The famous Mexican filmmaker Guillermo del Toro is a kind of curator of this anthology horror series made up of eight short films. Two episodes were filmed based on his short stories, two were based on the stories of the legendary horror author HP Lovecraft, and each episode was filmed by a different director. There are also famous names such as Panos Cosmatos (Beyond the Black Rainbow, Mandy), Australian Jennifer Kent (The Nightingale), Ana Lily Amirpour (A Girl Walks Alone in the Night, The Bad Batch), Vincenzo Natali (Cube) and and Del Toro’s resident director of photography Guillermo Navarro who won an Oscar for the wondrous “Pan’s Labyrinth”.
“Labirinto del fauno” is the film in which we can perhaps best understand Del Toro’s imaginary, that fascination with horror, fantasy that he so skilfully combines with realism, and such are his two stories based on which the first and last episodes were filmed. Del Toro is not only the curator, he is also the producer of the series and also the narrator, and at the beginning of each episode he introduces us to a single story that is both thematically and stylistically quite different. It’s been known for a long time that short or this kind of medium format are made for horror, and although individual episodes vary a lot in quality, Del Toro’s cabinet was very interesting and I assume that it will satisfy the appetites of horror fans.