Fresh off earning the Oscar statuette for Best Director (The Shape of Water) at the 90th Academy Awards, Guillermo del Toro hassold a new horror anthology seriesto Netflix.
The series, to be titledGuillermo del Toro Presents 10 After Midnight, will feature “a collection of personally curated stories that are … equally sophisticated and horrific.” Del Toro will reunite withShape of Waterproducer J. Miles Dale, who will serve as executive producer on the project. The series has no official target date or episode count, though based on the name, we’d be willing to guess there will be 10 chapters.
Del Toro is a veteran of the horror genre, having directed films such as 1997’sMimicand 2001’s acclaimedThe Devil’s Backbone. He’s well-known for a fascination with things typically considered creepy or gross — once evenadmitting to“a fetish for insects, clockwork, monsters, dark places, and unborn things” — a sensibility made clear by creative costuming and special effects in films likePan’s LabyrinthandHellboy(not to mentionBest Picture winnerThe Shape of Water, which received Academy Award nominations for cinematography, costume design, and production design, winning the latter).
The director alsorecently found financiersfor his feature-length adaptation ofScary Stories to Tell in the Dark, the popular children’s horror book series. Del Toro also has a healthy working relationship with Netflix, as evidenced by thesuccessofTrollhunters, an animated series created and produced by Guillermo himself (in collaboration with DreamWorks), which has its third and final season due for release on May 25.
Del Toro was long rumored to beinvolved withthe upcoming Amazon seriesCarnival Row, possibly as a co-writer, executive producer, and/or director, but he ended upstepping awayfrom the project due to scheduling conflicts.
10 After Midnightwill be Netflix’s first original horror anthology series (Black Mirrorbegan on British Channel 4 before heading to Netflix for seasons three through five). It’s worth mentioning that del Toro (often through no fault of his own) has been associated with animpressively lengthy listof films, television series, and video games wthat never came to fruition. Given Netflix’s hefty resources and the popularity ofTrollhunters, though, we’d be surprised if10 After Midnightended that way.
