Abstract
Despite the disparity of the different fields and geographical locations in which Guillermo del Toro works (in the Mexican and Spanish film industries and in an increasingly globally dispersed Hollywood), the horror genre has characterized the majority of his work as director, producer, writer, curator, and film advocate to date. But although he has consistently worked in the horror genre, critical readings of del Toro’s films have rarely focused on the workings of the horror genre itself, preferring instead to displace their studies onto other topics. Critical readings of Cronos, for example, “treat vampirism as a metaphor or cover story for something else,” letting the film’s “vampiric surface” virtually disappear (Davies, 2008, 395). The neglect of horror in Cronos can be explained in part by the critical disreputability of the horror genre both in Mexican official culture and in Latin American cultural discourse, which has meant that the genre has had little or no presence in its national film canons (and that del Toro struggled to find institutional funding for both Cronos and El espinazo del diablo/The Devil’s Backbone in Mexico).1
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Tierney, D. (2014). Transnational Political Horror in Cronos (1993), El espinazo del diablo (2001), and El laberinto del fauno (2006). In: Davies, A., Shaw, D., Tierney, D. (eds) The Transnational Fantasies of Guillermo del Toro. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407849_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137407849_10
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