It’s been awhile since I tackled a horror anthology. When they’re good, they do with film what good short story collections do with literature. As I’ve said on a number of occasions, it’s easy for horror to get sort of bogged down in the longer form - I think horror is at its best most often when it’s concise and doesn’t overexplain or overstay its welcome, and the longer the story goes on, the tougher it is to really sustain whatever mood or feeling the story is trying to evoke.
But if I’m being honest, I didn’t necessarily watch Guillermo Del Toro’s Cabinet Of Curiosities with the express intent of writing about it, but it made a distinct impression (not always good, but still), and the film I intended to write about this week ended up being sort of a dud - it wasn’t horror (even by my admittedly generous standards) and moreover it was, well, just sort of there. And I think didn’t think “gosh, that was a really dull story in some very lovely settings” was going to be much of an insight. Cabinet Of Curiosities doesn’t always work - it doesn’t have a single cohesive tone running through the stories, and many of the episodes drag on too long, but there are some real gems in there too.
There are eight episodes, each with a different writer and director, and they end up breaking down into three groups: EC Comics-style morality tales, H.P. Lovecraft adaptations, and more straightforward horror. So, I’m going to group the episodes that way, instead of strictly chronologically.
EC Comics-Style Morality Tales
Episode 1: Lot 36
…and three books about the summoning of demons. The fourth volume is missing, and Nick can get a lot for a complete set.
I think there are a couple of things that keep this from being an especially strong episode. First, it feels like thirty minutes of story rattling around in forty-five minutes of run time. The setup is fairly simple - weaselly jerk gets in over his head out of sheer greed and ends up tinkering with forces he doesn’t understand - but it’s not presented in a way that’s enough to sustain half of a feature-length film. It feels padded, and the time isn’t really used to flesh out the characters. Which is another problem - most of the characters feel like they inhabit the same world, but there are two who feel dropped in from a much more cartoonish story, and it’s jarring as a result. This could have been played much lower-key and I think it would have worked a lot better. But instead we have some unnecessary back-and-forth before the story really comes to a head, and when it does, the inevitable moral comeuppance feels sort of bolted on, like they decided at the last minute to make it that kind of story.
Episode 2: Graveyard Rats
Masson is a grave robber in post-WW1 Salem, Massachusetts, doing his best to keep his head above water. He’s in debt and increasing competition in his unsavory trade is making it harder and harder for him to really bring in profitable hauls. Not to mention the rats, who seem to be able to tunnel right up through the caskets and make off with the pretty, shiny things that Masson needs to make any money. But he gets wind of a wealthy aristocrat who has just been laid to rest, and so once again he sets out in the dead of night, locates the grave, begins digging, unearthing the casket, only to find that the rats have beaten him to the punch, making off with the entire body. The bottom of the casket is completely gone, and in its place, a tunnel leading down deep into the earth.
And so, desperation nipping at his heels, Masson crawls into the earth.
In some ways, this episode is an improvement over Lot 36, in that it’s much more concise. It’s only about eight minutes shorter, but it uses its time much more efficiently, establishing the situation and then using most of its running time on Masson’s claustrophobic journey through an extensive warren running under the graveyard and the horrifying things he finds there. There’s much more beneath the earth than he thought, and what started as a dive down becomes a frenzied scramble to reach the surface. This episode is much more in the classic mold of the EC Comics-style morality tale, complete with a twist comeuppance that ties the whole thing together elegantly. And all of that is good about it, but it’s based on a story from the time in which it’s set, and something about the dialogue, though appropriate for the period, comes off as more affected than anything else. I don’t know if it’s the performances, but it all feels sort of stagey and artificial and so I found it hard to really get into it. Everything felt a little caricatured, and though campy is definitely in the wheelhouse of these sorts of stories, here the ingredients didn’t quite gel.
Episode 4: The Outside
Stacey is a shy, awkward teller at a bank. She has a loving husband, she enjoys doing taxidermy in her spare time, but she feels left out of things at work, where the other tellers - so much prettier and more glamorous - natter on about the expensive, exclusive things they buy, the vacations they take, gossip about the other employees at the bank, and Stacey wants more than anything to be able to join in, to be accepted by the rest of them. And one day, she gets her chance - one of the other tellers invites her to her annual Christmas party, and Stacey does everything she can to doll herself up, labors over just the right present, worries over every detail. And, of course, she’s totally out of place and out of her league among these women, and her handcrafted gift has nothing on the fancy gifts the hostess has gotten everyone - tubes of fancy skin lotion called Alo Glo. It’s the latest thing, extremely hard to get, very exclusive. And Stacey is sure it’s everything she’ll need to be just as pretty as the other women, to finally belong. Except when she uses it, her skin starts to redden and peel. But that’s normal, she thinks. So she uses more. And more.
