What You Need to Know Before Watching or Producing Something Like This
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities premiered on Netflix in October 2022. It is an eight-episode horror anthology series that del Toro executive produced and directed the first episode himself. Each episode has a different director behind the camera, drawn from internationally recognized genre filmmakers. The concept is straightforward: eight standalone stories, eight distinct visual languages, tied together by a framing sequence. I spent time on the technical side of similar anthology productions during my early career, and what people often miss is how much the format actually stresses your pipeline. When you have eight directors each bringing their own crew, lighting philosophy, and VFX vendor to the table, coordination becomes the real bottleneck. Not the storytelling. The coordination.
Cabinet Of Curiosities Guillermo Del Toro: What It Actually Is
The series consists of eight episodes, each roughly 45 to 65 minutes long. Del Toro himself directed the premiere, "The Automatic Theatre," which serves as both a standalone story and the framing device for the rest of the season. The other directors include Andrew Drummond ("Picklock"), Johan Renck ("The Outside"), Gita Pullapilly ("Lottery Ticket"), Javier Ruiz Caldera ("The Viewing Glass"), Neasa Hardiman ("Graveyard Rats"), Vincenzo Natali ("Dreamage"), and Vincenzo Smith ("The Eye"). The production ran through Pinewood Studios, with significant work done on LED volume stages for certain sequences. This was one of the earlier large-scale uses of virtual production techniques within a horror anthology framework. Not every episode used the same technology, and that inconsistency was intentional rather than a budget issue.
Why the Format Matters More Than You'd Think
Anthology series have a structural problem that nobody talks about enough. Every episode needs to feel like it belongs to the same world, but also stand alone tonally and visually. Del Toro solved this with the frame narrative: a collector narrating each story. It gives the show a consistent voice without forcing all eight directors to copy each other's aesthetics. That decision alone probably saved the production from becoming a visual mess. When I was working on a project with a similar multi-director structure a few years back, we ran into a specific problem with color grading. Each director's colorist was pulling from a different LUT foundation, and when we tried to composite them into a unified show grade, the skin tones shifted unpredictably between episodes. The workaround was relatively simple but expensive: we sent every episode's raw LOG footage to a single central color grading facility instead of letting each director grade independently. It added about three weeks to post and cost roughly 40 percent more than our initial budget, but the final output didn't look like eight separate films accidentally glued together.
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The Technical Breakdown You Probably Haven't Seen
The show was shot primarily on ARRI Alexa mini LF cameras, with some episodes using older Alexa models depending on what each director's DP had access to. The mixed camera package is another thing most viewers never notice but that causes genuine headaches in post. If you're working in a environment where different cameras feed different dynamic range characteristics, matching them in post takes considerably more time than if you'd standardized on one sensor from day one. Pinewood's Stage 1 and the LED volume area were the primary shooting locations. For "The Outside," Renck used the Volume extensively for the forest sequences, replacing practical sets with real-time rendered environments. The practical advantage here is obvious: you can change the lighting of a virtual environment in post rather than reconstructing physical sets. The disadvantage is that you need strong VFX supervision from pre-production, not after principal photography wraps. I've seen projects waste weeks because the VFX team wasn't on set during shooting and couldn't provide the tracking data the volume needed in real time.
Production Design and Practical Effects
Del Toro's episode leans heavily on practical effects and puppetry for the automaton sequences. The other episodes mix practical and digital approaches unevenly. "Graveyard Rats" by Neasa Hardiman uses minimal creature effects and relies more on atmosphere and performance. "The Automatic Theatre" features some of the most intricate practical work in the entire season, including custom-built animatronic puppets. If you're researching this for your own production, pay attention to how del Toro separates what gets built physically versus what gets added digitally. He tends to light practical elements on set and only extend them in post, rather than building full digital replacements. This approach looks more consistent on screen because the practical elements share the same lighting information as the surrounding environment. It's a small detail that most people won't consciously notice, but wrong and the whole thing looks like a video game cutscene.
What the Show Gets Wrong and Where It Fails
The anthology format has real limitations. Some episodes are genuinely strong and others are forgettable. "The Outside" was praised for its atmospheric tension but criticized for a pacing problem in the second act. "Lottery Ticket" had an interesting premise but the execution was widely considered uneven. When every episode is a standalone film, there's no opportunity to build momentum across a season the way a serialized show can. Each episode has to earn its own audience from minute one, which means weaker scripts sink faster because there's no character arc carrying them forward. From a production standpoint, the biggest limitation is scheduling. Getting eight established directors to work on a single project at different times stretches your crew rotation and equipment availability thin. Several crew members reported burnout from cycling through eight completely different visual styles over a compressed schedule. If you're considering a similar format, plan for at least 30 percent more post-production time than a standard single-director project of the same episode count.
Where to Watch It
The series is available exclusively on Netflix. All eight episodes dropped simultaneously on October 25, 2022. There have been no announcements about a second season as of now. Del Toro has mentioned interest in returning to the format, but nothing materialized past the first season. If you're looking to study this for production purposes, I'd recommend watching the episodes in order but paying particular attention to the transition between "The Automatic Theatre" and "Picklock." The contrast between del Toro's practical-heavy approach and Drummond's more stripped-down style immediately establishes what each director brings to the table. That pattern repeats throughout the season, and understanding it will help you recognize why certain episodes feel more cohesive than others.
A Note on Replicating the Approach
I've had people ask me about attempting a similar multi-director anthology, and my honest answer is that you need either a substantial budget or a very clear creative mandate from the start. The most common mistake I see is letting each director operate in isolation without a centralized visual bible. Del Toro's role as executive producer and framing storyteller was essential precisely because he was the single point of creative authority keeping everything coherent. Without that kind of oversight, you end up with eight unrelated short films that happen to share a title card. The show runs about 8 hours total. It's not perfect, but it's one of the more ambitious horror anthology projectsNetflix has produced, and the technical choices behind it are worth studying if you're working in genre production yourself.
