If you are a fan of the macabre and horror, then surely you caught director Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities when it was released on Netflix in October. The horror anthology was created by Del Toro specifically for Netflix, with the episodes being released two at a time over a span of four days.
With each installment ranging from 38 minutes to just over an hour, del Toro made it possible for eight different filmmakers and directors to bring their visions for these stories to life. The series starts and ends with stories that were co-written by Guillermo himself: Lot 36 starring Tim Blake Nelson (The Ballad of Buster Scruggs) and The Murmuring starring Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) and Andrew Lincoln (The Walking Dead). Along with other short horror stories that he wanted to pull from the pages and make for the screen, he also included two stories by renowned horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. His goal was to focus on stories and characters that had yet to be adapted all while supporting the community he has been a part of for his entire career.
What Fans Loved About Season 1
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A multi-talented and well-known writer and director, Guillermo del Toro has flexed his creativity in everything from books to movies and even video games. With titles such as Pan’s Labyrinth, Pacific Rim, Hellboy, The Shape of Water, and even the nostalgic Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark under his belt, del Toro has been delighting and amazing his fans for years. And while he has shown that he can tackle any genre successfully, it is clear that fantasy, horror, and monster/creature design are where his talents truly lie.
While del Toro uses eight different directors for the installments of Cabinet of Curiosities, none of them being himself, it is easy to spot how he had his hand in the creature and monster design for the show. Director Catherine Hardwicke (Red Riding Hood and Twilight) was in charge of one of the Lovecraft adaptations, Dreams in the Witchhouse. Rupert Grint stars as Walter Gilman, a researcher who lost his sister to an illness at a young age. As a man, he spends his time experimenting with a mysterious drug that allows him to cross over to another realm in which he hopes to find his long-dead sister and bring her back to life. It is here that the audience gets to see del Toro’s influence on the creature design. Hardwicke even said this in an interview with Entertainment Weekly.
Other highly rated fan favorites from season one were The Autopsy where a medical examiner played by F. Murray Abraham (The White Lotus) is called in to help his old friend examine dead bodies to try to solve the eerie and unsettling mystery of their deaths, and Graveyard Rats which stars David Hewlett (who has previously worked with del Toro in Nightmare Alley and The Shape of Water) as a man desperate to pay off his debts by robbing graves situated on top of a convoluted maze of tunnels filled with rats he must stave off while attempting to steal from rich people’s coffins.
“He’s got these fantastic artists who do conceptual stuff,” Hardwicke says of Del Toro’s operation. “So I gave a lot of ideas to them and we would brainstorm, me and the artist, and go to the sculptors’ studio. We tried things on, like fur and everything. Then [Guillermo] would look at everything too, and either sign off on it or come up with an even more crazy-ass idea: ‘I love the rat. Let’s give him some more boils and pus!’ I would be like, ‘Yeah, that’s awesome.’”
What Could Happen with a Second Season
With the star-studded list of actors, writers, and directors for this series, Guillermo del Toro certainly set the bar high with his work on the first season of this show. Though as of this time, another season of Cabinet of Curiosities has not yet been greenlit or confirmed at Netflix, del Toro has already started making plans for when or if it does get renewed. Even with his other projects, like the stop-motion version of Pinnochio that was recently released on Netflix and the upcoming sequel for Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark (currently in pre-production), he has not lost sight of the goal he set in curating the tales for his Cabinet of Curiosities.
In the first season, he pulled in directors like Ana Lily Amirpour (The Twilight Zone), Panos Cosmatos (Mandy), and Guillermo Navarro (Pan’s Labyrinth). For the possible second season, del Toro is looking at directors he had in mind previously but who had other scheduling conflicts. He wants to bring on Jayro Bustamante (La Llorona), Issa Lopez (True Detective), Boots Riley (Sorry to Bother You), and Larry Fessenden (Habit).
If Netflix sees fit to renew Cabinet of Curiosities for another season, del Toro’s solid plans and creative input will surely not disappoint fans of horror and the macabre.
