Guillermo Del Toro, the Oscar-winning director of Pan’s Labyrinth and The Shape of Water, is having a busy year. As well as seeing his passion project, a stop-motion version of Pinocchio, finally come out, the director has produced a Netflix horror anthology series â and now the first trailer for it has been released.
“Cabinet of Curiosities is a show that I always wanted to make,” says Del Toro in the teaser alongside some increasingly ominous music. “In this anthology, we gave ownership of each episode to the directors. Each of the episodes has a whole world. They present you with different delights. Some are savoury, some are sweet. You get a surprise from each of the bites.”
The series will be made up of eight episodes, released daily from October 25 â just in time for Halloween. Del Toro has written the story for two of the episodes, with other directors and writers given control of the remaining six.
And if the teaser is anything to go by, it’s going to be incredibly scary. In one scene there’s a woman with blood splashed across her face, in another, a metal rod of some kind is squished into someone’s face. In another, there’s a graveyard at night (of course), in another an older couple dances in a dusty house, and in another a hand appears on a woman’s shoulder while she cuddles a baby. It’s all really spooky.
“We wanted to create beautiful, practical creatures. With Cabinet of Curiosities what I’m trying to say is look: the world is beautiful and horrible at exactly the same time,” adds Del Toro.
Del Toro has written The Murmuring which has Jennifer Kent (who made the horror film The Babadook) onboard as director, and Lot 36, which has been directed by Oscar-winning cinematographer and longtime Del Toro-collaborator Guillermo Navarro.
David Prior (a longtime collaborator of director David Fincher) is behind the episode The Autopsy, which is based on a novel by World Fantasy Award-winning author Michael Shea. Director Keith Thomas’ episode, Pickman’s Model, is based on a short story by horror writer H. P. Lovecraft and directors Panos Cosmatos, Catherine Hardwicke and Vincenzo Natali are also directing, as is Ana Lily Amirpour, the creator of the “Iranian vampire Western” film A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night.
The most famous cast member to star is Rupert Grint, who will feature in Hardwicke’s episode Dreams in the Witch House.
This isn’t the first series that Del Toro has been involved with, nor is it the director’s first time working with the streaming site: his Pinocchio film is being released with Netflix, and Del Toro has previously written five fantasy series.