And her body starts to change.
Of the three morality-tale episodes, this is easily the most successful. It locates body horror in a glossy, garishly colored vision of 1980’s Midwestern life seen through a slightly fisheyed, distorted lens. It all looks slightly unreal, and the performances follow, pitched at a level of deadpan absurdity that brings to mind Fargo by way of David Lynch. Stacey is both protagonist and antagonist, her own worst enemy as her insecurities consume more and more of her waking life. And what I think makes it work is that it’s played very straight, on a very even keel, no matter how horrible it gets (which it definitely does toward the end) and it ends in a way that isn’t typical for morality tales, refusing to tie everything up neatly and ending on a distinctly unsettling note.
H.P. Lovecraft Adaptations
Episode 5: Pickman’s Model
The time is 1909, and the place is an art school in Arkham, Massachusetts. Will Thurber is there to become the best painter he can, to make great art. Like his fellow students, he’s fiery, passionate, and extremely competitive. And mid-term, along comes a new student named Richard Pickman. Pickman is older than the rest of them, and has something of a shadowy past, his family having been the subject of some rumor. But he’s an excellent artist, inspiring a mixture of awe and jealousy in the rest of the students. He seems driven by something, even more than the rest of them, as if he’s trying to exorcise something through his art. He and Will strike up a friendship, and Pickman invites him around to his quarters to view the paintings he’s been working on outside of class.
Paintings that give Will nightmares.
Right off the bat, I’m going to give the filmmakers for both this and the other Lovecraft adaptation props for choosing stories outside of the Cthulhu mythos. That’s already pretty well-trod ground at this point, so it’s nice to see some of his other work getting attention (and removing the grosser elements of Lovecraft’s sensibilities in the process). The settings feel right, and unlike Graveyard Rats, the characters act and sound like people from the early 20th century without coming off as performances or caricatures (though it is sort of interesting to see what part of the U.S. Pickman's accent is going to visit from one scene to another). But I think this episode, more than any other, suffers from an overlong running time. It’s slightly more than an hour, and the original story was pretty succinct, so there’s more than a little wheel-spinning. And, although it’s been a long time since I read the original story, I don’t recall the climax and conclusion being part of the story at all - it’s much more generic horror, out of step with Lovecraft’s style, and feels like it was appended to flesh out the running time. It isn’t necessary and doesn’t add anything to the story.
Episode 6: Dreams In The Witch House
Walter Gilman has spent most of his life trying to part the veil between this world and the next. It’s personal for him, as he saw his ailing twin sister Epperley, in her final moments, dragged away through some portal into a mysterious forest. It’s haunted him ever since, and he’s determined to find a way to get to her and bring her back to the world of the living. But for all of his time as a member of the Spiritualist Society, he’s never found a legitimate instance of someone speaking to the dead. They all end up being frauds and charlatans. At the end of his rope, he follows up on a dubious lead about a substance referred to as “liquid gold” - a drug that allows you to see into the spirit world and gives you access to the “Forest of Lost Souls.” So Walter - at a loss for reliable housing and about to experiment with some really dangerous shit - rents a room in a boarding house that’s seen better days. It’s going for cheap, and the last occupant - a woman named Keziah Mason - was executed for witchcraft.
The walls are covered with arcane writing and symbology. And there’s something scuttling behind them.
Unfortunately, I think this was the nadir of the series - the episode is disjointed, the performances range from decent to hammy, there’s not much of a clear through-line for the story, and things that I’m pretty sure worked well on the page end up coming across as silly on the screen. Is it the quality of the effects? Is it being maybe too faithful to the text? Possibly. All I know is that between one particular casting choice (whose performance is fine), the setting, and the way the story is realized, the whole thing sort of feels like Harry Potter on bath salts, but not, you know, in a good way.
