Guillermo del Toro somehow feels like he is one of us, a monster kid to be sure, but also one that has a Best Director and Best Picture Oscar on his shelf along with all the Aurora models and back issues of Famous Monsters. Actually, he owns two homes just for his collections, saying “As a kid, I dreamed of having a house with secret passages and a room where it rained 24 hours a day. The point of being over 40 is to fulfill the desires you’ve been harboring since you were 7.”

The themes of monsters being the heroes and the Catholicism of Mexico run deep within del Toro’s work. More than any filmmaker, I’d love to have a discussion with him. After all, his theory of why Fulci works so well — “He’s getting high on his own supply” — is so all-knowing that statement has informed so much of my writing.

Cronos tells the story of Jesus Gris (Argentine acting legend Federico Luppi, who also worked with Del Toro on The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth), an antiques dealer who is infected by a mechanical scarab that he has found in the base of an angelic statue.

This device was created by an alchemist who lived for nearly four hundred years, sustained by the blood of the living. Soon, Jesus has started to feel the kiss of youth once again, yet he must pay for it in, you guessed it, blood.

The alchemist is based on Fulcanelli, a French alchemist and esoteric author whose identity remains unknown (some believe that he was Jules Violle, a famous French physicist) and whose life and disappearance were popularized by the Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier book The Morning of the Magicians, which heralded the new age of the occult. This isn’t the only movie that deals with Fulcanelli. His book The Mystery of the Cathedrals informs the Michele Soavi movie The Church.

Dieter de la Guardia (Claudio Brook, Castle of Purity) has been looking for this device for decades, seeking statues of archangels as he knows that is where it lies. He sends his brutish nephew Angel (Ron Perlman, who would also freuently collaborate with del Toro) to get the device no matter what.

In the funeral home scene, look for Tito the Coroner and the funeral director, who also show up in Jorge Grau’s We Are What We Are.

Angel does exactly that, nearly beating the old man to death to get the device. Jesus wakes up in a mortuary and soon discovers that his skin burns in the sun.  Can he escape the curse that this device has put on his soul, save his granddaughter and escape the evil de la Guardia family? Time will tell.

Sadly, all of the Cronos devices made for this movie were stolen when production was completed. They were never recovered, so the ones that del Toro owns today are just replicas.

This is a different take on vampires and announced del Toro to the world. Watch it and be stunned.

Psiquiatra is a therapist who is abducted by a masked man one night, who takes her to the woods, where he assaults her and leaves her to die. However — and this is incredibly upsetting — she seems to like it and looks for a former patient of hers, promising him “no holds barred” sex while her husband is away on business. What follows is some 9 and 1/2 Weeks style antics with attempted drowning and her turning the tables on her assailant by beheading his dog and pegging him.

Yeah — this is something else. Honestly, it’s the most repellent and fascinating quasi-giallo I’ve seen in a while, filled with gross people doing gross things.

Humberto Zurita, who plays the villain Violador, is still acting to this day. Sonia Infante, who plays the therapist, is also in Beaks: The Movie. This was released in the U.S. on VHS as Playback, which I’m sure gave no indication how massively screwed up this movie is. I can only hope that people rented this and were destroyed by how sickening it is.

Rene Cardona Jr. is the master of low budget Mexican scumfests, particularly because Violador spends some time sculpting Psiquiatra before sailing the seas of mayonnaise all by himself while staring at his work. Magical.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The first Mexican movie to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, it was also entered into the 1960 Cannes Film Festival. It’s based on the B. Traven novel The Third Guest and is loosely based on an old border legend. It also bears similarities to the Grimm Fairy Tale Godfather Death or The Death’s Godson. It was directed by Roberto Gavaldon.

Poor, hungry peasant Macario longs for just one good meal on the Day of the Dead. In fact, he’s so hungry that after seeing a parade of turkeys, he says that he will no longer eat until his dream of eating an entire roast turkey. His wife steals him one as he goes off to work.

As Macario prepares to eat, three men appear to him. The first one is a fine gentleman who is the Devil and the second is an old man. Macario refuses to share with them, as he believes they are powerful enough to get the food  themselves. But a third man, a peasant much like our hero, gets the turkey right away. And that man is Death.

Death is touched by this and becomes friends with Macario, but they never speak, merely stare at one another. He also gifts him with magical water, which can heal any injury. That gift will lead him through all manner of toil and trouble and one final meal with Death.

You can watch this on YouTube.

