The iconic fantasy filmmaker William of the Bull has recycled the title of his 2013 book on creative processes, ‘Cabinet of Curiosities’, for a horror anthology that can liven up Halloween marathons. like a new Rod Serling, he presents each episode himself, but, let’s be precise, this would be less his ‘Twilight Zone’ than his ‘Night Gallery’, for not focusing so much on science fiction as on the supernatural and terrifying. And for also containing an adaptation of ‘The Pickman Model’ by H. P. Lovecraft.
In his job as curator, Del Toro has selected the stories (two of them his own) and those in charge of directing them. For agenda reasons, he has left us without an episode signed by himself. He gives the alternative to ascending names (above all) with their own personality, a bit like he has been doing Shyamalan with his selection of directors for ‘Servant’, which has included Julia Ducournau, Kitty Green or Veronika Franz and Severin Fiala.
The first chapter, ‘El trastero 36’, directed by William Navarro (del Toro’s recurring cinematographer), isn’t entirely encouraging, especially as it exemplifies the problem with this and other current anthologies, and the streaming landscape in general: episodes can be too long. More than cutting stories, they taste like long short novels. Curiously, in this story of racist hustlers who bid for the wrong storage room, sometimes there is plenty of footage and sometimes it is not, as in the abrupt climax.
Shorter and more convincing is ‘Ratas de cemetery’, the vision of Vincenzo Nataly from a story by Henry Kuttner already adapted in ‘Trilogy of Terror II’. The director of ‘Cube’ exhibits great sense of the macabre and expressive camera in this tale of grave robber (excellent David Hewlett) against army of rats. And even more electrifying, quietly electrifying, is ‘La autopsia’, in which David Prior (‘The empty man’) knows how to fuse police procedural, science fiction and display of imaginative ‘gore’.
With the estimable but, again, too long ‘The Appearance’, Ana Lily Amirpour (‘A girl comes home alone at night’) seems to be looking for a consumerism satire in the style of ‘The stuff’, Larry Cohen’s eighties classic. Do we consume the products or are they the ones that consume us? What in Cohen was a viscous dessert is here a coveted beauty product that does not know how to stay still inside the bottle. The most curious: its ending is identical to the (quite original) of ‘Pearl’.
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After the halfway point, the anthology reaches a halfway point with two adaptations of the HP Lovecraft legacy, ‘Pickman’s Model’ and ‘Dreams in the Witch’s House’, by, respectively, Keith Thomas (‘The vigil’) and Catherine Hardwicke (‘Twilight’). The former struggles and wants to achieve the climate of fascination necessary in this story about the suggestive power of art. The second zigzags between tones and settings, landscapes and ideas without the back and forth helping to create any kind of narrative tension.
Del Toro saves two of the best dishes for last. In ‘The visit’, Panos Cosmatos (‘Mandy’) returns to the unhealthy retrofuturism from ‘Beyond the black rainbow’ to unravel the impossible visit of a group of four strangers (among them, the great comedian Eric André) to the design house, with its own soundtrack, of a somewhat mystical and disturbing rich man (Peter Weller) . Psychedelia, viscosity and synthesizers (by Daniel Lopatin) rule in an episode that smells like the beginning of something incredible. More concise and direct, ‘El murmurlo’, by Jennifer Kent (‘Babadook’), is a beautiful ghost story in which a kind of explanation is given for the phenomenon of the murmur or coordinated flight of birds. Kent does not waste image or word. He values our time, his time and the opportunity to shine that Del Toro gives him.