Few contemporary filmmakers could surpass Guillermo del Toro in imagination. From the giant cockroaches Mimic to the Oscar-winning hybrid The Shape of Water and the masterpiece Pan, the Mexican director and screenwriter seems to be inexhaustible in the creatures and stories he can bring to life on screen. Even if it’s smaller than Netflix, which hosts his latest work. The Closet of Strange Objects was uploaded to the platform just recently, perhaps in celebration of the approaching Halloween holiday with its somewhat…spooky overtones.

Because it’s horror at its best. Eight self-contained episodes, all supervised by Del Toro – some written entirely by him – who even himself appears in the prologue of each, next to the “wardrobe” in the title, to introduce us to his strange world. An old key with the number 36, human bones, unicorn horns: these and more are hidden in the dark depths of huge furniture, and Del Toro, with almost fetishistic seriousness, invites us to open them with him.

However, he is not the only guide on this journey. Each of the stories is filmed by a different movie personality: its regular cinematographer Guillermo Navarro, the creator of the Kafkaesque “Cube” Vincenzo Natali, the ever-rising Ana Lily Amirpour from “Girl Goes Home Alone at Night”, Keith Thomas from “Vigilance”, Jennifer Kent from the brilliant “Babadook” “, as well as a native of Greece, Panos Kosmatos from the unclassified “Mandy”. In short, this is a stellar contemporary horror troupe that follows and adapts to Del Toro’s unbridled imagination, while still retaining its own unique identity.

Indeed, each episode has a representative style. The first is dominated by the occult as a Vietnam veteran, now far right, unknowingly buys the contents of an old warehouse, where he discovers a treasure trove of black magic. In the next, we see an unrepentant grave robber embarking on a terrifying adventure full of living skeletons and giant rats in the bowels of the earth. As it is easy to understand, the “heroes” of the stories are here for a reason. Del Toro and his staff clearly enjoy these controversial characters, treating them with (black) humor but avoiding the clichéd dichotomies of good and evil: only horror rules here, and those who believe…come.

To convincingly bring visions and nightmares to life, of course, such an image is required, and in this area, “Wardrobe” proves to be impressive. The staging, scenery, costumes and special effects are all impeccable, often testing the viewer’s endurance, because here the spectacle is strictly “over 18”. Master del Toro, for his part, seems to smile sardonically behind every tentacled monster, every animated corpse, winking and noticing that the darkest corners of the human mind can be the most interesting.