debut film it is rather ambitious while also playing off the vampire myth enough to carve out its own identity. There are many other directions I could go with the cronos device and how that works that I would really like to hear others' opinions on the thing.