Glowing in the dark, p.4
Glowing in the Dark, page 4
In his commentary, he describes his inspiration for the Device, which came from alchemy. What most people know about alchemy is that it was the quest to find a way to transform lead into gold, but del Toro talks about the search for the “ultimate depuration of vile matter—be it lead or flesh—and turn it into the ultimate expression of itself. Be it gold or eternal life, eternal flesh.” The Device—through the living insect trapped inside it—draws out mortal blood, filters it, and replaces it, adding a drop of the alchemical “Fifth Essence” which brings with it eternal life.
Not only does Cronos mark the beginning of del Toro’s habit of linking insects with everlasting life, it also prefigures several of the themes that will come to play in his second film, Mimic, as the villainous industrialist de la Guardia in Cronos muses, “Who says insects aren’t God’s favored creatures?” It’s a sentiment that was meant to be echoed by the protagonists of Mimic years later, though the lines wound up on the cutting room floor. De la Guardia ultimately takes his reasoning further than Mimic was ever meant to, comparing insects to Jesus Christ and pointing out that, “the matter of the Resurrection is related to ants, to spiders,” as he describes spiders returning from seeming death after having been trapped in rock for years.
An anecdote from the set of Cronos tells as much about Guillermo del Toro the filmmaker as it does about the importance of insects in his films: The original budget for Cronos didn’t contain enough money to film the shots of the interior of the titular Device. Producers assured del Toro that he didn’t need the shots, but del Toro disagreed, and ended up selling his van in order to pay for the construction of a massive animatronic replica of the inside of the device—complete with rubber insect—through which the camera could be slowly passed. What could have been a silly or pointless sequence in less dedicated hands becomes not only a nod to the monster movie origins of Cronos, but also a profound moment of cinematic magic, one that shows the insect not as a monster or an angel, but as much a victim as any of the film’s human characters. It is perhaps the greatest condemnation of the allure of immortality in Cronos, as we see the insect suffering, trapped inside its golden prison, but unable to die.
Mimic (1997)
In the filmography of almost any visionary director, there is bound to be at least one film that represents a compromise between the director’s vision and the demands of the filmmaking machine. For Guillermo del Toro, that film was Mimic, his second feature and his first studio film. For years it was available only in a theatrical cut that lacked del Toro’s seal of approval, but recently a director’s cut, fully color-corrected by del Toro himself, was released onto Blu-ray. The director’s cut did more than just remove jump scares and action beats shot by the second unit; it returned the picture to something more closely resembling the director’s original vision, and brought the film’s symbolic elements more to the foreground.
“I wanted to make them God’s favorite creatures, angels,” del Toro says of the film’s giant Judas Breed insects in Cabinet of Curiosities. “I wanted very much to indicate that God favored our downfall as a species.” On the opposite page is an image from one of del Toro’s ubiquitous notebooks, in which a man is “prostrating himself before the godlike figure of the man-shaped insect, a shaft of sunlight sweeping diagonally across them from on high, as if God were passing judgment.”
In the original screenplay, one of the characters was meant to take up de la Guardia’s chorus from Cronos, with lines like, “What if God is fed up with us? What if insects are now God’s favorite creatures?” Unfortunately, none of this dialogue made it into the final screenplay, leaving the heavy lifting of the film’s thematic concerns almost entirely in the hands of the visuals. The director’s cut does restore a scene of a woman calling the Judas Breed what del Toro called them in early treatments for the film, “dark angels.”
The first time we see the Judas Breed is in and around a run-down inner city church. The film’s first on-screen fatality is a priest who falls to his death in front of a huge neon cross that reads, “Jesus Saves.” Inside the decaying church, the Judas Breed blend in with the plastic-wrapped figures of saints, familiar imagery for viewers of Cronos with its hanging gallery of archangels wrapped in plastic sheeting. In his commentary for Mimic, del Toro says that he wrapped the saints in plastic to make them “obsolete, out-of-order holy figures.”
“We created the church and the despoiled figures again in the idea that the natural order of the sanctity of the world and our place in creation was being subverted, and that the new fathers and mothers of the world were insects,” del Toro continues in his commentary track. As the film progresses, this subversion is driven home again and again through careful visual choices. From the color coding, which makes it feel as if the “humans are insects trapped in amber,” to a dramatic change of scale in the film’s final acts, in which the humans find themselves in a massive underground subway station, effectively reduced to the size of insects, scurrying around, desperately trying to accomplish menial tasks, while the “dark angels” can climb the walls with ease or effortlessly fly around them.
Among the many struggles that del Toro describes when talking about the making of Mimic are his efforts to ensure that the character of Dr. Peter Mann wears glasses. “I like the idea of showing how imperfect mankind is,” del Toro says in Cabinet of Curiosities. “The insects in Mimic were all organic, but mankind needed glasses, artificial limbs. The mimics are the perfect ones, not us.” The value of human imperfection is another subject that comes up again and again in Guillermo del Toro’s filmography, and the dichotomy of the mechanistic perfection of the insect is one that he also brings up in the commentary track for Cronos, where he says, “I do happen to believe that insects, as far as form and function, are the most perfect—albeit soulless—creatures of creation.”
