Horror from the niche to the mundane

As noted before, there are many different types of horror. As one of the more flexible of modern popular genres, it's quite easy for it to be an "additional" category or subcategory of a story that would already be identified as science fiction or crime or even something that arcs toward the "literary"categorization, as Frankenstein or some works by Edgar Allan Poe now do (Nevermore!) It's with that flexibility in mind that I tried to consider the final two episodes of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities. One of them worked well in a classical, albeit mundane, sensibility. The other didn't really work in any proper, constructive sense. Neither of them really turned out to be interesting.

The Viewing: I believe that director and co-writer Panos Cosmatos' intent was that you really couldn't get more 70s than what he put on the screen; from cars to cocaine. Complete with garish orange furniture, mood lighting where it wasn't needed, and a vaguely disco-riffic soundtrack, this was an attempt to depict the decade in all of its artificial glory. Of course, it felt artificial because it was, as it also lacked any of the humanistic touches which defined that era's films, but exemplified the plastic and gallons of hairspray that often defined that era's TV. I'll leave it up to you to figure out whether that was a deliberate approach for something being shown on a streaming service. But the problem I had with The Viewing was that the majority of what it depicted had neither tension nor horror. It was 40 minutes of people on a serious snorting binge while Peter Weller (most notably of RoboCop and Buckaraoo Banzai fame) told them about this cool toy he had in the back that he was going to let them be the first to see. Meanwhile, he had to expand their consciousness and "get them all on the same wavelength" with drugs because that's always a good idea in a scientific experiment. When we do finally get to something resembling a plot, we end up with what looks like an homage to the ending of Raiders of the Lost Ark (an 80s film, just by the by) and an alien/demonic force that implies some greater threat to society but which really doesn't come to any kind of natural conclusion after that. We had these stories in comics back in the day. They used to use them to fill space and didn't care if the people reading them felt cheated because they still assumed that their audience was made up exclusively of 8-year-olds. I confess to having no idea what the "story" was genuinely supposed to be about, other than the opportunity to show Paul Freeman and the departed Ronald Lacey that they're not the only ones that can have fun with disintegration. It was endless waiting for something to actually happen and then some mildly interesting moments when it finally did, but not enough to sell me on any deeper meaning.

The Murmuring: Speaking of attempted deeper meanings, we had the final episode in our series, which arced away from Cosmatos' heavily time- and culture-influenced presentation and back toward what one might consider a "classic" ghost story; akin to the aforementioned Poe and those like his creations. However, like The Viewing, this episode also contained a great deal of build-up to a payoff that was surprisingly pedestrian. With our two lead characters running away from their personal grief, it was the typical setup that found them running into the embedded past grief of an old country house. While the ornithology angle seemed to set up something that hearkened to one of the most famous works of Alfred Hitchcock or at least a deeper involvement of their field of study, the "murmurings" amounted to literal background noise in what was otherwise a routine story about a woman who's experiencing various kinds of distress with a male associate who keeps telling her that she's imagining all of it and then complaining when she doesn't appreciate his side of the story. But it's that "routine" label that causes most of the problems here because there's absolutely nothing original or unusual about anything that happens. This is a perfect example of the "seen one, you've seen them all" phenomenon. Nothing happens that isn't entirely predictable and the ending leaves the white picket fence intact, marriage saved, haunting "solved", and the birds vaguely bored onlookers to everything. This is the difference between a ghost story and a horror story. The former is generic. The latter usually has to have something that at least mildly excites the reader/viewer, even if it's as strange as a murderous orangutan with a straight razor. Now that I think of it, the color of the creature in The Viewing was orange (like everything else...)

So, yeah. That ended on a bit of a down note. Given the first six episodes, I was hoping that the last two might deliver a bit more of a punch or at least a couple moments of the unknowable that del Toro's better films have displayed. Maybe next time.