Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiousities

Peter Weller in Panos Cosmatos' The Viewing

Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, an anthology series currently streaming on Netflix, will please horror fans. Mr. del Toro gets to emulate Hitchcock by curating and hosting the films. All the films have some redeeming quality, most of which are short story adaptations. What unites the films are their luxe production qualities. When I came of age in the 1960s, horror was the bargain basement genre, but now it is such a commercially popular genre that its budgets are A level. Of course, you can still make good horror with a cheap cast and a barn or ranch house, like Romero, Craven and Hooper, but the roadshow musicals of my youth are long gone; thank god. Some of this is due to the change in the demographics of the audience. The current movie theater audience is younger and more male than in 1965. Perhaps the rise of the modern horror film, ushered in by Rosemary's Baby and The Exorcist, reflects cultural decay, but I think the primary reason boils down to economics. Anyway, I find that The Last House on the Left offers a more compelling artistic and moral statement than Camelot, Paint Your Wagon, Song of Norway, Oliver, 1776, Darling Lilli or Sweet Charity. 

Two of the hour or so long films in the anthology are the standouts. Ana Lily Amirpour's The Outside is an effective example of body horror and satire. The burlesque of consumerism is broad and black, but Amirpour never loses sight of the plight of her plain jane protagonist. It reminded me a lot of Larry Cohen's The Stuff. Panos Cosmatos' follows up his breakthrough, Mandy with The Viewing. Cosmatos style is so extreme that I don't think he is a candidate for mainstream success, yet I think he has a singular brilliance. The bespoke 1979 style of The Viewing with its gold, orange, brown color scheme puts to shame most current period films about the era. Peter Weller is superbly deadpan as the power mad oligarch who intones lines like, "There is no smoking in the obelisk room." There are a number of Lovecraft adaptations in this anthology, but The Viewing, an original script, is the only film to conjure the dread of that twisted master. Cosmatos is too lysergic a filmmaker for most, but I enjoy sampling his Kool-Aid.