Poison for the Fairies (1984)

Day 23 of Sobriety.

Poison for the Fairies is part of a collection of three films by Mexican director Carlos Enrique Taboada that was put out on blu-ray by Vinegar Syndrome. The set is titled Mexican Gothic, so, although I was not familiar at all with Taboada, I guess I had some preconceptions or expectations about what the films might be like. Poison for the Fairies is the second film I have watched from the set. The first was Rapiña, from 1973. I was quite disappointed with Rapiña, because I would not personally classify it as “gothic” at all. It is not a horror film, either—more of a depressive crime drama that has a lot to say about society, poverty, and the human condition. Not a bad film by any means, but not what I was looking for when I bought a set of movies with “gothic” in the title.

That makes me think about how my preconceptions and expectations can often make a huge difference to how much I appreciate a film. Going into watching Poison for the Fairies, having read the brief synopsis, I suppose I was expecting something that might be along the lines of the French film Don't Deliver Us from Evil (1971), or maybe even something reminiscent of Juan López Moctezuma’s Alucarda (1977). I mean, I wasn’t expecting anything that crazy, but it is also a Mexican film about two young girls exploring ideas of evil and black magic.

Anyway, it wasn’t much like either of those, but I did enjoy it. It was a strange movie. The plot concerns a ten-year-old girl from a wealthy family called Flavia who starts a new school and befriends another girl in her class, Veronica, who lives with her invalid grandmother and her superstitious nanny. The nanny regularly tells Veronica macabre folk and fairy tales about witches and suchlike, and Veronica laps them up. Veronica convinces Flavia that she herself is a witch, and persuades her to join her in her witchy activities. Needless to say, things do not go well.

The thing that really surprised me about Poison for the Fairies was its tone. It has an almost “Sunday afternoon children’s film” vibe to it. The music, for example, even during some quite creepy scenes is kid of playful and almost pastoral. It makes some efforts to present the story from a child’s point of view, such as by rarely showing the faces of the adult characters and adopting a low camera position. It largely succeed in capturing something of the atmosphere of childhood—a time when some of us believed that superstitions might be true, and the world still had room for the products of our imaginations and fantasies.

Another thing that really struck me about the film was its period setting. I just could not put my finger on when it was supposed to be set. It was released in 1984, but it doesn’t look like an 80s film at all, looking at the interiors and the furniture etc., The toys and picture books in the children’s rooms to be from the 1950s or 1960s, as did their clothes, but the cars the adults were driving looked like they were from the 1940s. I noticed that the grandmother’s room had an old gramophone in it. I don’t remember seeing anything like a TV set anywhere.

The film becomes progressively disturbing, until its highly unsettling conclusion, but I’m not sure can really be classified as a horror film, exactly. To an extent, it played out like a dark fairy tale or childhood parable. It confounded my expectations, but in a good way.