Guillermo Del Toro Is Heading Up Netflix’s First Horror Anthology

Guillermo del Toro – he of Hellboy, Pan’s Labyrinth, The Shape Of Water, and cameoing as the terrifying Pappy McPoyle in It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia – is reportedly working on a horror anthology series for Netflix, tentatively titled Guillermo del Toro Presents 10 After Midnight. It will compile horror stories selected by del Toro, who has also been lined up to write and direct some episodes.

If you were looking for a modern-day equivalent of Alfred Hitchcock Presents, you could do a lot worse than sticking del Toro in the driver’s seat, with his face being splashed large on the marquee to serve as both badge of quality, and suggestion to exactly what sort of tone the series will take. Del Toro has form in this kind of role – one of his first directing gigs was with Mexican anthology series La Hora Marcada, critically acclaimed within Mexico as their answer to The Twilight Zone.

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Del Toro is said to be reuniting with his co-producer from The Shape Of Water, J. Miles Dale, in order to pick out writers and filmmakers. The advantage of headlining an anthology series is that it isn’t as labour-intensive as directing – Hitch only picked it up when he’d been making films for thirty years and Hollywood would chuck money at him for a particularly menacing fart – so this project is unlikely to detract from del Toro’s upcoming film adaptation of Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark (itself a well-established collection of horror stories) for CBS films. Del Toro is a longstanding fan of the original books, particularly Stephen Gammell’s notorious illustrations, which he cites as being ‘scary as fuck‘.

With The Shape Of Water having swept this year’s Oscars, and blockbusters like the Hellboy series and Pacific Rim under del Toro’s belt, the Hitchcock comparison is an apt one (even if uncle Alf never actually won an Oscar). Del Toro is, by now, a film establishment all of his own – though it should be remembered that Hitch was the master of suspense, while del Toro’s genre is decidedly horror.

And horror is a label which, perhaps, gets thrown about too much. The late Peter Cushing always referred to his and Sir Christopher Lee’s Hammer Horror projects as ‘fantasy’, dealing as they did with vampires and magic, reserving ‘horror’ as a descriptor for stuff like The Godfather – i.e., films depicting horrifying things which could actually happen. And as we know, del Toro knows the difference. As terrifying as Doug Jone’s Pale Man was in Pan’s Labyrinth, he simply couldn’t compare with Sergi López’s Francoist, human-hunting Captain Vidal. Anyone can be scary when they’re buried in makeup and their eyes aren’t where they should be – but when a husband and father becomes scary, that’s a kind of twisted poetry.

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