Cabinet of Curiosities: Graveyard Rats Is A Celebration of Practical Horror

“The idea was alway to use a minimum of digital effects and make things as physical as possible,” Graveyard Rats director Vincenzo Natali (Splice, In the Tall Grass) tells Den of Geek. “The Queen Rat is ninety percent physical with a little bit of digital sweetening. It was the first time I worked with a puppet that truly worked. It could really articulate beautifully. When you’re working in TV you don’t have a lot of time and the takes are often just what they are. This one was fast. They rolled it in, it did its thing, and we had a great time with it.”

There’s a genuine love of realistic horror that seeps through every scene in this episode. It’s obvious when hearing from the people behind the camera that this passion is insightful and genuine. There’s something incredibly detail-oriented about their approach, but this is something we’ve come to expect from a project with Guillermo del Toro’s name and credentials attached to it. Natali also mentioned that his love for horror wasn’t the only important factor in the passion of the project shining through. Production designer Tamara Deverell and cinematographer Colin Hoult were instrumental in making the fiction feel like reality. This extended beyond just the effects for the rats, though. There’s a zombified corpse that makes a cameo later in the episode, and the realism of the monster is on par with the rest of the project. 

“Doing a reanimated corpse, I needed to do it right,” Natali says “I wanted to take a slightly unconventional approach to it. The details, the patina, the pizzicotto of making a corpse is very important to me. And I think it’s for Guillermo, too. If you asked him I’m guessing one of the primary motivations of this was just to make creatures.”

Cabinet of Curiosities indeed includes at least jaw-dropping monster in each of its eight installments, but Graveyard Rats stands out due to its prevalence at the beginning of the series and for making one of the most common animals on the planet, a rat, into something grandiose and grotesque. Ironically, even though most of what you see are physical models throughout the episode, the use of real-life rats was kept to a bare minimum. 

“We never filmed more than say three rats at a time,” Natali told us. “They were there for references as much as anything. There are some shots of rats early on where they’re just environmental and kind of hanging out where you’d have a few of them. But once you get to rats running over somebody or a carpet of rats then you are in the digital world for sure.”

Masson eventually succumbs to his imminent fate that the audience has been anticipating since the second he descended into the depths of this underground hellscape, but that doesn’t mean it’s any less jarring when it occurs. Masson thinks he sees the light at the end of the tunnel, but it’s just a small hole the rats have chewed in one of the tombs. His escape has been thwarted by his arrogance. These tombs belong to the rats and the dead, and when the living tries to interfere, they get a justifiable fate.