Show Review: Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities    

On Oct. 25 of 2022, horror anthology Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities premiered on Netflix. Created by the director of Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape of Water, and Pacific Rim, Cabinet of Curiosities is a fresh, chilling take on classics of the horror genre.

The majority of the anthology’s episodes are translated from literature into film, such as famed horror stories “The Graveyard Rats”by Henry Kuttner, featuring a desperate graverobber neck-deep in debt who comes face to face with a horde of body-snatching rats which he chases through tunnels that surround a sinister ruin; and “Pickman’s Model” by H. P. Lovecraft., which follows the tragic friendship between passionate art curator William Thurber and sadistic artist Richard Pickman, whose paintings hypnotize and torment the minds of their viewers unto suicidal and murderous madness.

Each episode is captained by its own director, showcasing styles of both veterans and newcomers of horror cinematography, and allowing the series to alternatingly focus on gothic, fantastical, and suspenseful elements of horror depending on each director’s respective strengths. Among the anthology’s directors are David Prior, director of recent cult film The Empty Man; The Babadook’s Jennifer Kent, and frequent partner of Del Toro, Guillermo Navarro.

Fans of horror will find that these film adaptations have retained their inspirations’ characteristic dark and dismal atmospheres, bloodcurdling suspense, and macabre imagery. Audiences may also note that the anthology’s eight episodes consistently follow a pattern of intensifying, increasingly unsettling buildups that conclude in horrifying epiphanies of poetic justice and nightmarish revelations about humanity in the face of the unknown.

As the show often interweaves the gruesome with the philosophical, some episodes may seem to lose their pace at times before driving the story’s main point home, particularly in scenes that focus on characters’ conversations with each other, often concerning their life stories, experiences, or outlooks on life.

One can speculate that these pauses or sudden changes in pace are intentional so as to mirror reading experiences of gothic horror’s tradition of lingering on descriptions and building atmospheres before proceeding with stories’ events. Whether this is the case, what the show lacks in momentum is often made up for with embellishments of blood, viscera, snarls, and character developments that might otherwise not be found in their literary progenitors.

Through his creation and execution of this harrowing and inventive anthology, Del Toro has done honor to multiple geniuses of horror, and has provided them with another way to be remembered among audiences of today by adapting their stories for a new generation of readers and viewers.

Aside from lovers of gothic or science-fiction horror, the content of this anthology may especially appeal to fans of shows with elements of variety, violence, and strangeness, like American Horror Story, Channel Zero, or Love, Death, and Robots; or to fans of dystopias with dark atmospheres and thematically philosophical leanings like Black Mirror. 

From ancient demons to eldritch gods, graverobbers to mad artists, Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities delivers new perspectives on enduring pieces of macabre horror, filled with varieties of darkness and brutality that will find their way into the hearts of both new and long-time fans of the vast, ever-growing genre.  

If you are sensitive to violence, gore, or other such content, do not watch the show reviewed above. This is a show targeting audiences of horror and is not for the faint of heart, or stomach.