Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities: a successful horror anthology with some narrative deficiencies

Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities (Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities / USA, 2022). Creator: William DelToro. Address: Guillermo Navarro, Vicenzo Natali, David Prior, Ana Lily Amirpour, Keith Thomas, Catherine Hardwicke, Panos Cosmatos, Jennifer Kent. Interpreters: Tim Blake Nelson, Elpidia Carrillo, F Murray Abraham, Rupert Grint, Peter Weller, Essei Davis. Available in: Netflix. Our opinion: Good.

Guillermo del Toro is an avid collector of horror short story anthologies, so it is not unexpected that he has brought back the format for his second project with Netflix, after his imminent version of Pinocchio. in the manner of Alfred Hitchcock Presents either The unknown dimension, its Cabinet of Curiosities is a set of independent stories although united by the genre, which in this case is that variant of the fantastic known as weirdfiction, category that invokes an essentially hostile universe in which evil takes the ominous form of entities far removed from the human. Among the many followers of him, HP Lovecraft is the most recognizable name; two of the episodes, in fact, are based on stories by the American author, and another two on stories by Henry Kuttner and Michael Shea, disciples of the writer.

Del Toro closely follows the format of the aforementioned series, to the point that he himself hosts at the beginning of each episode, just as Hitchcock or showrunner Rod Serling did in The unknown dimension. However, there is a notable difference precisely between the form of these classical series and The Cabinet of Curiosities… Serling imposed an inviolable rule on its authors: each episode had to conclude with an unexpected twist, to the point that many must have been painstakingly constructed from back to front to enhance that final twist. It is worth noting that he did not ask for anything that he did not demand of himself, since it was Serling himself who imagined the unexpected discovery of Charlton Heston in the last 20 seconds of Planet of the Apes (1968) that resignifies the entire film and that was not in the original novel by Pierre Boulle, one of the great endings in the history of cinema.

Despite its excellent technical billing, in many of the episodes of the Mexican director’s series, the narrative construction is weak and does not comply with the traditional requirement, although by no means mandatory, of a forceful ending. It’s almost as if they are arbitrarily interrupted in the second act, with no real dramatic closure. It is true that cosmic horror usually presents open endings that do not point to an occlusion of evil but to the beginning of a new era of terrors, but this characteristic of the genre has nothing to do with the fact that here it is difficult to produce the effect of a conclusion: several of the stories feel truncated, as if the appearance of a monster exempted them from resuming pending narrative lines.

The first chapter, “Lot 36″, one of the two based on an original idea by Del Toro and commanded by his former director of photography Guillermo Navarro, is a clear example of the problem and also, when opening the series, the one that traces the horizon of our expectations. The episode brings into play a set of promising characters as a veteran with gambling debts captured by radio xenophobia alt-right; a mysterious Mexican immigrant who spies on him; a millionaire who practices curious rituals in a gloomy rental warehouse and two booksellers who dispute the black magic books that appeared in the warehouse after the millionaire’s death. However, after introducing these characters, their idiosyncrasies and their potential conflicts, the story gets rid of them to hasten the arrival of a monster that destroys everything. It is not being suggested that all narration must obey the old “Chekhov’s weapon” rule, but there must be some reason to ignore it more compelling than carnivorous cephalopods from another dimension not being aware of the problems of narratology.

“The Viewing”, the chapter written and directed by Panos Cosmatos (Mandy), has a similar deficiency, with a crucial difference in favor of the episode: the center of gravity here is not the enigmas of the story -which is practically non-existent-, but the extraordinary aesthetics of the director, which seems to come from a future imagined from 1982 by a hybrid of John Carpenter and Darío Argento. The rules of this world come from fantastic movies released directly on VHS. Set to the steely techno-pop of Oneohtrix Point Never on the soundtrack, deliberately reminiscent of Carpenter’s pulsating synths, this hyper-stylized fantasy brings Peter Weller to life (Robocop Buckaroo Banzai) in the role of a billionaire who invites a group of notables – an astrophysicist, a novelist, a music producer, a psychic and Gaddafi’s personal doctor (?) – to take a vigorous intake of “space cocaine” before contemplating a meteor. What follows can be described as a lysergic version of the ravenous stain. If the Hollywood Academy incorporated the Oscar for the best orange demon of the year, this chapter has it insured.

The filmmaker David Prior (author of the excellent and ignored The Empty Man) signs “The Autopsy”, another of the most successful episodes and -the exception to the rule- of solid construction: here each element put into play finds its place. F. Murray Abraham plays a forensic pathologist who examines the bodies of the victims of a mine explosion to discover among them a being of unprecedented cruelty. Vincent Natali (The cube) directs the black comedy “Graveyard Rats”, previously adapted to the cinema and in this version driven by the flowery self-pitying monologue of the protagonist: a grave robber who does not stop lamenting his bad luck. Jennifer Kent (The Babadook) takes on the most disparate episode in this context of slimy, tentacular monsters: while the others set the volume to 11, this is a dim, leisurely, Jamesian ghost story starring two ornithologists coming off a family tragedy.

The remaining episodes are the most unsuccessful: they deal with a taxidermist who becomes obsessed with a beauty treatment that comes to life (presented with equal parts grotesque and irony by Ana Lily Amirpour), a painter whose paintings make anyone who looks at them lose their minds. (The first affected must have been the actor Crispin Glover, judging by his unusual performance) and, finally, a young man who manages to rescue his dead sister from the “other side” at a very high cost.

Del Toro selected some of the most celebrated filmmakers of the so-called horror art for his series and put the resources of Netflix at his feet. The result is inevitably uneven, a generality that occurs in almost all episodic work. The particularity of this, however, can also be extended to other recent anthologies such as Love, Death and Robots Because maybe it’s a sign of the times. Perhaps the “golden age” of the series got us used to the fact that a television story should last ten, twenty or fifty hours and, beyond aesthetic or technical virtues, the difficult art no longer of presenting but of closing a captivating narration in 48 minutes or less is something that was lost in the past.