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There's nothing new about horror anthologies on television, seen from The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits to somewhat recent titles like Channel Zero and Black Mirror. The anthology has been making somewhat of a comeback, with American Horror Stories, Love, Death + Robots, Creepshow and many more having aired this year alone. The great thing about anthologies is their capacity to showcase a wide spectrum of talent; there is certainly a lot of talent out there, but for anthologies, it really comes down to who is curating it.
Guillermo Del Toro is a passionate lover of film and horror in particular who has lent his skills and assistance to many great directors and projects over the year. The vast amount of movies that simply pay him a "Special Thanks" is a testament to this, as are the many stories from directors like James Cameron and Ana Lily Amirpour about his kindness and eagerness to help. That's part of what makes him an excellent curator — he's got the rolodex to prove it.
Guillermo Del Toro Curates an Excellent Anthology
Having worked on the project for several years on and off, he now brings us Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, a new eight-episode horror anthology on Netflix. The series is based loosely around the premise of the titular cabinet, which was historically an often ornately designed piece of furniture (or sometimes a room) that collected bizarre, exotic, disturbing, or rare memorabilia. Del Toro introduces each episode with his baroque cabinet, speaking a few brief sentences before introducing each short film and its corresponding director, which are the real curiosities Del Toro has curated.
He's utterly charming but is hardly the focus, with Del Toro instead ceding control almost instantly after the start of each episode in a way that makes Rod Serling seem loquacious. The sparseness of his presence is a bit disappointing but makes sense; this is, after all, about what he has curated for us. The episodes are directed by several of the best directors working today (along with a couple of great surprises), and features a delightfully broad range of actors in consistently high-quality productions. The stories are very different, but combined, provide some thoughtful insight into the nature of possession, ownership, and collecting.
A few episodes are genuinely frightening, and nearly every episode makes great use of atmospheric dread (and the Netflix budget), but Cabinet of Curiosities is hardly extreme. If anything, this is a great crossover series, a well-produced inclusion to any horror hound's watch list but also a prime pick for viewers who may only tune into the spooky stuff on a seasonal basis. It's not perfect, but it's about as prestige as horror anthologies get, and Netflix seems to know it — instead of the 'drop and stop' method of releasing everything at once, they will be releasing two episodes a day for four days beginning Oct. 25th. Here's a brief glimpse and review of each episode in order.
Lot 36 (Oct. 25)
Lot 36 begins Cabinet of Curiosities with a very strong performance in an unfortunately weak episode. Tim Blake Nelson, a great actor and director, is wonderful as an angry man whose desperation and misanthropy are boiling over. With a debt past due and the deadline fast approaching, he purchases a storage room in an auction, hoping to find some expensive detritus. What he finds, though, may be dangerously devilish.
Director Guillermo Navarro is a master cinematographer, winning an Oscar for Pan's Labyrinth and doing classic work on many Robert Rodriguez films, a Quentin Tarantino movie, Night at the Museum, and more. He knows how to film darkness, which helps a lot in the cavernous corridors of Lot 36, set almost entirely inside a storage unit (which hearkens back to the motifs of ownership and collecting). However, he's not great with pacing and is unable to build much tension at all, partly due to a surprisingly weak and obvious script.
Graveyard Rats (Oct. 25)
Graveyard Rats is the first glimpse of just how incredibly entertaining Cabinet of Curiosities can be when everything is working right. The shortest entry in this show features a wonderfully shameless man, also trying to repay a debt (perhaps another motif); his family has owned a cemetery for generations though, so he pilfers the graves to pay off what he owes. His graveyard seems to have a rat problem, and soon he finds himself fighting off ferocious rodents in order to steal some skeletal treasure.
The brilliant Vincenzo Natali (Cube, Cypher, Nothing, Splice) directs Graveyard Rats with his usual finesse and imaginative designs, casting his longtime friend and cult favorite actor David Hewlett in the lead role of 'Old Masson.' Hewlett brings everything he has to the grueling part, which often sees him crawling through spaces that would kill a claustrophobe. The character is delightfully memorable, a man from a formerly wealthy family who sweet-talks everyone but can't disguise how pathetic he's become. Robbing graves and shouting at rats, praying for mercy whenever he's in a bind, he's the utter personification of a rapscallion.
Aside from Hewlett's unforgettable performance, Graveyard Rats has some really frightful moments that land even more effectively when interwoven with the more comical scenes. The sets, costumes, and effects are wonderful here in this nasty little gem that continues to explore the idea of what it means to really own something.
The Autopsy (Oct. 26)
Undoubtedly the most stomach-churning entry in Cabinet of Curiosities, The Autopsy at least warns viewers with its very title. Despite the nauseating imagery, though, this is one of the tightest, most interesting segments in the series, wasting no time whatsoever as it puts everything in place for a stunning (and sickening) conclusion. Cleverly directed by David Prior (The Empty Man), it's the best thing that the great David S. Goyer (Dark City, Blade, The Dark Knight) has written in years.
The legendary F. Murray Abraham plays a coroner who arrives in a small town to investigate some extremely strange recent events. Welcomed by the confounded detective (the always great Glynn Turman, whose career is like a wonderful scrapbook of cultural significance), Abraham's character is tasked with cutting open the weirdly mutilated bodies of a recent explosion. He delves deeper into the mystery (and viscera of human guts), not realizing what's waiting for him.
