A vampire film where the word vampire is never used, Cronos presents a merciless world where mercy survives in the face of uncontrollable appetite but only at a grave cost. The characters face hard choices and are pushed to ever more extreme actions. All of it unfolds in a fantasy realm that blends the Jalisco of Guillermo’s youth with the Grand Guignol world he soaked up from books and films.

In the film, it’s initially easy for Aurora (Tamara Shanath), like any granddaughter, to love her gentle grandfather, Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi), who stays reassuringly the same. But what do you do when your grandfather inexplicably gets younger, more vigorous—and then, astonishingly, returns from the dead, growing ever more horrific looking? In Aurora’s case, you see the soul within and cherish it, regardless of outside appearances. You tuck him into your toy chest with your plush bear; you shield him from the light and witness his final moments of existence. As for Jesús Gris, who is transformed by the exquisite, monstrous Cronos device into a deathless addict, he chooses to destroy both himself and the device rather than sacrifice his granddaughter on the altar of his need.

With these characters, their monstrous circumstances, and their difficult choices, Guillermo confronts his audience with an inescapable truth of life: that those we love, and we ourselves, will ultimately be made horrible by either accident or illness, and certainly by death. Constancy and devotion are possible only by virtue of love, which alone endures.

^{Jesús Gris (Federico Luppi) succumbs to the device in Cronos.}

In his first film, Guillermo announced his singular aesthetic: his desire to utilize classic horror tropes to strip away artifice and show us clear reality—albeit his reality, his world. With Cronos, Guillermo gave voice to the world inside himself.

Guillermo took ten years building the makeup and special effects infrastructure (through his company Necropia) that would allow him to make this film, and its production was fraught with trouble. At one point, financing collapsed during shooting, and Guillermo had to tell star Ron Perlman, whose agent advised him to quit, “I can’t pay you now, but I promise you will get paid.” The time and attention to detail paid off. In Cronos, many of Guillermo’s major themes are on display, particularly child/parent and especially child/grandparent relationships, the fragility of innocence and its inevitable dance with corruption, and the sociopathic impulse that spoils for an excuse to let loose unbridled violence.

While working on Cronos, and as he would do with all his films, Guillermo kept a detailed notebook full of his illustrations, concepts, and thoughts. These are suggested by the storyboards, sketches, and production stills that follow, but none of this artwork is from the notebook itself.

For that, blame James Cameron.

“When I was finishing Cronos, Jim and I went to an Italian restaurant in Santa Monica,” Guillermo explains, “and it was a very, very, very dire time. I was staying in a hotel that was three hundred dollars a month, so it was very, very economical. With that hotel, most of the time the plumbing did not work, so I had to go to another hotel every three days and rent a room just to take a shower—or I could have a hot dog at Pink’s. Those were my choices. The day I took the shower, I couldn’t eat lunch.

“So when I met Jim Cameron, I was really filthy. I was a disaster. And he said, ‘Order what you want.’ And I thought, Oh my God, I’d better carve up for the whole week. I ordered like a madman, and wine kept pouring, and I got completely bloated and drunk. I said to Jim, ‘I want you to have my notebook for Cronos’, which was a Day Runner full of notes. I gave it to him, and Jim received it, and I think he was also not completely sober.

“The end of the story is that the notebook—he says that he placed it somewhere. He still lives in the same house, so I have hopes, but he says that he hasn’t been able to find it since.”

As a result, the pages that follow can only hint at what the Cronos notebook held, at what it still holds, like a snippet from a lost work of Sophocles quoted in a play by Aristophanes or snapshots of the Ark of the Covenant that is itself crated and buried in the closing-credits warehouse in Raiders of the Lost Ark.

What’s clear from the surviving Cronos storyboards and sketches is that, from the beginning, Guillermo possessed a bold creative vision and the ability to communicate it. In the years to come, Guillermo would make bigger films, more ambitious ones, but from the first he staked out a territory that was all his own.

^{The top of one of the original scarab props.}

^{Sketch of a poster idea del Toro made when looking for an American distributor for the film.}

GDT: I did this illustration of the Cronos device tearing into the skin [above] to show a possible idea for a poster for the film’s release. At the time, we were sending the movie out to American distributors, and I wanted to convey the idea that Cronos could be marketed. I was particularly happy with this image and the distributor, October Films, liked it, but they changed it for an image of a woman—like a girl having an orgasmic reaction to the device.

And the storyboards here [right] are rare—very few storyboards for Cronos survived. These particular story-boards were for an original prologue that I discarded, which was to start in the dark and then show the alchemist harvesting the insects.

MSZ: I know storyboarding is something you do on an ongoing basis while you’re working on your films. Can you talk a little bit about how you use them?

GDT: I now just doodle because it serves the same function as a more elaborate drawing. Even if you’re just using shapes, you can still communicate how you want to organize the frame—you’re still able to share the composition. I’ll give my doodle to someone who can interpret it and make it useful for preproduction. For example, if it’s for a VFX shot or a makeup effects shot, they’ll do a better job rendering the scene for budgeting.

I also use storyboards when I’m shooting. I call it the poor man’s Avid. Because I can edit on the page while I’m shooting. If I have sixteen or twenty setups I can put them all out on a sheet of paper and decide if I want to go from this one to that one, or if I have to skip one—you know, as time gets tighter. Storyboards are a great tool for making decisions like that.

MSZ: But this particular storyboard seems much more detailed. Was there a time when you drew more elaborate storyboards?

GDT: This one is so detailed because we were trying to budget for the effects we needed. I wanted to show the insect moving in the foreground, but I didn’t want to show its shape. So the storyboard was important for communicating how much we really needed to reveal to my guys at Necropia.

^{One of the few surviving storyboards for Cronos, this one for an unfilmed introduction to the film.}

^{Concept by del Toro of the scene where Jesús Gris bites Dieter de La Guardia and drinks his blood.}