Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities

This collection of original and adapted stories doesn’t feature a single dud, delivering frights, heartache and insanity in excitingly surprising fashion. So electric and inspired are these hour-long episodes that you’ll wish there were twenty more on the way. ... The series is at once cohesive and diverse, tilling familiar soil in order to unearth a bounty of uncanny riches.

The attention to detail in everything from thrill-inducing soundscapes that conjure dug-up graves to meticulously art-directed spaces that are truly haunting elevates these terrifying short horror tales.

Like any horror anthology, Cabinet of Curiosities is hardly perfect (it’d be boring if it were, frankly). But the misses are hardly unforgivable, and the hits are too entertaining to ignore.

So far GdT’s CoC is terrific, and future outings hold even greater promise. STREAM IT, I say, and stream the HELL out of it.

It's not just the promise of a good scare that casts a spell, but it's the exquisite corpses, furnished haunted houses, nightmarish paintings, and more. Every short here has a piece to recommend it, even if some burns can be too slow, or moral lessons a little too pat. ... A treat for fans of standout horror filmmaking.

All in all, Cabinet of Curiosities works because it's just that: A grab bag of different stories, linked together tenuously by del Toro. We never linger too long in one place, and horror benefits from the shadows that it can hide in.

Given the peaks that this series reaches and the overall quality of the filmmaking, this is a smashing success.

A mostly chilling, thrilling selection of scary tales. Guillermo Del Toro has made a selection pack of horror shorts full of ghosts, gore and giggles.

With interesting ideas, haunting visuals and memorable performances scattered across these eight offerings, this is a Halloween treat you'll definitely want more of.

Some episodes are more effective than others. “The Outside” (Wednesday) has a kind of “Don’t Worry Darling” vibe, with a better payoff. It’s genuinely memorable. Not so much with “Dreams of the Witch House” (Thursday), which, despite a game performance by Rupert Grint of “Harry Potter” fame, is borderline campy in its execution. On balance, though, this is a suitably grisly and nightmarish feast for fans of the sinister and the supernatural.

Cabinet of Curiosities feels like a haunted funhouse, as its eight shorts, each one helmed by a different director, reflect an eclectic range of tones and sensibilities.

With contributions from horror luminaries such as Ana Lily Armipour (A Girl Walks Home Alone At Night), the visionary Panos Cosmatos (Mandy) and Jennifer Kent (The Babadook), and stars like Dan Stevens and F. Murray Abraham, there’s a good deal of hope that the series might transcend its conventional presentation and predictability to offer something a little more substantial.

The production design here is something of a headline draw. These dramas have an enticingly grotty sense of place: you can practically smell the dank recesses of a low-rent storage facility in the first episode, Lot 36, which was directed by Del Toro’s one-time cinematographer, Guillermo Navarro. ... The pacing is a little off, though. ... The hope with this thus-far-average show is that the peaks are yet to come.

Cabinet of Curiosities is fairly typical in its anthological unevenness, with two or three clear winners, one or two total duds and a few patchy, well, curiosities. As a bonus, it’s doubtful that any pair of viewers will have the identical heirarchy.

These episodes are often provocative — there’s visual imagination to spare, here, generally tending toward the visceral and gross. But there is, too often, a somewhat trite takeaway. It reverses del Toro’s tendency to find the profound within familiar storytelling tropes: Here, we cross dimensions into the world of eldritch only to find fairly simple morals.

As vanity projects go, his series is considerably less imperious than Hitchcock’s, but it also feels far less likely to make a mark in the long run, or even in its own accelerated, pop-cultural moment.

As a horror maestro and auteur, Guillermo del Toro has earned the right to his moment in the spotlight -- in this case presiding on camera, Alfred Hitchcock style, over "Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities." It's only too bad that this eight-episode Netflix horror anthology lacks the verve of the director's cinematic work, with episodes that feature monstrous special effects but half-baked stories that don't really draw blood.

“Cabinet of Curiosities” is just not very frightening. ... There’s an abundance of visual talent on display in “Cabinet,” but there isn’t a corresponding stock of storytelling imagination.

Sadly, while episode directors such as Vincenzo Natali and Catherine Hardwicke (all of whom del Toro makes sure to verbally credit before throwing to their episode) give their assignments unique visual and stylistic flourishes, the tales they’re tasked with executing are often less than the sum of their parts. Too often there’s gore without scares, punishments that aren’t particularly ironic and stories struggling to justify their run time.