Graveyard Rats (2022)
Rats! Big ones, little ones, one really big one! Human characters who are rats! Tunneling between graves by all involved! This second segment of Cabinet of Curiosities takes a goofy turn while also turning back the clock for the first all-out period piece of the series. As Tori points out, the first episode had a couple cues that led us back to the dawn of the ’90s, so we were already skipping backwards, but now we take a quantum leap, even if there’s a conspicuously anachronistic flashlight in the mix. Don’t ask me, I got low Cs in history. Anyway, in this segment, expectations are still being set, while the worlds of the show expand. We haven’t yet reached anything can happen territory, but we’re certainly establishing that fantastic happenings are possible. Even in a mediocre follow-up to a stellar first episode, there’s cause for excitement: this series could live up to the promise of a program helmed by Guillermo del Toro. Also, we’ve now seen his intro routine a couple times and can begin to see where he fits on the Hitchcock—Serling spectrum: closer to Hitchcock in style and approach. A bit gothic, stagey, and a little dusty in a pleasingly throwback way. Less blustery than Hitchcock, less arch than Serling, yet still conveying that he cares about these stories and storytellers, and is characteristically low-key excited to share them. We tend to get an object pulled from a drawer that is plucked from the story to come—a talisman to drop in with, a detail to look out for, an artifact that establishes ontological connection between metaleptic layers—along with a little resin figure of the segment’s creator. Del Toro is relatively unassuming, but these moves do feel quite Hitchcocky, in terms of both the prop flourish and the scaling (he has the individual storytellers in the palm of his hand, and puts them on a table before us). We also have the opportunity to notice potential connections between stories: someone owes a debt, and we enter a vault that becomes a labyrinth. 3 out of 5 sacs of blood.
—J †Johnson
Rats is right, what more can be said. If you didn’t have a fear of them before, this episode might do the trick. But I do always have a soft spot for gothic set pieces and rusty old talismans, especially when it all takes place in my beloved home state.
This tale is based on Henry Kuttner’s story from 1936, published in Weird Tales, and is directed by Vincenzo Natali, a man known for directing one of the best known puzzle box/maze movies, Cube. It is also fitting that it stars the protagonist from Cube, David Hewlett. This tale goes back in time to Salem, Massachusetts, where greed, crime, and vice impact the decisions made by the characters we spend time with. It also shares plenty of connective tissue with Lot 36 as we follow a man who makes his money by robbing the graves of the recently deceased. Not much separates him from the rats that he so desperately loathes. Natali has plenty of fun with creating weird and winding mazes as we travel through the rat infested tunnels of Salem and come upon the treasures of long forgotten cults. Secret tunnel systems and cities below cities are great concepts and always fun to see played out on screen. On top of that we get not one but two terrifying creatures to spend time with. While it is funny to spend so much time with this man and have the cult history and rat colonies be unexplained pieces in the backdrop, at times it feels like these more interesting story elements should be front and center. But as a mini Indiana Jones-like horror story it is fun to visit this world. And the visuals alone will burrow into your brain, much like some unwanted furry vermin. 3.5 out of 5 sacs of blood.
—Tori Potenza