'Cabinet of Curiosities' Director Jokes Actor Was 'Scarred' by 'Graveyard Rats'

Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities will likely be a terrifying experience for viewers; even those making it found it hard not to be scared by it, Graveyard Rats director Vincenzo Natali told Newsweek.

The episode, which is one of two released on October 25, follows grave robber Masson (David Hewlett) who realizes that bodies of the recently deceased are being stolen from their coffins by rats, gold jewelry and all, and he decides to investigate when a prized cadaver is taken.

Masson is then drawn into the rats' underground lair, where he discovers multiple horrors, including a giant queen rat, and the grave robber has to use all his wits to try and survive and not be buried alive.

'Cabinet of Curiosities' Director Jokes Actor Was 'Scarred' by 'Graveyard Rats'

Hewlett, Natali joked, was "scarred for life" by the experience of filming, which saw him really crawl through compact spaces and act in makeshift coffins that were purpose built for the shoot.

Filming in sets that depict deep underground tunnels and were "about as small as it looks onscreen" meant Hewlett "didn't walk out of there without any residual damage," Natali told Newsweek.

"They are as tight [as they look], we had to. It was really fun because we have a brilliant production designer, Tamara Deverell, and a fantastic cinematographer, Colin Hoult, and we spent quite a bit of time engineering the tunnel and what form it should take, how to put a camera in and how to move the camera," Natali said of the shoot. "That was completely out-of-the-box stuff. There's no template.

"So, we had to do a lot of research in advance, even just lighting that kind of space is very, very tricky, but that also was the fun of it, and it was a kind of a Chinese puzzle box designing the rat warren and how to move around in it.

"Then for David, [he] was such a courageous soul and worked so hard without complaint under very physically trying circumstances, I mean it's not easy to wiggle in there and he did it for 17 days, or the better part of them."

As well as crawling through enclosed spaces, Hewlett also shot scenes from inside a makeshift coffin which Natali assured "had walls that you could take out" but was also so compact that they had to adapt the way they filmed scenes inside it.

"We use this special Periscope lens which is basically almost the kind of thing you'd use for a colonoscopy, this small probe lens you can stick into tiny spaces," Natali explained. "And that's thrilling, like usually when we think of cinema we think of Lawrence of Arabia, the desert and these big vistas, but you can create a vista in a very small space, too.

"And I think that the human face is a landscape, and it's unusual in a movie or even a TV show where the camera can get that close to someone's face. There's something certainly cinematic and thrilling about that perspective, too. So we really tried to get into those spaces as much as we could."

Reflecting on the experience, Natali added: "The hardest thing to do is work in a small space, you would think […] shooting in a giant house is incredibly difficult, but actually that's much, much easier because there's more place to put the lights, there's more room for the camera to move and use multiple angles—all these things that help you, especially when you're working on a television schedule.

"In a small space, there's no room for anything, and literally in this episode there was room for an actor and the light that he was holding, which was actually the light that was lighting him in the scene, and one camera, and that is much harder to work with.

"But then it's also thrilling, because I think the audience feels like they're in the character's shoes in that situation. I made a rule for myself that I could never shoot a plan view of the maze. I never wanted the camera to feel like it was outside of the set, I really wanted the audience to be trapped in that world with poor Masson and the rats, and that was thrilling."

On Creating a Rat Nightmare in 'Graveyard Rats'

There are many instances in the episode in which Masson is terrorized by the rats—from a colony of rats crawling all over him underground to his encounter with the giant queen rat.

Natali admitted it would be "the highest compliment" if viewers believe all the rats are real because, for the most part, they were digitally added.

When asked about filming with rats, Natali said: "Even though David Hewlett endured a lot of rat contact—we would always have a rat there for reference—and they ran all over his body and did terrible things to him, that's the brilliant work of Dennis Berardi [the visual effects supervisor].

"But our queen rat is 100 percent physical, [built] by a magnificent company called Spectral Motion, and it is the first puppet that I've worked with that actually works 100 percent. It was really quite something to behold."

Detailing what the puppet was like on set Natali described it as "actually frightening," adding: "It's always preferable to do things physically, and we would have done the [other] rats physically, but they just wouldn't ever behave the way that we needed them to.

"But the queen rat was so shocking, and they had it right in David's face. I think it was better than if he was acting to a tennis ball on a grip stand, and it's thrilling. There's something about watching that on a monitor, when everything's actually in the frame and it's happening in real time, that is exhilarating for everybody.

"Then you get a subtlety in terms of how that creature interacts with the light and even little things like the way its whiskers move and so on, that would be very difficult to do digitally. And, usually, the truth is, it's very hard to make puppets work as well as you want them to and so this was an extraordinary situation, especially on a TV timeline budget.

"This really worked. It could articulate really, really well, and the puppeteers were fantastic and we had a great time. I had a great time directing the puppet—like the puppet is a character, it is an actor on that set. It's kind of thrilling for me as a director to interact with a creature like that."

Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities premiered on Netflix with its first two episodes, "Graveyard Rats" and "Lot 36," and it will air two episodes a day until Friday, October 28.