Hey, so, since Guillermo Del Toro is back in the mainstream, I figured I’d talk a little bit about a work he had some involvement in. One of the few things to actually scare me in the past couple of years.
I’m not easy to scare. I don’t wear this as a badge of honor. It’s just because I consume a lot of horror media. But there’s one work that really got under my skin something fierce. There’s more under the cut.
This. This episode upset me so greatly I can’t watch it again. And I’m not sure why, to this day I’m not claustrophobic or afraid of rats, but this got me bad.
Spoilers if you haven’t seen it, but the main character is a cemetery caretaker and a grave robber, and has been fighting with the rats in the graveyard for gold fillings and necklaces and the like to pilfer off dead bodies. He’s afraid of being buried alive and is worried the mob will do that to him if he doesn’t pay off some gambling debts. So one particularly rich guy is buried with some treasures in main guy’s graveyard, but the rats get there first, and pull the body into a network of tunnels they’ve made under the cemetery. Main character swallows his fear and goes in for the body.
Now I get that it sucks to steal things off the dead, but it’s not like they’re going to do much with it in a box underground. And the main guy, Masson, is actually pretty likable. He’s well read and pretty nice to almost everyone he meets, and just wants to not die horribly. So you kind of end up rooting for him, at least I did. David Hewlett plays a bumbling crook role quite well.
Anyway blah blah blah Masson runs into a giant brood mother rat that he squishes with a boulder, and a zombie that comes to life when Masson takes its necklace (and it just wants the necklace back, as the only thing it says is “MINE!” Masson could have taken plenty of other things and let Skeleton Jones keep his necklace.) But then the ending hits. And my god.
So Masson sees a light and crawls towards it, thinking it’s the sun, but it’s actually just his flashlight reflecting off a plaque inside another coffin the rats already took the body from. The poor guy is buried alive just like he feared and we hear him scream and babble and bang on the coffin, and then the rats catch up, and it’s over.
Good LORD. Look, I know he was a criminal and got too greedy at the end, but fuck man. You usually save an ending like that for a Tales from The Crypt villain, not some goofball that’s taking things off rich people that don’t need them anymore. And he got the double whammy of his worst fear and a painful death alone in the dark.
My hands were shaking after that episode. It made me so upset I almost didn’t want to watch the rest of the series (I did, it’s quite good.) And it remains one of the few things I won’t watch again because it scares me too much.
Uh. Thanks for reading if you made it this far. I guess I don’t have much to say other than “don’t ever think you’re impossible to scare, cause something out there will get you one of these days.”
I want to send a appreciation letter to everyone who worked on cabinet of curiosities for making the audience aware it is night time while still seeing everything that's happening in the scenes