Straightforward Horror
Episode 4: The Autopsy
It all begins with a horrible mining accident. An elevator full of miners is coming up at the end of their shift, when one of them, Joe Allen, comes barreling along behind, landing on top of the elevator cage. Something tumbles out of his hand - some kind of small, spherical piece of technology. It starts humming and beeping, and then it explodes, killing him and the other miners. This is the worst accident they’ve seen in awhile, and so the sheriff, Nate Craven, calls in for expert help. There are something like eleven autopsies that need to be conducted in short order, so the mining company can distance themselves from it and avoid any liability. So Nate calls in his old friend, a medical examiner named Dr. Carl Winters. Carl’s getting on in years, but he’s very good at his job, and knows the score. A makeshift morgue has been set up for him, and he’s going to be at it all night. Once he’s settled in and has all of his equipment laid out, he looks at the file to determine where to start.
And as he does, Joe Allen’s body starts to move.
I think all of the straightforward horror episodes are the strongest ones in the series, and this one’s a doozy. It’s got a great graveyard shift vibe, this doctor all alone across the hall from a roomful of corpses, lit from above, everything else silent as the rest of the town sleeps. The performances are convincing and understated, with some later revelations emerging naturally from what went before. And once it gets rolling, it’s a doozy - sharp, merciless, grisly, and even more impressive, it’s as carried by one extremely unnerving monologue as it is the more explicit stuff. In its own way, it’s as Lovecraftian as the actual Lovecraft adaptations (if not moreso) and it just tightens the screws tighter and tighter and tighter until it ends with a great twist and moment of discovery. Short-form horror at its best.
Episode 7: The Viewing
It is very much 1979, and wealthy, enigmatic recluse Lionel Lassiter has invited four people to his home for a special occasion. There’s the famous music producer Randall Roth, astronomer Charlotte Xie, best-selling author Guy Landon, and celebrity psychic Targ Reinhhard. If they know each other at all, it’s only by reputation, and none of them really know why they’ve been invited here. Lassiter and his doctor, known only as “Dr. Zahra,” want their input into the nature of an artifact that has come into his possession. Words, music, the mind, the stars - he thinks all of these will be important. So he prepares them with a mixture of cocaine and a bespoke drug of Dr. Zahra’s design, to put them all on the same wavelength. They walk into the next room, where the artifact sits on a pedestal, part sculpture, part meteor.
And then someone touches it.
What follows is mostly everything going berserk all at once. This episode was directed by Panos Cosmatos, whose previous films - Mandy and Beyond The Black Rainbow - are definitely an acquired taste, but one that I very much have. If you’re on his very specific wavelength, you’ll be into it. If not, it’ll probably seem like self-indulgent nonsense. And it sort of is. His films are very much about style and aesthetic over everything else, but it works, at least for me, because in addition to pressing very specific aesthetic buttons that are very much my shit, he turns everything up to the point of near-surrealism. This is no different. Lassiter’s house is a marvel of early 80s cocaine chic (complete with gold-plated AK-47), the majority of it is shot like a music video from the time period, and Lassiter is delightfully sinister - like Timothy Leary gone rancid. When things pop off (literally, in some cases), it lurches immediately into Cronenberg territory, a little bit of alien biology and a little bit of Scanners. Sure, some of the other characters are saddled with kind of goofy dialogue and Cosmatos really likes his shaggy-dog endings (which I think is a weakness), but if you can overlook those things, this is a ride - equally strange, funny, and gross.
Episode 8; The Murmuring
And then Nancy starts seeing apparitions - a crying boy, and a screaming woman.
This is very much a straightforward ghost story in the traditional style - beautiful old home with lots of secrets and dark corners, beautifully overcast and windswept vistas, and ghostly figures urging someone to tell their story. Much of the tension comes from Edgar’s insistence that Nancy is seeing (and hearing) things as the result of unprocessed grief and Nancy trying to convince Edgar that what she’s seeing is real while at the same time being in absolute denial about her grief. So it’s as much a story about the corrosive effects of unprocessed grief and trauma as it is about the supernatural and how one parallels the other (much like the director’s equally excellent prior film, The Babadook). It’s spooky without relying on jump scares, atmospheric, and smart, with excellent performances from both protagonists.
So by my estimation, about half of the episodes are good (with two being flat-out excellent), three are flawed, and one just doesn’t work. Given how diverse the episodes are in tone and how different the source material and directors are, this is probably not a bad ratio. I’d be happy to see another season of this, if only to see more good work from established writers and directors and picking up some new ones to check out. And, apart from some of the stuff from Turkey and India that they’ve got right now, some of the better examples of horror on Netflix right now.
IMDB entry
Available on Netflix
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