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Portraying Lovecraftian horror on the screen has never been an easy feat. Many filmmakers in the past have tried their hand at the unique horror subgenre, but only a few have succeeded at doing justice to its abstract terrors. In recent history, a handful of movies like Annihilation, The Endless, and Color Out of Space have managed to capture the “fear of the unknown” that drives Lovecraftian horror.
On the small screen, an even smaller number of TV shows, like Archive 81, True Detective, and Lovecraft Country, have come close to capturing the cosmic terrors of Lovecraftian horror. Even Netflix’s Love, Death & Robots has some great Lovecraft-inspired episodes.
Like Love, Death & Robots, another anthology series on Netflix, Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, features some promising episodes with Lovecraftian underpinnings. Among them, one episode in particular easily has one of the greatest portrayals of cosmic horror in the history of television.
The episode, titled “The Autopsy,” features everything from grotesque body horror to the consequences of dabbling with the unknowable.
“The Autopsy” From Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities Does Lovecraftian Horror Right
Directed by David Prior and adapted by David S. Goyer from Michael Shea’s 1980 short story, “The Autopsy” truly understands the tenets of cosmic dread. Similar to iconic Lovecraftian movies like The Thing, it features an alien being that sees humans as mere “meat.” Humanity is a sensory host for the creature to experience sight, sound, and pleasure.
However, instead of having any sense of empathy or mercy towards its hosts, the alien dismisses them as sensory vehicles. Like many Lovecraftian beings, it completely disregards humans and keeps them alive and conscious purely for its own amusement. The episode also gives the alien creature a voice and an incredibly articulate personality, which allows viewers to get inside the head of the unknowable.
The more the alien narrates, the more it feels like a viewer, like the episode’s main character, is accessing forbidden knowledge one should stay away from.
H.P. Lovecraft was known for cleverly constructing a bridge between real-world science and cosmic madness. “The Autopsy” does the same by featuring Dr. Carl Winters (F. Murray Abraham) as a quintessential Lovecraftian protagonist. He is initially portrayed as a rational man who only hopes to seek empirical truth.
His curiosity, however, gets the best of him when he gradually realizes that the body he is working on has been “harvested” by something science cannot explain. The episode even makes a narrative device out of its body horror as it reduces the human body to its barest biological components and portrays us as nothing but biological machinery with accidental consciousness.
Cabinet Of Curiosities Proves Guillermo del Toro Must Finally Deliver His Unrealized Lovecraftian Project
Guillermo del Toro was all set to deliver a direct adaptation of H.P. Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness. It was his dream project. However, now, after all these years, the project ranks among the most promising unmade movies of all time. Initially, the project was in full swing with Guillermo del Toro at its helm, James Cameron as its producer, and Tom Cruise as its lead.
The movie was planned as a roughly $150 million, R-rated cosmic horror epic. Unfortunately, like most Lovecraftian movie adaptations, the project was considered a massive gamble for Universal. Owing to this, the movie eventually did not see the light of day. Guillermo del Toro later showed interest in reviving the project with Netflix, but it has seemingly gone dormant since the last update.
The success of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities, Frankenstein, and Pinocchio on Netflix proves that he deserves to have another shot at his unrealized take on At the Mountains of Madness. Hopefully, the Lovecraftian horror movie will someday see the light of day. Till then, fans of cosmic horror can check out Cabinet of Curiosities or even Archive 81 on Netflix, which is another great Lovecraftian series.
