In addition to being a beloved and Oscar-winning director, Guillermo del Toro is also a relentless champion of other filmmakers, from his recent impassioned Twitter defense of Martin Scorsese against a dismissive essay to his years-ago commentary track for his monster movie “Mimic” where he offers an unsolicited and enthusiastic recommendation of the film’s two direct-to-video sequels. (They were made without his involvement; he just genuinely likes them, possibly more than his own original!) So while plenty of other figures might be adept at filling an Alfred Hitchcock-style role as a impresario of ghoulish tales, it feels particularly fitting to see del Toro lend both his name and personality to “Cabinet of Curiosities,” a Netflix anthology series where eight different filmmakers are given around an hour to tell a creepy and/or chilling and/or goopy horror story — primarily set in the past, though presumably that wasn’t a requirement.
This eclectic group of horror and horror-adjacent directors includes material that should be hotly anticipated by genre fans. The third episode, “The Autopsy,” is David Prior’s first fiction piece since his long-shelved, now cult-building horror film “The Empty Man,” while the eighth, “The Murmuring,” represents “The Babadook” director Jennifer Kent’s return to horror, as well as a reunion with that film’s star Essie Davis.
“The Murmuring” is something of an outlier in this series — a statelier bit of ghostly gothic that’s as much domestic drama as it is horror. Many of the other mini-movies here tend toward the Lovecraftian; two, in fact, are directly based on H.P. Lovecraft stories, while a third is based on a story from one of his contemporaries. Strangely, two similarly tentacle-heavy figures that appear in two early episodes — “Lot 36,” from Guillermo Navarro, and “The Autopsy,” from Prior — are not the Lovecraft creations here, nor is the mysterious object at the center of “The Viewing,” from “Mandy” director Panos Cosmatos, where a seemingly disparate group of people is gathered with the promise of seeing something amazing.
Arriving as the seventh episode of eight, “The Viewing” almost plays like a parody of the pacing of some of the other stories, playfully running out the clock with period detail and stylized atmosphere before finally unleashing a gnarly climax. That structure recurs throughout the series without the mischievous wink Cosmatos brings to it. In other episodes, the development of characters like a racist scavenger (Tim Blake Nelson) raiding abandoned storage lockers in “Lot 36” and a misfit housewife (Kate Micucci) in thrall of a supposedly life-altering new lotion in Ana Lily Amirpour’s “The Outside” tends to be repetitive and caricatured. Similarly (and less gruesomely entertaining), the plotting of Catherine Hardwicke’s “Dreams in the Witch House” and Keith Thomas’s “Pickman’s Model” (both, strangely, the actual Lovecraft adaptations) wears out their respective stories’ welcome well before their hour is up.
Even those two weaker installments, though, feature detailed production design, effective performances, and impressive creature work; all eight episodes have their charms, and in terms of filmmaking bona fides “Cabinet of Curiosities” defies the conventional wisdom about the vexing inconsistency of anthologies. With television, at least, the format can offer a welcome unevenness-by-design back to a medium that’s been consumed with the idea of making 10-chapter novels or 13-hour movies for the small screen. If anything, “Cabinet of Curiosities” could have stood a little more inconsistency related to its pacing, running time, or tone; Kent’s “Murmuring” is a memorable season-capper not because it’s especially scary (compared to her features, it’s almost disappointingly gentle), but because it’s doing something so different from its siblings. “The Outside” also stands out, with its mish-mashing of late-20th-century signifiers into a cartoonishly unspecified period. The best of the lot may also be the shortest: “Graveyard Rats,” a wild and macabre descent into, well, pretty much what it sounds like.
Other viewers’ mileage may vary, depending on their personal interest in a director’s particular style, and/or their personal tolerance for vividly rendered gore; “The Autopsy” is a major undertaking on both counts, solidifying David Prior’s fusion of the natural and the uncanny as near-instantly recognizable while indulging some literal gut-wrenching.
If the cautionary-tale backbone of many of these stories eventually grows predictable, and if the running times may inspire nostalgia for the days of the tight network-mandated 44 minutes, the del Toro-like willingness of “Cabinet” to support and spotlight its filmmakers’ various styles remains undiminished to the end.
The first two episodes of “Cabinet of Curiosities” premiere on Oct. 25 with two additional episodes every day through Oct. 28.
