Del Toro’s early horror film recontextualizes vampire mythology for a richly textured exploration of time and temporality
As anyone familiar with the genre can attest, so much of the artistry of the horror film can be seen in how its creators manipulate time. In some cases, this can pertain to how they choose to reveal the monstrous and threatening entity only in select moments, culminating with some final reveal or defeat at the end of the film. In other instances, an editor calibrates precisely how often, and at what pace, a film shifts perspective between the slasher and their target. Time can be a thematic preoccupation of a film, as is the case with any number of haunted house films, ghost stories, or movies about existential agony and terror of the figure of the vampire, who is both youthful and eternal. Cronos (1993), directed by Guillermo del Toro, is a vampire film concerned with the passage and manipulation of time. Del Toro’s film is a lamentation about the search for immortality and what it means to yearn for the inhuman, and yet it is also about an awareness of time as something that is itself both living and dead, human and inhuman, subject and object.
Set in Mexico City in the late 1990s, Cronos follows the nightmarish transformation of an elderly antiques dealer into an undead monster capable of killing to satiate his eternal thirst, if only for a moment. Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) lives with his wife, Mercedes (Margarita Isabel), and their young granddaughter, Aurora (Tamara Shanath). The girl, who speaks only one line of dialogue for the entire film, has come to live with her grandparents after the deaths of her mother and father. Though this situation does not seem to be what Mercedes wants, it is clear that Jesús and Aurora have a special bond. Jesús delights in having Aurora as his companion in their antiques shop, and the two are visited there one day by a curious stranger. Angel de la Guardia (Ron Perlman) has come to the shop looking to procure an archangel statue with a one-of-a-kind object that lies inside of it: A golden Cronos Device, which is in the shape of a scarab and houses an undead insect. When activated, this apparatus stings the person holding it and triggers in them a vampiric transformation. The holder is granted eternal youth (as long as the contraption is intact) but will forever be compelled by a thirst for blood. Jesús and Aurora can tell the ancient device is a rare and curious object but do not know what it is or does. Nevertheless, they furtively withhold the Cronos Device but sell the statue to Angel, with him believing that he has gotten the better end of the deal.
Angel has been sent in search of the Cronos Device by his dying uncle, an industrialist by the name of Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook). To the sickly Dieter, the Cronos Device is his last hope to cling to life. He has been searching for the machine for years and has amassed countless, empty archangel statues in the process. In this time, he learned about the mythology of the device and its manufacture by an Italian alchemist living in Veracruz, Mexico, in 1536. Angel, for his part, cares little for his uncle’s fantasies and is perfectly willing to wait out the old man until his death, at which point he can claim his inheritance. Meanwhile, as Dieter is outraged that his nephew has found another empty statue, Jesús and Aurora become familiar with the properties of the Cronos Device, which stings Jesús and initiates his transformation into the undead. His youth and vigor begin to return, which surprises Mercedes. But his urge for blood continues to grow, and he grows addicted to the sting of the Cronos Device and the youth it provides. In the middle of the night, Aurora finds her grandfather with the Cronos Device attached to him, and she grows concerned about what is happening to the person who means the most to her in the world.
Dieter attempts to convince Jesús to give up the Cronos Device are futile. The thuggish Angel is then dispatched to beat Jesús into submission, which seemingly results in the old man’s death; however, Jesús returns to life, now even more recognizably inhuman with a layer of white, desiccated skin growing underneath the human surface. Grandfather and daughter go together to the de la Guardia headquarters and plan to exchange the Cronos Device for what Dieter promises is a “way out” of Jesús’ transformation and addiction. But there is no real way out. Aurora revives Jesús with the Cronos Device a second time, and when he returns to life again, he has completed his transformation into a vampire. He peels away his human skin, revealing the lifeless, marble-colored layer underneath, and looks to Aurora, wanting her blood.
Cronos is a richly textured vampire film, and one that stands out from its contemporaries in the early part of the decade, namely Francis Ford Coppola’s Dracula (1992) and Neil Jordan’s Interview with the Vampire (1994), both of which romanticize the vampire as a tragic and lonely figure. There is a tragic dimension to Cronos, but it also shows something desperate and possibly even mundane about this life of the vampire. Del Toro takes the idea of eternal life being a curse, a romantic concept itself, and recontextualizes that curse as addiction, an illness that the afflicted (in the world of the film) cannot find a cure for. Not only does this choice subvert some of the more common depictions of the vampire as a refined and aristocratic figure, but it also grounds this haunted figure in the material and temporal world. Consider, for instance, the film’s most famous scene: At a New Year’s Eve party, Jesús steps away to the public bathroom, where he is tempted by puddled blood on the floor from another guest’s bloody nose. Jesús has to wait for the opportune moment to lick the blood up. He has to be quick enough that he finishes the deed before anyone else walks in. But while he licks up the blood, a look of ecstasy and satisfaction comes over him: He obviously knows that he does not have any time to enjoy himself, nor is there even that much blood in the first place, but the pleasure of the moment is enough for him to want to remain in it forever. This is a quite desperate and sad image, but it is also one that is about temporality: The satisfaction he feels is both too short and also eternal. Time continues to fade away from him in the moment of pleasure itself.
