Cronos

Director: Guillermo del Toro, 18, 1992

Stars: Federico Luppi, Ron Perlman, Tamara Shanath

Out to buy on DVD

A member, alongside the likes of From Dusk Til Dawn, of a selective club of cult Mexican vampire films, del Toro’s debut drips with macabre flair and mordant comedy. The tale of an antique dealer (Luppi) who discovers a gruesome immortality device built by an Inquisition-era alchemist, it was at the time Mexico’s most expensive film.

But the esoteric fabulist del Toro made every cent count, with artfully lit sets and unsettling effects — it is easy to see how he has been able to graduate to the more ambitious, but equally unsettling, canvases of Blade II and Hellboy. Del Toro is an engaging, ursine presence on the extras, expounding on his love for all things Gothic, and the links that his “sick mind” have drawn between alchemy, vampirism and the Catholic Church. If this is sick, then long may his malady continue.