4 out of 5

Created by: Guillermo del Toro

covers season 1

If I’ve had an issue with Guillermo del Toro’s work, overall, it’s that for someone associated with often such fantastical visuals and ideas, I don’t know that I’ve ever been much surprised by any of his movies. And I suppose I want those things to be together, especially given del Toro’s appreciation for some darker themes surrounding loss, and trauma: I want the macabre and gothic productions; the Lovecraftian creatures and undertones; and I want to be surprised by the story.

While it’s as imperfect as any horror anthology, by sitting back and acting as a producer, and gifting his name to ‘Cabinet of Curiosities,’ del Toro had allowed for that wished-for combo, with absurd and dark subject matter, some grand practical and digital effects, and a true element if surprise – sometimes for worse, mostly for better, I had no idea where many of these episodes were going. Even when acting as the story source / writer of a couple entries – the bookends – the particular visions of the assigned directors gives the tellings, logically, their own flavor, and then it’s all wrapped in a very del Toro “style” that extracts the whimsy from Burton and slathers it in otherworldly good.

The entries are all directed by known quantities in the horror or horror-adjacent world, and we get indulgences or missteps that might be familiar to those creatives – underwhelming scares; jumping the shark with mood – and scripts can seem stretched to fill the full hour runtime, or pretty blatant in their messaging, but none seem phoned in from a writing, acting, visualization or production perspective, and, as mentioned, despite whatever flaws, there really wasn’t an episode where I knew every beat it would hit. Most importantly for a horror series, there didn’t seem to be a mandate that an ending had to be happy, or downtrodden, or a Tales from the Crypt twist, so again – you just kind of had to watch. And give me imperfect but unpredictable horror with these design aesthetics, and I’ll show up every time.

Drawing a nice circle around the package are del Toro’s intros. Acting as our Hitchcockian host, I loved the mystery box gimmick (taking an episode-relevant item from a many-drawered puzzle box) and the way he wouldn’t mask the artifice, explaining the general plot and naming the director of the episode. It’s just a very confident, artistic approach that leant the series an immediate sense of gravitas.

Will you be scared? Probably not. Grossed out on occasion, maybe annoyed at some plot points, maybe wishing for X, Y, or Z, but… not bored, and thus always interested to see what the next episode offers.