Mexican horror is commonly associated with masked wrestlers battling rubber monsters, but carries an altogether subtler strain embodied in the films of writer-producer-director Carlos Enrique Taboada. Taboada began his career writing B pictures with vampires and such but later developed his own distinctive voice in low-budget genre fare. Movies like Even the Wind is Afraid (1968), The Stone Book (1968) and Blacker Than Night (1974) evoked chills through atmosphere and strong performances rather than cheap monster masks. His final film, Veneno paras las hadas (Poison for the Fairies) was possibly his most potent, trading the supernatural subject matter of his early offerings for more potent psychological terror laced the elements of childhood fantasy that left a lasting impression on one of Taboada’s biggest admirers: Guillermo Del Toro.
A sepia toned prologue follows a creepy little girl, actually a witch in disguise, who slits a woman’s throat as bright red blood splatters the floor. This turns out to be a story told to entertain wide-eyed, little Veronica (Ana Patricia Rojo), whose imagination is fired by tales of witches, fairies and ghosts. “Witches can do anything”, the family housemaid tells her. After the opening credits roll over the unsettling image of a young girl slowly morphing into a cackling old crone, the story proper finds Flavia (Elsa Maria Gutiérrez), a meek and trusting little girl from a wealthy family, enrol at the girls’ school where she is befriended by Veronica.
Convinced Veronica is a witch in disguise, thanks to a trick she employs posing her grandmother as her true form, Flavia innocently asks whether she can help her avoid taking piano lessons. Veronica extracts a drop of blood and invokes Satan in a bogus black magic ritual. Whereupon Flavia’s piano teacher drops dead, actually from a stroke but the child suspects otherwise. Now Veronica has a hold on Flavia. She helps herself to Flavia’s toys and makes her take the blame for pranks she plays at school, but the friendship that blooms between the two seems genuine. That is until the pair are caught concocting a poison made from snakeskin, toadstools, live frogs and cemetery soil and Flavia reveals their “secret” to her father, thus angering Veronica.
This is an eerie and poetic children’s horror that really gets under your skin. Taboada offers the flipside to The Spirit of the Beehive (1973). Here childish flights of fancy are not a source of wonder but dread and adult logic has no place in a world that seems alien, yet unsettlingly familiar like some half-remembered dream, since we were all children once. Just as in Charles Schultz’s Peanuts cartoons, grownups are only glimpsed in the background, their voices heard but faces never seen. They are removed from the private fantasy world of children where petty grievances seem like life and death and an active imagination makes ghost and magic come alive. Taboada makes inspired use of familiar childhood terrors: tree branches claw at the bedroom window, a museum full of mummies seem to come alive, witches haunt Flavia’s dreams, the girls candlelit trek through a haunted forests. He also makes evocative use of the rural landscape with its spooky ruins, complemented by the beautiful score by Carlos Jimenez Mabarak.
There is a conservative undertone given it seems to imply fantasy and childish games can corrupt young minds, but the film avoids the crass elements that marred the thematically similar Little Sweetheart (1989) and its dark denouement truly haunts. Angelic Ana Paticia Rojo, who went on to become a popular star in Mexican telenovellas, makes a chillingly spiteful little minx while co-star Elsa Maria Guitiérrez - in what was regrettably her only film role - is equally compelling.