Pan’s Labyrinth (2006)
If asked to identify the single most recurrent theme in Guillermo del Toro’s body of work, “the value of human imperfection and the choices that we make because of it” would probably be a pretty good start. While del Toro’s sixth feature and his third—and most widely celebrated—Spanish-language film may not seem to have a lot to do with insects at first glance, it does have a lot to do with choice and human imperfection, and it features an insect in a particularly key role.
We are first introduced to the insect in one of the earliest sequences of Pan’s Labyrinth, where we see it crawling out of the statue of a saint, continuing del Toro’s habit of equating insects with Catholic imagery. It’s also the last time it will happen in the film, though, breaking the insect free of its previous Catholic trappings in Cronos and Mimic and eventually equating it with a more pagan conception of eternal life. During this sequence, as the human protagonists arrive at the mill where most of the rest of the film will take place, our focus stays on the insect as it flits between the trees. In his commentary track, del Toro says, “I wanted to emphasize with the camera how important the insect was.”
Freed from the Catholic imagery of Cronos or Mimic, the insect in Pan’s Labyrinth is also distinct from the more oppressive or ominous themes of the insects in those films. No longer a “dark angel” passing divine judgment, the insect instead acts as a psychopomp, not only literally leading Ofelia into the labyrinth, but also serving as a visual transition device that signals to the viewer a shift from the “real world” of fascist-occupied Spain to the film’s fairytale underworld.
In most traditions, the psychopomp’s job is not to pass judgment on the dead, but merely to provide them safe passage into the underworld. In this way, the insect in Pan’s Labyrinth is very different from the Cronos Device or the “dark angels” of Mimic, acting as a bridge to eternal life, rather than a means of obtaining it, or an alternative to it.
Over the years since the film’s release, much has been made about whether the magical elements of Pan’s Labyrinth are intended to be objectively “real” within the film, and del Toro himself has called the film a “litmus test” for audiences. By any reading, though, there are obvious parallels between the fairytale world of the film and the afterlife of many religious traditions. Del Toro has pointed to Ofelia’s choices at the end of the movie as her “giving birth to herself,” a theme that recurs in many of his projects.
It’s telling that the last image of Pan’s Labyrinth is not of Ofelia in the fairy world, but of a flower blooming on the formerly dead tree that she saved from the toad in the “real world.” Here we see a purer kind of eternal life than the one offered by the Cronos Device, an immortality in which our choices today promote new life in the future.
Author’s Note: I originally wrote this for a book of scholarly essays on Guillermo del Toro’s filmography that was supposed to come out from McFarland, I believe. However, the resulting essay wasn’t long enough for that book, so I eventually sold it on to Clarkesworld—to date my only publication in that venerable venue.
At the time this was written, Guillermo del Toro’s most recent movie was Pacific Rim, but I’m sure someone could easily add an additional section to this essay dealing with Sebastian J. Cricket and the religious iconography of GDT’s Pinocchio.
Originally published March 2016
Nightmare
The H Word: But Is It Scary?
That seems to be the litmus test to which horror is most often held. When you get back from the latest movie about ghosts or serial killers, put down your favorite horror novel, or mention a spooky story on social media, it’s the first question that you’re likely to be asked. In our eternal struggle to find the boundaries of this vast and often contradictory territory called horror, I’ve seen more than one writer resort to “it aims to scare you” as a working definition.
Not that long ago, fans and detractors alike were wringing their hands about whether or not Guillermo del Toro’s love letter to the Gothic romance genre Crimson Peak should be considered a horror movie. The main concern seemed to be that it wasn’t particularly scary, and, perhaps more damning, didn’t really try to be. Which comes back to the idea that, whatever else it might be, horror should be trying to scare you, and can be judged on how well it succeeds.
Even if we do accept “it aims to scare you” as the definition of horror, there are lots of different kinds of fear, and different ways to be scared. When someone asks if something is scary, they’re most often talking about the much-maligned “jump scares” that populate the majority of Hollywood’s horror output, and which, even at their best, mostly amount to someone jumping out and yelling “Boo!” But while that may be the most obvious kind of scary, it’s certainly not the only one.
There are much more cerebral fears to be found in the literature and cinema of horror, from the cosmic nihilism of Lovecraft, Ligotti, and Barron to the “pleasing terror” of M.R. James and E.F. Benson. Movies like John Carpenter’s The Thing combine the visceral terror of body horror with paranoia and existential dread. Even Crimson Peak, which isn’t particularly scary by most measures, carries a heavy freight of inevitability and decay.
The precise difficulty that accompanies any attempt to pin horror down, to fence it in, is also exactly why horror works so well, and part of why we love it. Horror thrives at the edges of every other genre, in the places on the map marked “here be dragons.” It’s why Gremlins is not only in the same genre as Texas Chain Saw Massacre, but even contains a nod to it. Horror means different things to different people, and each one brings to it their own interests and obsessions, their own foibles and fascinations. For some, it’s simply a matter of what aims to scare you, and how well it succeeds, while for others, it’s more a set of touchstones and traditions, something that we can use as shorthand to help fire our imaginations, and fear doesn’t even really enter into the equation.
