Cronos

An antiques dealer finds a gold clockwork device in the base of a statue. It bites him. He gets younger and cannot stop wanting something.

Del Toro made it in Mexico for about two million dollars, mortgaging his house and his car and spending eight years developing it. Every mechanical effect in the device was built by his own company.

The film is not about horror of the vampire so much as about indignity: Jesús hides in a bathroom licking blood from a floor, hides the change from his family, and is slowly humiliated by a body he did not ask for.

Federico Luppi plays it with total dignity, which makes it worse, and the granddaughter never once treats him as a monster.

Ron Perlman is in it, playing an American thug, and it began a working relationship that has lasted three decades.