We’re all drowning in content—so it’s time to highlight the best. In her column, published every Friday, critic Clarisse Loughrey recommends a new show to watch. This week: spooky auteur Guillermo del Toro’s loving and stunningly consistent horror anthology, Cabinet of Curiosities.
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities: Season 1
Guillermo del Toro has found a strangely comforting way to introduce his new Netflix anthology series, Cabinet of Curiosities. At the start of each episode, the Oscar-winning director strolls out of the darkness, in the tradition of The Twilight Zone’s Rod Serling and his modern-day successor, Jordan Peele, or Alfred Hitchcock during his television appearances in the sixties.
But that trio of men walked and talked like puppet masters, mischievous and sly, delighted by whatever exquisite intellectual tortures they were about to inflict on their audiences.
There’s not a drop of malice to del Toro’s introductions. He is unfailingly sincere in his musings on magic, mystery, and that titular cabinet, a historical term for any collection of curious and unexplained artefacts, be they unicorn horns or mummified mermaids. The director reveals each story, and each corresponding object, with the delicacy and steady, academic hand of a museum curator.
Each is filled with phantasmagorical terrors—burst eyeballs and exposed ribs, monsters and ghouls—and operates on an uncomplicated fairytale logic. Those who are greedy, curious, or desperate are drawn towards their appropriate fate, as if dealt out by the hand of a tarot reader. It’s almost sweet. Cabinet of Curiosities plays largely like a bedtime story—that is, if you grew up in the Addams household.
I’d expect no less from del Toro, whose films vary wildly in content—from (multiple) sexy fishmen to giant battle robots—but share the same soul. Though he may not have directed any of these episodes, he boasts writing credits on two and co-designed many of their creatures alongside frequent collaborator Guy Davis. There’s a curious kind of alchemy at work here: each of the eight short films, all self-contained, bear the distinctive voice of their individual directors, while also feeling cohesively del Toro-esque.
There are two HP Lovecraft adaptations (Keith Thomas’s Pickman’s Model and Catherine Hardwicke’s Dreams in the Witch House). Both are rooted in the author’s view, as del Toro himself describes, that the world “is a haunted house of cosmic proportions”. There’s a story where fascistic obsessions come to life in a mass of tentacles and death (Lot 36, directed by Guillermo Navarro, who worked as a cinematographer on many of del Toro’s films). There are tales of how man’s greed can quite literally turn monstrous (Vincenzo Natali’s Graveyard Rats). David Prior’s The Autopsy features some shudderingly repulsive body horror.
These are all particular obsessions of del Toro’s. It’s clear the filmmakers featured have such a reverence for the man that there’s a compulsion towards homage, whether in style or content. Bedrooms at night are frequently plunged into an inky mix of oranges and blues, a favourite palette of the director. Clearly, their affections are reciprocated. At the end of each introduction, del Toro sets down a tiny, carved statue of the relevant director—it’s a small, but affecting demonstration of his own appreciation for the craft.
The three most striking, and arguably best, films of Cabinet of Curiosities still find their ties back to del Toro. All share the qualities of a fable. In Ana Lily Amirpour’s The Outside, the A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night director channels her fascination with outsiders into a stern warning about the dangers of allowing consumer society to dictate your worth. “Why do I want to take off all of my skin and throw it in the garbage?” asks Kate Micucci’s Stacey, whose feelings of inadequacy around her co-workers result in a dangerous addiction to a beauty cream sold to her through the TV by a vaguely accented European (Dan Stevens, a riot) who’s seemingly able to talk directly to her.
The Viewing, helmed by Mandy’s Panos Cosmatos, is exactly as psychedelically demented as you’d expect from his previous work. A group of strangers (played by Eric André, Charlyne Yi, Steve Agee, and Michael Therriault) are invited to the home of Lionel Lassiter (Peter Weller). He wines and dines them on 50-year-old Japanese whisky and refined cocaine, before coaxing them towards the latest addition to his collection, focused on what lies “beyond the known”.
The Babadook’s Jennifer Kent directs The Murmuring—the series’s final chapter, based on a concept by del Toro—as a classic gothic ghost story. An ornithologist couple (Essie Davis and Andrew Lincoln) struggle to grieve for their dead child, while finding themselves wrapped up in the tragedies of spirits past. It works for Kent: she revels in the richness of metaphors. It works for del Toro: the supernatural, here, is an urgent whisper from another realm.
Cabinet of Curiosities is full of these idyllic pairings. And there’s no better way to spend this Halloween.
