The First Sound Film

In 1931, the German filmmaker Fritz Lang directed M, his first sound film. The plot of the movie is simple. The city of Dusseldorf lives in fear of a serial killer of girls and there is a massive search underway to find him. In 1931, the sound film industry was still in its infancy. In fact there are many sequences in the film that could be in silent movies, sequences without dialogues in which the ambient sound is ignored, as when the police do the raid in the red light district (no sirens, no car noises, nothing) (Prince, 2007).

Practically all the directors of that time came from the silent cinema, which amounts to knowing how to narrate only with images. Guillermo Del Toro, however, was quite used to the sound film industry, having a successful career in it.

Not all directors seem to understand that one of the great strengths of film is being able to use sound dramatically in the horror genre in order to better engage the audience, but both Lang and Del Toro exemplify this.

Director Fritz Lang’s M, was his extraordinary first venture into sound film, both through the use of dialogues, leitmotif, and even the absence of sound in many cases, to describe the search for the killer on which the movie centers on. At the beginning of M, Lang uses little dialogue, and focuses on the empty staircase, on the plate on the table waiting for the arrival of Elsie, all in silence, setting the ominous tone for what is to come.

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In Cronos, there is also little dialogue but the dialogue is fewermore present. There are also less actors throughout the movie than there are in M.

During the first three-quarters of an hour of the film, M, we hardly see M, only a brief shot before the mirror. The other moment, also brief, in which it appears, is in the murder of the girl. We see how he tricks her by buying her a balloon and how she takes it, but only through his back and his shadow. Lang uses a leitmotif, thewhistle that accompanies the protagonist throughout the film, to instill a feeling of threat to overwhelm the audience every time they hear it (Prince, 2007). In contrast, in Cronos, Del Toro more often employs the use of dramatic music to set the tone for each scene, affecting the overall emotion from a musical standpoint. This is an evident difference between a movie from 1931 versus a movie from 1993. Production-wise, Del Toro had access to much more modern and effective design technologies.

Though similar in genre, M and Cronos use different dramatic approaches to induce a sense of fear in the audience. In M, the shot in which the murderer’s shadow obscures the police poster against which little Elsie plays ball, or the two scenes which indicate the murder of the girl (a ball rolls off into a bush, the balloon that the murderer had bought the girl appears entangled in electrical cables) are some of the images with which Lang creates the disturbing atmosphere that will mark the whole film. Cronos is also a film of the horror genre but is also more fantastical in approach, being that the protagonist drinks blood and chases immortality.

In Cronos, del Toro creates many of the same style shots, shots meant to express the emotion of the scene, but there is a greater focus on the dramatic visual effects, especially makeup and costume design which increase its visual impact on the audience. The costume design and makeup in M were quite natural and period-appropriate, as film noirs of that time were accustomed to (Prince, 2007). Though it is obviously due to the dates in which each movie was made, M being far older than Cronos, the special effects of Cronos are significantly more advanced, such as when the device adheres to the hand and chest of Gris to extract blood.