Horror As Folk: Friendship is (Black) Magic in Poison for the Fairies (1986)

Poison for the Fairies is one of those movies that has been on my radar for so long that I can no longer remember how it originally got there. Chances are, it was recommended by someone who was comparing it to the early, Spanish-language films of Guillermo del Toro – if it wasn’t recommended by Del Toro himself.

The comparison makes sense, even if this tale of toxic friendships, childhood imagination, witchcraft, and the (not always beneficent) power of storytelling has more in common with some other films that we’ve covered here in the past, most notably Celia (1989) and The Reflecting Skin (1990). It would also make a good double-feature with Heavenly Creatures (1994), a picture with a not-that-different logline.

Poison for the Fairies is about two little girls growing up in Mexico City. Veronica is obsessed with stories of witches and mummies and such – who wouldn’t be? – and Flavia, a new girl at school, becomes obsessed with Veronica. Once Veronica convinces Flavia that she is, in fact, a witch, with dark powers granted by pacts with Satan, and who knows secrets told to her by a taxidermied owl, the two enter into a toxic friendship in which Veronica preys upon Flavia, leading to inevitable tragedy.

Ultimately, Poison for the Fairies is a naturalistic tale. Veronica’s “powers” are nothing more than manipulation and coincidence, and the only glimpses we get into the supernatural come from dream sequences and imagination. We know all that early on, but Flavia doesn’t, and one of the things that Poison for the Fairies does exceptionally well is grounding us in the lives of its young protagonists.

One of the most striking – and oft-discussed – elements of how this is done is the decision to never show us the faces of adults. There are roughly three exceptions to this, and all of them are scare sequences, showing how the adult world stays siloed from that of children except in moments that are often jarring, frightening, or confusing.

It could easily be a heavy-handed technique, but here it works in tandem with the rest of the film’s themes to always feel obvious but rarely like it’s beating you over the head. Indeed, the depiction of childhood presented here feels more real and lived-in than most that has ever been put on film before or since.

Despite the fact that this is a coming-of-age story (of sorts), its themes aren’t all limited to those we experience as children. The relationship between Flavia and Veronica is one whose specifics are rooted in that age, but whose broad strokes can happen to us at any point in our lives, and Flavia’s story, in particular, is a showcase for how we are inescapably drawn to the things that frighten us, and often to the things that are bad for us.

It would be easy enough for the film to paint Veronica as villain, with Flavia trapped in her web. But Flavia returns to the trap willingly on more than one occasion, drawn by that same instinct that makes us peek between our fingers to see something that we know will frighten us. We don’t always want what is good for us, even when we wish we did, and the tragic relationship between Veronica and Flavia plays out because of that conflicting desire, as much as because of Veronica’s deceptions or petty cruelties.

One of the last directing credits from Carlo Enrique Taboada, who made a number of supernatural horror films in Mexico in the 1960s and into the ‘70s, Poison for the Fairies is also probably his most well-known movie, at least in the States. Taboada seems to have had a particular gift for titles, and some of his other films include Blacker Than the Night (1975) and Even the Wind is Afraid (1968), which may just boast one of the best titles of all time. Vinegar Syndrome recently put out a collection of some of his later films, consisting of Poison for the Fairies, Blacker Than the Night, and Rapina (1973).

At the time of this writing, I haven’t seen any of Taboada’s other films, so I can’t speak to how reflective Poison for the Fairies is of his entire oeuvre, though it does seem that children take center stage in several of his gothics.

Like many of the other films I compared it to, Poison for the Fairies nabs its nominal folk horror status by dint of the fact that Veronica’s fantasies about witchcraft and fairies are informed by the folk stories that her Nanna tells her before bed. These stories partake of actual folklore in the same way that fairy tales do, but are filtered through Nanna’s own memory and then filtered again through Veronica’s imagination, and the imagination of Flavia, as Veronica conveys these figments to her as truths.

As Veronica and Flavia are conducting a ritual to put a hex on Flavia’s piano teacher, she asks Veronica why the candles are black, to which Veronica replies simply, “That’s the way the devil likes them.”

Ultimately, one of the most interesting things about watching Poison for the Fairies in the year 2024 is how much it feels like it could have come out yesterday. Slap a droning semi-synth score on this thing, and it could be an upcoming A24 headliner. That isn’t always complimentary – but in this case, it is.