Poison For the Fairies & The Wolf House
This week's double feature brings a pair of dark fairytales, of a kind, united by childhood horrors...although the depth and scope is a little different.
Poison for the Fairies (Veneno para las hadas) is a 1984 Mexican production written, directed, and produced by Carlos Enrique Taboada. Although it was made and released in the 80s, it feels much more like a 1950s movie, both in terms of production value, plot structure, pacing, and basic vibes...although the twist at the end is certainly not Hays Code-approved.
It's a story about Veronica, a young orphan living alone in a villa with her creepy grandma and superstitious nanny, who fills her head with all sorts of dark folklore, and Flavia, a wealthy kid who's new in school and looking for a friend. Flavia latches onto Veronica early on, intrigued by the other girl's wildness and insistence that she is a witch with powers. At one point, Veronica talks Flavia into performing a spell to enter a pact with the devil, and Flavia's music teacher dies soon after; Veronica uses this as blackmail any time Flavia tries to disobey her or break up their friendship. But after coercing her to do all sorts of things, Veronica goes too far, and Flavia retaliates.
This is mostly a story about feral, witchy little girls and how awful kids are to each other, and it really resonated with me in that way. At various times in life, I have been both of these kids. The child actors are great, and the film does some interesting thing with its camera work, almost never showing adult faces in frame and relying on off-angles and mirrors to convey duplicitous characterization. The pace plods along, though, and I found it more cozy and frequently kind of adorable than frightening, although I suppose some may find the ending quite disturbing.
The Wolf House is a 2018 Chilean film directed by Cristobal Leon and Joaquin Cocina, and written by Alejandra Moffat. It's a stop-motion animation movie framed as a Nazi-era propaganda film about an isolated colony--inspired by the atrocities of the historical Colonia Dignidad.
Plot-wise, the film is very loosely a retelling of the Three Little Pigs. It's about a girl who runs away from the colony and tries to live on her own while a menacing wolf lurks around outside. But this isn't really a plot film. It's a film built on vibes, and it conjures up themes of depersonalization, helplessness, cult indoctrination, sexual assault, and much more.
I was very excited for this one and did not leave disappointed. It is agonizingly bleak and viscerally disturbing and very, very weird. It's also unlike anything I've ever watched, in terms of animation. Just, trust me on this, go watch it yourself because it's a film that must be experienced rather than understood.
I also appreciate that it led me to read up more on Colonia Dignidad, because I'd never heard of that before and now I know a lot more about the atrocities of Paul Schafer, William Branham, and Augusto Pinochet....which I think was probably the ultimate hope of making a movie like this, that people would be curious enough to learn more and for these lives and what they endured to be remembered.
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