Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities’ on Netflix, A Star-Studded Horror Anthology Series From the Modern Master of the Macabre

God – or Satan, or who or whatever – bless Guillermo del Toro for being the modern torchbearer for the macabre. The filmmaker behind Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water gives his name and creative direction to the Netflix horror-thriller anthology series Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, which rolls out with two episodes daily Oct. 25-28. Our man GdT wrangled an impressive roster of directors including Panos Cosmatos (Mandy), Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), Catherine Hardwicke (Twilight!), Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night), David Prior (The Empty Man), Kieth Thomas (the underrated The Vigil) and Vincenzo Natali (Splice), with some episodes based on del Toro short stories and H.P. Lovecraft ditties, and with David S. Goyer among the writing credits, and cast members including Peter Weller, Crispin Glover (!), Nia Vardalos (!!), Sofia Boutella, Rupert Grint, Charlyne Yi and Andrew Lincoln. Are you impressed? You should be. The series launches with the GdT and Regina Corrado-penned Lot 36, directed by frequent GdT collaborator and cinematographer Guillermo Navarro – which we fired up with great anticipation. Here’s how it went.

GUILLERMO DEL TORO’S CABINET OF CURIOSITIES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: Guillermo del Toro emerges from the darkness to introduce the first story, and turns the crank on an antique cabinet. Is it a curious cabinet, you may ask? Yes. VERY CURIOUS INDEED.

The Gist: A gross old man (James Neely) shuffles away from the George H. W. Bush “new world order” speech on TV to his kitchen, where he’s cleaving a skinned animal carcass. Chop, the head with its nasty mottled eyeballs falls off onto the floor, and it might be a cat, or maybe something not of this world, I can’t quite tell. He bends over to pick up the gooey skull and crashes to the floor. Dead. RIP ugly gross guy, we hardly knew ye, but considering the sinister vibes and the looks and the likely smells of your grubby place and your grubby self, we’re probably better off.

Cut to: A wiry fella driving a truck and listening to racist “white rights” talk radio. I’m not sure we ever catch the fella’s name, but he’s played by Mr. R-U-N-N-O-F-T himself, Tim Blake Nelson, so it kind of goes without saying that he looks a bit like sentient beef jerky with permanent bedhead (and I say that with nothing but affection and admiration). He pulls up to a storage facility in Buffalo, where the Manager (Demetrius Grosse) heads up an auction for an unclaimed mystery lot behind a locked door. It’s rigged. Our Wiry Fella outbids everyone then meets up with Manager afterwards. They have a deal. Wiry Fella wins the lot, sells the stuff with value and Manager gets a cut. It’s absolutely worth noting that Manager is a Black man and Wiry Fella almost certainly doesn’t like Black people – or anyone who isn’t white, considering how cruelly he treats a Latina woman (Elpidia Carrillo) whose stuff was accidentally auctioned out from under her. Wiry Fella’s whole life philosophy seems to be, too bad for you, I got mine.

Anyway, Wiry Fella’s latest lot, Lot 36, belongs to Old Gross Man from the opening. Manager shows him the security footage of Old Gross Man doing a curious hop-three-times ritual before entering and leaving the unit; he did it every day for years, arriving with something in a bag and leaving with the bag empty. Eh, must be nothing. Wiry Fella starts rooting around the storage unit and he finds – what do you think he finds? A rare, complete set of Garbage Pail Kids cards? Three thousand Beanie Babies? No! A “seance table.” With a pentagram sigil carved into the top. NEAT. He gets an old woman (Martha Burns) to appraise it and she raises an eyebrow at the three books in the table’s hidden drawer and calls in a German gent (Sebastian Roche) who gets all a-titter about this: $10k for the books, but $300k if they can find the ultra-rare fourth book. So off they go, back to Lot 36, where the search for Book 4 is sure to be uneventful, so you might as well stop watching now.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? If GdT isn’t inspired by Alfred Hitchcock Presents and The Twilight Zone, I’ll eat Old Gross Man’s kitten pot pie or whatever he was about to make. Shudder turned Creepshow from movie to series a few years back, and it’s still running. And Black Mirror explores similar anthological territory.

Our Take: One of Navarro’s clever devices here is the storage facility light with a shutoff timer. So as our bitter bastard of a protagonist inevitably scampers in terror through the dingy old storage facility, the light keeps shutting off and he needs to twist it back on: Tick tick tick click OFF scamper scamper scamper fzzzzt ON. There’s nothing like inconsistent lighting to amplify the freakout factor of a big crazy hectic impending-doom climactic sequence!

Lot 36 is very much in the King-Hitchcock-Serling tradition, flavored with some succulent GdT occult flourishes (think GdT-produced film The Orphanage). It stirs up a little subtextual, um, effluvia in the racial tension of the business partnership between Wiry Fella and Manager, and in Wiry Fella’s heavily implied war-vet trauma. Otherwise, the film – and you won’t be surprised to learn that it feels more like a “short film” than “TV” – isn’t about that much, per se, beyond its captivating blend of creepy atmospherics and detailed visual panache (enjoy the early-’90s ephemera). Its greedy-selfish-jerk-gets-more-than-he-bargained-for irony-laced comeuppance and ability to inspire a few ghoulish laughs is classic fodder for horror shorts. It tightropes between homage and pastiche, but frankly, splitting that hair is silly when considering how entertaining this lovely bit of grotesquerie is.

Sex and Skin: None in the first episode, but the content description includes “nudity,” so hey, boobs and/or butts pending!

Parting Shot: Tick tick tick tick tick CLICK.

Sleeper Star: Roche – the type of delectable character actor that this series has no shortage of – teeters oh-so-perfectly on the edge of camp as the German man who knows a thing or three about devils and imps and the like.

Most Pilot-y Line: Decontextualized: “In my field, they call it ‘effluvia.’”

Our Call: At one point Wiry Fella declares, “I’m not interested in any of this creepshow shit you favor,” but he only speaks for himself, because so far GdT’s CoC is terrific, and future outings hold even greater promise. STREAM IT, I say, and stream the HELL out of it.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com.