The sequel to 2014’s Mexican Barbaros brings together more south of the border filmmakers to create a portmanteau movie that only had one rule: each story had to be about something related to Mexican culture without repeating anything from the first movie.

Tijuana’s Abraham Sanchez starts the movie with Juan the Soldier, a story about a soldier who makes a deal with the devil to come back after his death. Sanchez’s first movie was a short called Antropofagus that cost $20, so he’s my kind of filmmaker.

Diego Cohen made Paidos Phobos, a tale of a mother who is behind a door, hiding, that the main character is afraid to see. Cohen also directed the films La Marca del Demonio and Perididos.

Potzonalli is a fourth-wall-breaking comedy by Fernando Urdapilleta, who also directed Estrellas Solitarias. It’s the story of a father getting his just reward for how he treats his family.

Christian Cueva and Ricardo Farias made Fireballs, the story of demons who transform amateur pornography into a murderous evening. This team is called Giant Stories and they’ve mostly worked on short films.

Michelle Garza’s Vitriol is the story that most point out in this collection. Like most of the directors in this movie, she’s mainly worked on shorts. I’d love to check out her movie La Rabia de Clara, which is about a woman quarantined with rabies yearning to become part of a pack of wild dogs.

Do Not Sleep is a story of old grandmother’s tales by Sergio Tello. It Is Time, by Carlos Melendez, is about bullying, something that the director has explored in other films like Hysteria. And Exodontia, by series boss Lex Ortega, is a frightening tale of the tooth fairy.

While there is no uniting story, the idea of seeing Mexican creatives handling uniquely Mexican themes is the whole reason to see this film. I enjoyed it as much as the original.

You can watch this on Amazon Prime and Tubi.

Translated as Even the Wind Is Afraid, this Carlos Enrique Taboada-directed horror film touches on the gothic and predates a very similar feeling film, Suspiria, by nearly a decade.

It’s all about Claudia, a student who investigates a tower that keeps showing up in her nightmares, where she sees the hung body of a student who killed herself years before and whose ghost has been haunting the teachers.

It turns out that the ghost is real and it is Andrea, a girl who had asked to leave the school to see her dying mother before it was too late. When Bernarda (the principal of the school) refused, Andrea hung herself inside the tower. Now, Andrea will not rest until everyone pays. And for some reason, she’s picked Claudia to help.

This movie was remade as The Wind of Fear in 2007, with Alicia Bonet (who played Claudia) playing her mother.

That said, I’d recommend you check out the original, which was incredibly entertaining. It really does have that feeling of isolation and worry that the teen years engender, with plenty of gothic mood as well. You can see its influence on del Toro’s The Devil’s Backbone, particularly in that movie’s setting.

You can get this on blu ray or DVD from VCI.

Sometimes, your quest for Mexican gold is fruitful. Other times, you discover movies like this, which translates as Night Killer. If you’re thinking — I bet this is a lot like a giallo, you’d be right. But it’s not all that great, I hate to report.

Actually, I take some of that back. Once you get past the cops — who are the most boring parts of any giallo, so director Fernado Duran Rojas gets that right. He also gets the blasting synth parts and lots of gruesome murders correct as well. Yes, that’s right. The same guy who made El Extrano Hijo del Sheriff, which is nuanced by comparison to this.

Edna Bolkan — who was Olivia, the heroine of Grave Robbers and also Don’t Panic right around the same time this was made — is the final girl. Actually, she played Olivia in Cemetery of Terror, too.

That said — if you’re getting into Mexican horror, I can think of a few better films. Same as if you’re looking for a giallo. Let me make the mistakes so you don’t have to.

When it comes to 70’s Mexican horror, the name Carlos Enrique Taboada is one that you can depend on. This one is a modern gothic horror about four young women who get to move into a large mansion with one condition: the dead aunt’s black cat Beker.

Yet when the cat is found dead, so are two of the girls — Aurora (Susana Dosamantes, Brian Trenchard-Smith’s Day of the Assassin) and Pilar (Helena Rojo, Mary, Mary, Bloody Mary).

Ofelia (Claudia Islas, the “Mexican Brigitte Bardot”) and Marta (Lucia Mendez, who as Vanessa was one of the first starring telenovela characters to be killed off) must now try to survive, but seeing as how Marta had joined the other two girls in the killing of the cat, it’s only a matter of time before she joins them in the great beyond.

This is a classy horror film that I’d compare to Corman and Bava, except set in modern Mexico. In 2014, it was remade in America as Darker than Night by Henry Bedwell.

You can watch this on YouTube.