'Cabinet of Curiosities,' 'Devil's Hour' perfect Halloween

We're closing out this year's spooky season with two engagingly suspenseful streaming series that premiered during the final full week of October 2022.

"Cabinet of Curiosities" on Netflix

Part of what makes Guillermo del Toro such an appealing figure is his effusive enthusiasm for the art of onscreen storytelling itself, which manifests not only in the craftsmanship and ideas inherent in his own films, but also in his frequent tributes to the works of other filmmakers.

"Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities" on Netflix allows the acclaimed director to do more than merely praise the cinematic creations of his peers and influencers, as the eight-episode anthology showcases the lovingly produced narrative experiments of a number of his fellow filmmakers, whose roughly hour-long one-offs del Toro introduces and contextualizes for us viewers at home.

The horror subgenres and historic settings represented in this collection are as diverse and notable as the cast of actors assembled to breathe life into their characters, but with del Toro running the show, it's not surprising to find multiple homages to H.P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos, as well as a general empathy for those excluded by mainstream society.

Del Toro's lineup of directors includes Ana Lily Amirpour of "A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night," Vincenzo Natali of "Cube" and "Splice," and Catherine Hardwicke of "Thirteen" and "Twilight."

They draw haunting performances from performers you'd expect to be that effective, including F. Murray Abraham of "Amadeus" as a dutiful coroner who scores a Pyrrhic victory in "The Autopsy," Crispin Glover of "Back to the Future" as a degenerate artist with dangerously infections visions in "Pickman's Model," and Essie Davis of "The Babadook" as a married birdwatcher whose maternal grief is compounded by the emanations of another family's loss in "The Murmuring."

Those directors also coax unexpectedly heavy performances out of otherwise light comedians, turning trollish talk show host Eric Andre into a surprisingly soulful Phil Spector-esque music producer in the atmospheric 1970s period piece "The Viewing," and shifting standup Kate Micucci's quirkiness from charming to cringeworthy, and then literally skin-crawling, as an existentially dissatisfied working wife in the '80s-set anti-consumerist satire "The Outside," which manages to be as tangibly creepy as 1985's "The Stuff."

Del Toro is also the lifelong horror fan who's gushed over fellow filmmaker David Cronenberg's innate understanding of "the betrayal of the flesh" in movies like "Videodrome," so if there's yet another hallmark of del Toro's work that was bound to be reflected in his "Cabinet of Curiosities," it lies in nearly every episode's visceral level of flesh-rending bloodshed.

Don't eat anything meat-based while you're watching this series, is what I'm saying.

Anthologies are infamously difficult to keep running with a consistent baseline of quality between all their episodes, but "Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities" maintains the most even keel of any current TV series this side of "Star Trek: Strange New Worlds," so here's hoping new seasons of this show become an annual Halloween tradition on Netflix.

'The Devil's Hour' on Amazon Prime

Given how morally mercurial the lead character of the BBC's "Doctor Who" can be, it's little wonder that former lead actors from "Doctor Who" are so often cast as villains, antagonists or psychopaths, and that's just handsome boys Matt Smith and David Tennant.

How's it's taken psychological thrillers this long to weaponize Peter Capaldi's "attack eyebrows" is beyond me, especially in a self-contained six-episode miniseries that sees his character - who's ultimately arrested on suspicion of being a child predator - claim to possess a special relationship with the flow of time.

"The Devil's Hour" leans as hard as possible into every possible Hannibal Lecter trope, right down to having a prison jumpsuit-wearing Capaldi stare unblinkingly into the soul and psyche of his own personal Clarice Starling, a married-but-separated social services worker named Lucy Chambers (played by Jessica Raine), who's also a single mother to an implacably placid grade-school-aged special-needs son, Isaac (Benjamin Chivers).

Not only Lucy and Isaac, but also Lucy's seemingly dementia-addled elderly mother Sylvia (Barbara Marten), all seem to struggle with remembering events that have never happened, or at least, that haven't happened yet.

Raine draws her portrayal of her character's internal turmoil not only from Lucy's inability to solve the riddle of her emotionally absent son - Chivers does an unnervingly solid job for his age of playing Isaac as a total void of a personality, like a walking chalk outline where an actual child should be - but also the persistent set of enigmas that have plagued Lucy throughout her own life, such as why she always wakes up precisely at 3:33 a.m.

When Isaac goes missing in the wake of two otherwise unrelated murders that are forensically confirmed to have been committed by the same killer, Lucy teams with a pair of police detectives, squeamish but committed prodigy Ravi Dhillon (a sensitive, forthright Nikesh Patel) and aging but relentless bulldog Nick Holness (a hilariously unfiltered Alex Ferris).

Much like Anthony Hopkins in "The Silence of the Lambs," Capaldi doesn't command a majority of the screentime, but this remains his show to steal, playing a character so twisted by his experiences that he's rarely more terrifying than when he's earnestly attempting to express empathy, with his jaggedly frosty eyebrows, snarling canine teeth and icy blue eyes.

For those who have been burned by TV shows such as "Lost," or any other series or films to adopt the most onerous aspects of J.J. Abrams' "mystery boxes" or M. Night Shyamalan's twist endings, rest assured that, in spite of invoking both parallel and cyclical timelines, "The Devil's Hour" ties up all of its own loose ends satisfactorily, to the point that I can't even imagine any need for a second season.

Author Bio

Kirk Boxleitner, Reporter

Shelton-Mason County Journal & Belfair Herald
[email protected]