Limiting horror to only what scares us seems like it would rob the field not only of many of its best entries, leaving them orphaned in the storm without a genre to call their own, but would also rob horror itself of many of its resources. Horror is capable of so much—beauty, numinosity, dread, even humor and hope—scaring you is just one trick up its sleeve.
When I first started publishing stories, I struggled with the label of “horror writer,” and one of the biggest reasons was because I never write with the express intent of scaring anybody. At most, I aim for a pleasant frisson, James’ “pleasing terror,” those cold little caterpillar feet up your spine. More often, I’m interested in the tropes and the atmosphere of horror, the phenomena of the supernatural or the uncanny, and being scary isn’t really on my mind at all. So I flinched away from calling myself a horror writer, even while horror is the genre that I love the most, and most readily consume.
Just as when I write, though, I’m seldom looking for fear when I crack open a book or sit down in the dark to take in a movie. I’m happy enough when I get it, but it’s not my raison d’être. I love all kinds of horror, but some of my favorites are vintage horror films. The creaky stuff from the ’30s and ’40s, the Universal monsters, Hammer’s Gothic horrors, the works of William Castle, the atomic panic films of the ’50s, Roger Corman and Vincent Price very loosely adapting Poe in vivid Technicolor. Are those films great? Absolutely. Are they scary? Well, definitely not to us now, not anymore. Do they need to be? Hell no.
When I write and consume horror, I am more likely to be looking for something “to kick open doors to light and shadow and let us view something that otherwise we might not see,” as Joe R. Lansdale once put it more eloquently than I ever could. It’s why I write about monsters and ghosts and things that probably don’t exist.
The things that really scare me aren’t that interesting. They’re banal, boring, and quotidian. Like most people, I’m afraid of failure, of financial hardship, of getting sick, of letting my loved ones down. The really scary things in life don’t put your heart in your throat and get your blood pumping; they just weigh you down, day after day, like being pressed under stones, one stone at a time, any one of which would be nothing at all, all of which added together crushes the air from your lungs and makes every breath an agony. Those are the things that scare me, but I sure as hell don’t want to write about them. I’d rather write about monsters.
Author’s Note: Despite the fact that most of the examples I use in this essay are movies, it’s a bit of a stretch to call this an essay on the horror film. That said, I think it belongs here, in no small part because it is my first publication in Nightmare, the venerable online horror magazine.
Every issue, Nightmare asks a horror writer to pen a nonfiction piece for their regular “H Word” column, and this was the first time I had ever been invited. It definitely felt like one of those “I’ve arrived” moments. I’ve since published a couple of stories with Nightmare, and written another H Word column, reprinted later in this book, but this one felt like a big deal.
Originally published April 2016
orringrey.com
“Each one of these things
comes from an egg, right?”
It was March 14, 1989 when I first saw Aliens in its broadcast television premiere. (Thanks to Jason McKittrick of Cryptocorium for helping me track down the date.) I must have been seven years old—I would turn eight that October—and it hit me the same way that Star Wars seems to have hit most everyone else.
To this day, I remember the scenes from the CBS Special Movie presentation intro, which included my first glimpse of the famous xenomorph design, and I also remember being confused by my later viewings of the theatrical cut, which was missing several scenes that were added back into the television version, notably the moment when Ripley learns about her daughter. It led to one of those bizarre situations that sometimes happened in the days before DVDs and special editions, where I knew something about a movie that wasn’t included in any cut of the movie that I could conveniently find, and so I wondered if I had perhaps made it up.
I had seen other horror movies before, of course. I grew up watching stuff like Squirm and C.H.U.D., The Food of the Gods and countless Godzilla flicks. I think I had even seen bits and pieces of Predator when my brother rented it on video. I remember watching Cronenberg’s The Fly on network TV while eating a hamburger, and my mom coming into the living room during some particularly gross scene, and asking how I could eat while watching that. I don’t know if that was before or after I saw Aliens. (I wonder now how heavily edited The Fly must have been to even show up on TV in those days.)
But when I first saw Aliens, it was like nothing else I had ever seen. It felt more complex and more ambitious than I was used to my monster movies being, and I was struck by the design—and, of course, the life cycle—of the eponymous creatures. The alien queen might have been my first introduction to the idea of the boss monster in cinema, and the battle between the queen and Ripley in the cargo-loader exosuit, with its callback to the great stop-motion monster battles of King Kong and Ray Harryhausen, and the rubber suit wrestling matches of the Godzilla films, had an enormous impact on my young imagination.
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t in love with movies, but seeing Aliens was, without a doubt, a turning point in that fascination. The Alien franchise became my first fandom, for lack of a better word, a fact that was only reinforced by the gradual revelation that the Alien and Predator films might take place in the same universe—another concept that, while not actually original, was new to me at the time.
