The Husband, the Witch-Child, and the Murderous Imagination

Double Feature #2: Él + Poison for the Fairies

by Buzz Drainpipe

for Crease Magazine

Some double features shake hands.

This one slips a note under the door that says:

Belief is dangerous when the wrong person realizes it works.

Luis Buñuel’s Él and Carlos Enrique Taboada’s Poison for the Fairies are not the same kind of movie, unless you are paying attention in the proper basement-light. One is a blackly elegant study of male jealousy, Catholic repression, and bourgeois madness. The other is a schoolgirl witchcraft nightmare where childhood cruelty blooms like mold behind the wallpaper.

But put them together and the wall starts talking.

Both movies are about people who invent a reality, enforce it on others, and then treat the consequences as proof that they were right all along.

That is not fantasy.

That is not horror.

That is civilization with a fever.

I. Él: The Jealous Man as Private Inquisition

In Él, Francisco is not merely jealous. Jealousy is too small a word. Jealousy is the matchbook. Francisco is the whole burning hotel.

He is respectable, religious, wealthy, well-dressed, and insane in the way only a man can be insane when every institution in his life has quietly suggested that his feelings are property law.

He sees a woman. He desires her. He marries her. Then he begins to suspect betrayal everywhere. Not because betrayal exists, necessarily, but because possession is a form of imagination. Once he decides his wife belongs to him, the world becomes a conspiracy against his ownership.

That is the Buñuel poison.

The horror is not that Francisco loses touch with reality.

The horror is that reality keeps giving him furniture.

Churches. Apartments. Servants. Social status. Marriage. Male authority. Polite society. All of it becomes scaffolding for his delusion.

He is a haunted house with cufflinks.

And Buñuel, sweet venomous Buñuel, does not need to make him monstrous in the ordinary way. Francisco does not sprout claws. He does not turn green under moonlight. He simply becomes more himself. That is much worse.

II. Poison for the Fairies: Childhood as a Witch Trial With Better Shoes

Then Poison for the Fairies walks in wearing a school uniform and carrying a knife made of imagination.

Taboada understands something adults hate admitting:

Children do not live in innocence. They live in myth.

They believe harder than adults because they have not yet learned the dull cowardice of “being realistic.” A child can turn a rumor into a kingdom. A lie into a curse. A game into a tribunal. A friendship into a hostage situation.

In Poison for the Fairies, witchcraft is not interesting because we need to know whether magic is “real.” That is the tourist question. The real question is:

What happens when a child discovers that another child believes her?

That is where the movie bites.

The occult here is social power. It is story as weapon. It is class resentment, loneliness, fantasy, domination, fear, and performance all tied together with a black ribbon.

One girl says she is a witch.

Another girl believes her.

And suddenly belief has a body count.

III. The Murderous Theater of Certainty

This is why Él and Poison for the Fairies belong together.

Francisco and the witch-child are both directors of private reality.

Francisco stages marriage as surveillance drama.

The girls stage childhood as occult war.

He uses religion, masculinity, and social standing.

They use folklore, fear, and play.

Different costumes. Same disease.

The adult version says:
“You are guilty because I imagine it.”

The child version says:
“You are doomed because I told the story correctly.”

That is the rotten little hinge of the double feature. These films understand that madness does not always arrive as chaos. Sometimes madness arrives as structure. As rules. As ritual. As someone insisting that the invisible thing is real and everyone else must now live under its ceiling.

That is how jealousy works.

That is how superstition works.

That is how authoritarian households work.

That is how childhood cruelty works.

That is how bad religion works when it stops being mystery and becomes management.

IV. Catholic Smoke in the Wallpaper

Neither film needs to become a church movie to feel Catholic.

In Él, Catholicism is everywhere in the architecture of guilt, purity, possession, confession, punishment, and theatrical suffering. Desire is not allowed to simply be desire. It has to put on a suit, kneel, accuse, sweat, and convert itself into moral procedure.

In Poison for the Fairies, Catholicism is more subterranean, more schoolyard-sacramental. The children inherit a world where symbols have teeth. Good and evil are not abstractions. They are playable roles. Witch. Victim. Saint. Sinner. Accuser. Accused.

The child does not invent the system.

She learns it.

Then she weaponizes it.

That is the real nightmare: childhood does not stand outside adult corruption. Childhood studies it, copies it, improves the user interface, and runs the program with no mercy.

V. Morning-on-Mute Verdict

As a morning double feature, this is nasty elegance.

Él gives you polished surfaces, Catholic shadow, architectural paranoia, faces tightening behind manners.

Poison for the Fairies gives you sunlit dread, schoolgirl cruelty, woods and bedrooms and whispered threats, the terrible brightness of childhood evil.

Muted, they might work even better. You can watch the body language do the talking. Francisco’s face becoming a locked room. The girls drifting through scenes like they are inventing death during recess. The adults failing to notice the spell until the spell has already built a little house.

This is not a “fun” double feature.

This is a watch your own thoughts carefully double feature.

Double Feature #2: The Mind as Haunted Landlord

Él
plus
Poison for the Fairies

A jealous man turns love into prosecution.

A child turns fantasy into execution.

Two Mexican films about the imagination becoming law.

And once imagination becomes law, brother, somebody is always dragged to court. ⚖️🕯️