Poison for the Fairies (1986)
When Flavia is enrolled at a new school she is befriended by Verónica, an unpopular orphan who lives with her ailing grandmother and whose nanny regales her with tales of witches, fairies and spells. What begins as an innocent enough friendship soon turns coercive, as Verónica confides to Flavia that she is a witch in disguise, making Flavia a reluctant accomplice in several acts of wickedness. As the line between what is real and what is imagined begins to blur, Flavia descends into a terrifying spiral of magic, manipulation, petty jealousy, and murder.
Written and directed by Carlos Enrique Taboada, and part of a rich tradition of Mexican Gothic horror cinema - which includes such titles as The Witch’s Mirror (1962) and The Curse of the Crying Woman (1961) - Poison for the Fairies unfurls as a complex study of the fraught and intense friendship between two impressionable girls whose dabbling in witchcraft and descent into occultism leads to tragedy. While it quite comfortably slots into the sub-genre of ‘malevolent children’ (which includes the likes of The Bad Seed, Orphan, The Innocents, Children of the Corn), Poison for the Fairies is also elevated to something much more disturbing thanks to an exceptionally nuanced screenplay. It unfolds as a study of manipulation, betrayal and the all-too real horror of adolescence. Verónica’s (Ana Patricia Rojo) insistence that she’s a witch – and the subsequent events her spells appear to invoke – casts a spell of its own on Flavia (Elsa María Gutiérrez), who becomes increasingly wary and unsure of her friend. Much of the power of the film lies in its exploration of the evolving relationship between the girls. What begins as two outsiders being drawn to each other, finding common ground and kinship, soon becomes an intense and toxic friendship. The girls are initially inseparable, but Verónica soon becomes more demanding and more manipulative, using coercion, blackmail, and outright threats of supernatural violence to get her way. Due to the influence Verónica exerts over her, Flavia becomes increasingly ostracised from her family, leaving herself vulnerable to Verónica’s demands.
There’s a clear divide between the worlds of the girls and of the adults in their lives. We never see the faces of the adults (except in moments of horror – the grandmother’s disfigured features startling Flavia, the staring, blank eyes of a dead body), so we can never properly gage who they are or have any insight of their interactions with the girls. This heightens the sense of a hermitically sealed little world in which the girls navigate, and the disconnect between their fantasy-infused mindset and that of the rational adult intellect. It also places the adults firmly on the periphery of the story, unaware of the dynamics of the girls’ friendship, and the tragedy towards which it is heading. As the narrative focus is always on the girls and how they see the world, events become increasingly intense, fraught with tension and terror, drawing us into a rich, folkloric space of spells, Satanic pacts, and transformation. The magnitude of Flavia’s fear and worry as Verónica’s behaviour becomes increasingly alarming fuels tension throughout, and the differences in the girls’ backgrounds and family life can be read as a reflection on class and religious belief. Flavia’s parents are modern in their outlook, cosmopolitan, and atheist. She is raised surrounded by rationality and pragmatism. Verónica, on the other hand, is essentially raised by her working-class nanny, who regales her with stories of superstition, witches, and the devil. The girl also absorbs the influence of her seemingly ancient grandmother, in the form of old books of fairy tales and ghost stories passed down to her. Verónica feels envious of the wealth of Flavia’s family, and the attention she receives from her parents, and when Verónica begins to exert her influence and control over Flavia, her jealously comes with a high price.
Taboada infuses the film with striking, nightmarish imagery; from the opening images of a young girl gradually changing into an old crone, and the clawed hand-like tree branch scraping at a bedroom window, to the shadow of a hunched, cackling witch stirring a cauldron in the barn, the film is suffused with fairy tale moments of terror which echo from childhood. While some of the more fantastical occurrences could be explained away rationally, to the young girl protagonists they are very real and very menacing. The horror emanates from the ambiguity – it’s never clarified if Verónica is really a witch, or if the girls just have vivid imaginations. There's also horror in the power one girl wields over the other, with the helplessness of the latter feeding into ideas concerning peer pressure, loyalty and extreme bonds of friendship. Certain events seem to suggest there is something sinister afoot, but these could be cruel coincidences. And because they keep their actions and beliefs secret from the adults, the world the girls inhabit becomes increasingly claustrophobic, their intense friendship gradually turning nightmarish.
Poison for the Fairies (which I first heard about in the documentary 1000 Women in Horror) is a deeply haunting, Gothic fairy tale, deftly conveying the heightened reality of childhood, where everything becomes menacing and overwhelming, and all that is held to be true and steadfast, utterly diminishes with the dimming of the light.
