The Oscar-winning director’s eight part anthology is full of delectably nasty tales brimming with some of the most exciting voices in horror
There are few safer bets than being a Guillermo del Toro fan. Whether he’s breathing life into a wooden puppet, having Sally Hawkins fall in love with a fish, or defending Martin Scorsese online, he is a seemingly endless source of delight. In the run-up to Halloween, he continues to bear fruit with his Cabinet of Curiosities (Netflix), an eight-part series that is as elegant as it is grotesque. While it is assumed that in any anthology series there will be hits and misses, nothing in this cabinet is worth discarding.
Del Toro has written two of the episodes but “curated” them all, and assembled eight directors to create self-contained nightmares. He appears at the start of each, not unlike Rod Serling in The Twilight Zone. But Del Toro cuts a more sinister figure, with a firmly unsmiling expression as he ominously presents each episode as though it were a cursed object. The literal cabinet appears alongside him, an ornate wooden structure that resembles a many-tiered mansion; its contents, we are told, range from keys to bones to unicorn horns. Meanwhile, Del Toro’s cabinet is also brimming with some of the most exciting voices in horror, including Jennifer Kent of The Babadook, Ana Lily Amirpour of A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night and David Prior of The Empty Man. But each keeps their offering rooted in Guillermo’s signature style of the twisted fairytale, packed with stomach-churning effects and morbid morality. This is a cabinet in which hubris leads you to hell and cruelty comes back tenfold.
