CABINET OF CURIOSITIES – Reviewed by Neil Healy
Would you watch a cross between Tales from the Crypt and Alfred Hitchcock Presents? An eight-episode TV series overflowing with body horror, mystery, and slashers? Guillermo Del Toro’s, one of our greatest living horror filmmakers, delivers in Cabinet of Curiosities a horror anthology streaming television series created for Netflix.
Feeling much like Pan’s Labyrinth and Nightmare Alley, each story is a dark tale of what might have been, as all hope turns to disaster. Each story takes you quickly down a path to destruction, each is a puzzle encased in foreboding, and almost overbearing dread.
Del Toro’s picks include the Canadian sci-fi creator Vincenzo Natali, the Texan Catherine Hardwicke (who directed the first “Twilight”), Iranian American provocateur Ana Lily Amirpour, who is best known for her vampire film “A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.” “The Outside,” which she directs, is an extreme self-improvement tale, starring Kate Micucci as an insecure woman attempting to physically reinvent herself.
In “Cabinet of Curiosities” Del Toro cherishes his directors. He introduces each director as a figurine, naming them every time to the point of giving them character in a time when streaming makes shorts even more appealing. He gives them personalities, allowing us to understand them.
Del Toro, a firebrand in the horror business, did not direct any of the eight short films in the Netflix anthology, but he recruited the writers and directors, and the series does seem like a salute to the master by his respected directors.
-Neil Healy