The Outside (Oct. 26)
Leave it to the endlessly awesome Ana Lily Amirpour (The Bad Batch, A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) to make one of the most iconoclastic entries in Cabinet of Curiosities. The Outside is a difficult film to pin down, but an immensely haunting and sad one that asks confrontational questions about beauty, self-image, and narcissism. Amirpour's film finds the very funny Kate Micucci of Garfunkel & Oates going all-in on a very different kind of performance, playing a suburban bank teller who develops an unhealthy relationship with a moisturizing cream.
Filmed in pastels and with Amirpour's usual visual flair, The Outside alternates between uncomfortable humor, melancholic character study, and disturbing psychodrama as the woman's mental health seemingly deteriorates while a hilariously creepy Dan Stevens talks to her from the television set. Also starring the lovably dry Martin Starr, The Outside isn't exactly scary, but it worms its way into your thoughts and may be the most haunting entry here.
Pickman's Model (Oct. 27)
A patient period drama that's ultimately horrifying, Pickman's Model initiates a night of Lovecraftian horror for Cabinet of Curiosities. A dark, moody meditation on art and beauty, Pickman's Model follows the prized student of an art school (the underrated Ben Barnes) after he encounters the horrifying paintings of the mysterious Pickman. Played by a perfectly concentrated Crispin Glover in one of those performances that seem too weird to be true, Pickman is an artistic genius whose morbid paintings seem to be capable of sending people into madness.
Glover's portrayal of an obsessive artist, with an exaggerated New England accent, squinting eyes, nervous demeanor, and dark wisdom chiseled into his face, is essential viewing; it may not be everyone's cup of tea, but it can't be ignored. Keith Thomas (The Vigil, Firestarter) does a great job at bringing to life the early 20th century and creates some of the most visually splendid but terrifying tableaus in the series.
Dreams in the Witch House (Oct. 27)
Catherine Hardwicke (Thirteen, Twilight, Red Riding Hood) has always done a good job at grounding fantastical or melodramatic stories in simple, realistic relationships often caught in the stasis of an arrested development. This is why her and Mika Watkins' reworking of Lovecraft's Dreams in the Witch House works as well as it does; without her, the changes made to the original story may have been too superficial. Instead, she takes the notoriously abstract tale of non-Euclidean nightmares and situates it in a grounded sibling relationship.
The greatly underused Rupert Grint has progressed so much further than Ron Weasley in Harry Potter and has perfected a kind of hollowed-out world-weariness despite his irrevocably youthful demeanor, something he uses to great effect here. He plays a man seeking out proof of the supernatural in order to get into contact with his sister, whose ghost he witnessed as a child before it was sucked into some forested dimension. Through the use of drugs and some investigative digging, he ends up in a decrepit house attempting to reach his dead sister, not realizing the evil forces he's disrupting.
The Viewing (Oct. 28)
Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow, Mandy) is a visionary with an anomalistic, uncompromising style, so of course, his entry stands out completely from the rest of the horror anthology. The Viewing looks and feels like no other moment in the otherwise cohesive series, but oddly enough, it's probably the most appropriate and pertinent segment on a thematic level, what with its study of ownership and collectors. Like his feature-length films, The Viewing is extremely rich, the caloric equivalent of eating dark chocolate for an hour. It's absolutely gorgeous on all levels, a blast of amazing visuals, sounds, dialogue, performances, and practical effects.
This ingenious treat follows four people, masters of their respective fields (science, music, literature, spirituality), as they attend a special 'viewing' from a rich old man at his mysterious compound. There, they indulge in philosophical conversation, disguised barbs, and a whole lot of drugs before their wealthy benefactor takes them to see the disturbing new item he's added to his collection. Starring Peter Weller in an instantly iconic role, alongside the very funny Eric Andre, Steve Agee, Charlyne Yi, and Michael Therriault (with a scene-stealing, entrancing Sofia Boutella), The Viewing is pure aesthetic indulgence, and one of the best hours of television this year.
The Murmuring (Oct. 28)
Jennifer Kent (The Babadook, The Nightingale) reunites with the always incredible Essie Davis for the most emotional hour of Cabinet of Curiosities, the quietly powerful segment The Murmuring. Davis and the beloved Andrew Lincoln (aka Rick Grimes for Walking Dead heads) are phenomenal as married ornithologists in the 1950s who go on a work trip to study their bird of choice on an isolated, perpetually gray island. At their rented house, Davis' character Nancy has some chilling encounters with the supernatural, all of which forces her to confront her own demons.
Davis, one of the finest and yet most underrated actors today, is gut-wrenchingly powerful here (while Lincoln, with a fully-developed character, is very generous in supporting her). Though her Murmuring character is incredibly different, it is similar to her Babadook character in that she plays a mother dealing with intense emotional horrors; in both cases, Kent is able to draw every last scrap of intensity from Davis, who gives a thrillingly vulnerable performance here. The Murmuring ends Cabinet of Curiosities with neither a bang nor a whimper, but rather a powerhouse of genuine human feeling and surprising beauty.
Produced by Exile Entertainment and Double Dare You, Guillermo Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities will be released over four consecutive days on Netflix beginning Oct. 25th.