It’s eight feature films in one. That’s how Emmy-nominated production designer Tamara Deverell describes Netflix’s horror anthology series “Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.” Episodes are set in eras ranging from early 20th century through the 1970s with locations as varied as a suburban living room and an otherworldly forest.
The series brings together filmmakers Del Toro admires, such as Catherine Hardwicke (“Twilight”) and Ana Lily Amirpour (“A Girl Walks Home Alone at Night”) to direct hour-long episodes mostly adapted from stories by renowned authors such as HP Lovecraft and current notables such as Emily Carroll and Del Toro himself.
“When I was first approached to do this, I was like, ‘This is kind of a designer’s dream,’ ” says Deverell, winner of 2022 and 2023 Art Directors Guild awards. “Cut to many months later going, ‘What was I thinking? All these directors?’ It was a real juggling act. I’m not doing it one at a time, either; I’m crossing over. So it was really a chess game of moves to get as much time as I could with the directors and understand them and how they ticked and how they approach their projects.”
A veteran of Del Toro’s “Nightmare Alley,” his FX series, “The Strain” and 1997’s “Mimic” (on which she was art director), Deverell calls ‘Cabinet’ one of the biggest challenges of her career. Most of it was shot on four stages in the Toronto area, with some sets being recycled from other episodes. The country house interior used in the final episode, “The Murmuring,” was repurposed in Episode 5, “Pickman’s Model” after having been recycled from elsewhere by Del Toro and producer J. Miles Dale.
“Pickman’s Model” ends in a basement where a terrible creature emerges from a well. That same basement was the opium den in Hardwicke’s “Dreams in the Witch House,” wherein the protagonist (Rupert Grint) ingests an elixir that opens a portal to a haunted forest.
