Guillermo del Toro’s ascent to the directorial A-list over the past few decades has been heartening to watch for several intertwined reasons. That del Toro is a director of tremendous skill has been apparent since Cronos, his independently made debut feature released in 1993. Since then, del Toro has floated between multiplex-friendly crowd-pleasers like Blade II, Hellboy, and Pacific Rim and artful genre exercises like Pan’s Labyrinth, the Best Picture–winning The Shape of Water, and last year’s underrated noir Nightmare Alley. Beyond the formidable résumé, del Toro has always exuded an infectious exuberance for his passions, particularly horror and science-fiction tales from the genres’ golden ages to their present.
The Netflix series Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities finds him playing host and curator to an octet of tales of the uncanny, roles for which he’s extremely well suited. Del Toro leaves the directing to others, but his taste is all over Cabinet of Curiosities, which favors stories taken from the world of weird fiction, the sort of tales of supernatural horror whose roots (or tentacles) can be traced back to Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft. (Cabinet of Curiosities’ selections include two installments adapted, loosely, from Lovecraft’s work.) The individual episodes are distinctive in look and tone, however. Del Toro’s introductions put special emphasis on each entry’s director, and the series seems to have given its creators a lot of stylistic leeway and room to make their episodes their own.
Like all anthology series, this first season contains both highs and lows, but its highs are quite high, and even its weakest entries are worth a look, particularly for those who aren’t faint of heart (and maybe even want to see a healthy serving of gore, which all but one episode delivers). Below, you’ll find a ranking of all eight episodes along with some content warnings for those who want to be careful about which drawers of del Toro’s cabinet they choose to open.
8. “The Outsideâ€
Adapted from a short story by Emily Carroll, this stylish, candy-colored entry from director Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night) suffers from a problem shared by a handful of Cabinet of Curiosities episodes: It begs to be a tight, 22-minute, Twilight Zone–size episode rather than an hour-long mini-feature. Kate Micucci stars as a bank teller with a fondness for cable TV and taxidermy who feels out of place among her more glamorous co-workers — until she starts using a beauty cream peddled by an unsettling infomercial host (Dan Stevens) who seems to be talking directly to her. Micucci, Stevens, and co-star Martin Starr are all quite fun, but the joke loses all momentum on its way to a gruesome punch line.
Approach with caution if you hate: Irritated skin, creepy lotion, dead ducks
7. “Dreams in the Witch Houseâ€
Lovecraft can be tricky to adapt because so many of his stories are light on plot but heavy on lore, like this 1932 tale about a haunted house and its strange inhabitants. On the other hand, that gives those doing the adapting room to roam if they simply pick and choose which elements to incorporate — like, say, the rat with a human face that plays a central role in this Catherine Hardwicke–directed episode — and build a different story around it. Rupert Grint stars as a haunted man who has never gotten over the death of his twin sister and takes some extraordinary steps to reconnect with her. Like “The Outside,†it runs into pacing problems, and its tone veers from mournful to silly with little warning, but it does feature a surprisingly scary turn from Nia Vardalos as the eponymous witch.
Approach with caution if you hate: Rats with DJ Qualls’s face and voice, witch houses
6. “Graveyard Ratsâ€
Speaking of rats, you can unsurprisingly find them in abundance in this adaptation of a 1936 Henry Kuttner short story directed by Vincenzo Natali (Cube, Splice), which gives veteran character actor David Hewlett a star turn as a cemetery caretaker whose considerable debts have made him resort to grave-robbing. His biggest problem: The rats steal his booty before he can get to it. Or at least he thinks that’s his biggest problem. A morality tale that wouldn’t have seemed out of place in an issue of Tales From the Crypt (or the HBO series it inspired), this installment is straightforward, gross, and filled with rotting corpses. If that sounds like a good time, you won’t be disappointed.
Approach with caution if you hate: Rotting corpses, enclosed spaces, wooden dentures, and … one other thing … What was it? Oh, yeah: rats.
5. “Pickman’s Modelâ€
Directed by Keith Thomas (The Vigil, Firestarter), the better of Cabinet of Curiosities’ two Lovecraft adaptations keeps the twist at the heart of one of the author’s most famous stories (no spoilers here) but uses it to explore what it means for art to reflect our darkest thoughts and instincts. The episode is more often intriguing than fully successful, but it does feature Crispin Glover as the seemingly crazed artist behind a series of horrific paintings, and that goes a long way.
Approach with caution if you hate: Nameless blasphemies with glaring red eyes and bony claws, immortal fountainheads of all panic, mold-caked bodies of the sort that may drive an excitable man to madness
4. “The Autopsyâ€
F. Murray Abraham and Glynn Turman play, respectively, a medical examiner and a small-town sheriff investigating an apparent act of terrorism at a mine that may or may not be tied to a string of disappearances. That intriguing setup eventually gives way to a long, literally visceral sequence in which Abraham’s character gets to the bottom of the mystery via the autopsy promised by the title. The plot, adapted from a story by Michael Shea, feels a bit thin at times, but David Prior’s (The Empty Man) tense direction balances nicely against the dark comedy of Abraham’s performance.
Approach with caution if you hate: Extended scenes of gore and gloops. This is the nastiest episode in Cabinet of Curiosities’ first season, and that’s saying something.
3. “Lot 36â€
Every Cabinet of Curiosities episode is a period piece — the most contemporary, “The Outside,†takes place in a time before streaming services like Netflix dethroned cable — and sometimes that time period seems to have been selected to make a point. Directed by longtime del Toro director of photography Guillermo Navarro, and adapted from a short story written by del Toro himself, “Lot 36†unfolds against the backdrop of Desert Storm. It stars Tim Blake Nelson as Nick, a right-wing talk-radio devotee whose own idea of the New World Order promised by George H.W. Bush doesn’t have room for immigrants. That view, predictably but effectively, comes back to haunt him after he purchases a foreclosed storage locker whose inventory includes some items with a dark history.
Approach with caution if you hate: Corpses, tentacles, monsters — those kinds of things. (But really — if you hate that stuff, why are you watching this show?)
2. “The Viewingâ€
Four 1970s celebrities from the worlds of spiritualism, literature, music, and science find themselves summoned to the mysterious bunkerlike home of a wealthy eccentric (Peter Weller) for purposes unknown. What begins as a strange Q&A session fueled by drugs of escalating intensity eventually gives way to the revelation of the gathering’s true purpose. Director Panos Cosmatos both reprises and sends up the hypnotic style of his films Beyond the Black Rainbow and Mandy (the latter, like “The Viewing,†is co-written by Aaron Stewart-Ahn), contrasting a droning synth score, moody lighting, and a mounting sense of dread with some funny performances by Weller, Charlyne Yi, Eric André, Peacemaker’s Steve Agee, and others.
Approach with caution if you hate: “space cocaine,†a mounting sense of dread that evolves into something quite dreadful
1. “The Murmuringâ€
Reuniting with The Babadook’s Essie Davis, Jennifer Kent delivers this season’s most memorable episode, a mournful ghost story starring Davis and Andrew Lincoln as married ornithologists attempting to work through an unthinkable loss while researching bird behavior on a remote island with a history. Adapted, like “Lot 36,†from a del Toro short story, it’s a restrained installment driven more by emotion and its leads’ strong performances than scares (though it has some of those, too). Cabinet of Curiosities can be watched in any order (and some episodes can be skipped if you’re short on time), but this is one not to be missed.
Approach with caution if you hate: This is Cabinet’s one essentially gore- and shock-free episode. People who really hate birds should probably stay away, however.