Director: David Prior
First aired: 2022
Contains spoilers
Cabinet of Curiosities was a Del Toro executively produced anthology series, where the great director introduces each episode, which was released in time for Halloween 2022 on Netflix and proved to be a strong series of episodes that drew from Lovecraft (2 of the episodes are based on Lovecraft shorts) amongst others.
The autopsy is based on a short by Michael Shea and is the closest the series got to a vampire episode – though this is not so much your undead vampire but an alien vampire amongst us.
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| running through the mine |
The episode starts with men getting into a mine elevator. It starts to descend when a miner, Joe Allen (Luke Roberts), jumps onto the elevator roof. Close to the shaft he jumps down to the floor and runs along, a large ball-like object in his arms. He manipulates it, lights moving on it, and releases it, continuing his run. Shards seems to float and an explosion rocks the mine.
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| Winters and Craven |
Dr. Carl Winters (F. Murray Abraham) arrives in town. An old friend of the sheriff, Nate Craven (Glynn Turman), he has been called in to autopsy the bodies. The mining company will not pay out unless those killed were killed in the pursuit of their employment – if Allen set off a bomb, as suspected, they do not have to pay out worker’s compensation. Before they head to the rather desolate looking morgue, Craven tells Winters about the disappearances in town.
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| the body |
He relays that they were up to 6 disappearances when, on one search of the woods, they found a body, covered in tarpaulin and stowed in a tree. The body had been butchered, professionally it seemed, but more noticeable there wasn’t a drop of blood in the flesh. They took pictures and put the body back, leaving a couple of hunters to watch for someone returning – they vanished along with the corpse. They did, however, get an ID as Abel Dougherty (James Acton).
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| in the bar |
Dougherty had met a man, Joe Allen, in a bar and was convinced he was actually Eddie Sykes a friend who vanished two months before when he went hiking to watch a meteor shower. As we watch the flashback we see Allen use eye mojo to hypnotise Sykes and walk him from the bar. Allen and Sykes are the same person and, in his rooms, the sheriff finds a murmuring, vibrating ball that Sykes/Allen found in the woods – the object from the beginning. They take the object and go to find Allen at the mine, but he smashes a car window, takes the ball and runs to the shaft (returning us to the opening of the episode).
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| bloodless organs |
Winters goes to the morgue and sends the Sheriff home to rest whilst he starts to work. The second corpse he examines has a strange hole penetrating the chest and when he opens him up the lungs and heart are drained of blood. The next body has a similar chest wound and no blood left within. Photos from the mine suggest that the two exsanguinated bodies were found next to Allen's corpse – Winters articulates (to Craven via the tape recorder) his crazy thought that the blood from the two might be in Allen’s stomach.
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| the creature |
It's round about then that Allen’s corpse starts to become ambulatory. Cutting sutures from his mouth (a small detail that made little sense as there hadn’t been an autopsy yet – but perhaps put in as a deliberate nod to Del Toro’s Cronos), he asks for help, saying he is trapped in the flesh and is starving. What we have is a parasitic alien creature that inhabits a host and feeds on the flesh and blood of others. It seems that the creature also feeds on pain and fear – it admits to reinvesting energy stolen from the two miners, whose blood it consumed in the cave, to keep their brains alive and directly feed in the information of what it was doing to them. It also suggests it gets a sexual pleasure from the feed, experiencing orgasms through the host’s body.
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| F. Murray Abraham as Winters |
The sphere was its ship and the explosion was as a result of it having to destroy it on discovery to keep the species hidden. The creature itself was larval when it landed but it has grown and is a tentacled thing reliant on its host for senses such as sight and hearing. This was a cracking, atmospheric little film made all the more powerful by F. Murray Abraham’s powerhouse performance as the dour, terminally ill coroner (the parasite can smell his cancer through Allen’s senses and calls it delicious). The verbal sparring between Winters and Allen is superb. 7.5 out of 10.
The episode's imdb page is here.
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