Aside from the novelty of reimagining the vampire, this scene invites a reappraisal, even a reimagining, of how we think about our relationship to time. For the most part, it is convenient to think of ourselves as living through or in time. People organize their lives in hours and days and weeks. We might be able to schedule things as we like, but we cannot change the progression of time: The minutes and years tick away, regardless of what any individual does in all of that time. We do not have any sort of control over the environment that we interact with; we simply exist in this space, and in turn, this space will be here whether we are physically present within it or not. However, I would submit that Cronos asks us to reverse this common temporal perception. Rather than regarding it as an unchangeable or abstract force that we are simply living through, del Toro presents the idea that time lives through us, in a very physical and material sense.
Time is something embodied in Cronos, whether the bodies in question are human or not. Del Toro points us toward this supposition with the archangel containing the Cronos Device: The statue is something that literally holds time inside of it, and conversely, the machine has existed for centuries as this archangel. This outer shell is what has physically interacted with the outside world, in each moment from its inception with its medieval Italian inventor to sitting in Jesús’ shop. As such, the outer “body” of the Cronos Device is an index of its temporality, as a physical entity in the world. Meanwhile, the machine itself exists “outside” of time insofar as it does not appear to the world until Jesús uncovers it. In other words, the Cronos Device exists for most of its life as it does for Dieter de la Guardia: a myth that people might know about (although the industrialist seems to be the only one pursuing it) but not as something that is part of a temporal, physical reality. In this way, del Toro draws a comparison between the archangel and the Cronos Device and the transformed Jesús, whose degraded human skin covers his new, vampiric flesh. His inner body exists outside of time, immortal and inhuman, and is seemingly impervious to any physical deterioration of damage. Likewise, Jesús’ dead, human body is (or was) an index of his temporal existence. From the countless hours he has spent with Mercedes and Aurora, to the years he spent in the shop, all of this time has been recorded on his aged body.
As a vampire, now, Jesús is no longer subject to time and age, and relatedly, he ceases to be part of the physical realm, too. This much is conveyed when Jesús, no longer himself, begins moving toward Aurora to feed on her, enticed by the blood on her hand. When Aurora calls out “abuelo” to her grandfather in what is almost a final prayer, Jesús pauses, regains his senses, and destroys the Cronos Device and himself. In this moment, Jesús becomes himself again, spiritually as well as physically: Although he mostly is this marble vampire corpse, immune from the degradations of time, he reclaims his physical existence for this brief moment: He has both the consciousness of him and control over his body to make an eternal self-sacrifice. At this moment, Jesús is not living through time so much as he is consecrating it with a moral action. Therefore, we can see that time is embodied in the way that Jesús returns to his body, one that has devoted itself to protecting Aurora. It is worth reminding ourselves that as soon as Jesús destroys the Cronos Device, he immediately feels the effects of its magical power dissipating, where he starts to grow weak and cough. This is his final act of making time. It is an everlasting act of love shared between granddaughter and grandfather, something that both allows Aurora to live on and that memorializes their time together. In effect, Jesús and Aurora become one at this point insofar as they have this final moment together and because Aurora will contain her grandfather within her for the rest of her life; Each moment of her life will be the embodiment of their love for each other.
Aurora’s almost complete silence in Cronos draws our attention to her physical presence and the actions that she takes and what she observes of the world. After all, she is the one who first saves Jesús when she revives her grandfather after his fight with Angel. This is yet another physical act that consecrates her time with her grandfather, and, more broadly, this also reinforces the idea of her making time, not living in it. She brings her grandfather back, not knowing at all whether he truly will return or if he will deteriorate further. Nevertheless, she commits and gives herself over to this action and this moment — even if it is only a moment. Aurora and Jesús are, for del Toro, heroic figures who commit themselves to moral actions that are immediate as well as eternal.
Although Cronos is very consciously a vampire film, the horror does not come from the superhuman powers the vampire has, and the scares, violence, and sense of dread that comes with those conventional features. Instead, what is horrifying about the vampire, to del Toro, is the incredible allure of being inhuman: To not belong to a shared sense of space, time, and moral commitments that bind people to each other. The vampire, in this way, is the antithesis of love.
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