At the climax of “Pickman’s Model,” young artist William Thurber thinks he’s escaped from danger. He couldn’t be more wrong. Suddenly, a dripping, ravenous ghoul is upon him, and Thurber is back on his heels, scared out of his mind — perhaps literally.
Drawn from an H.P. Lovecraft short story, the fifth episode of Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities follows Thurber, who finds himself involved in a twisted partnership with his colleague, Richard Pickman. Pickman’s paintings are more than just pieces of art; they also seem to create their own chilling atmosphere of death and despair, and soon Thurber is sucked into their orbit. The episode is bewitching and frightening in equal doses — but not quite like the original story.
Lovecraft’s tale served as more of an inspiration than it did source material; director Keith Thomas saw Lovecraft’s tale as an opportunity. “There’s a sting in the tail of the story as to why this guy’s work is so disturbing,” Thomas tells Tudum. “So our episode takes that as a jumping-off point to even go deeper into who these people are.”
And just who are those people? They’re played by Ben Barnes (Westworld, Shadow and Bone) and Crispin Glover (Back to the Future, Beowulf). The pair become intertwined, with Pickman’s art slowly developing an iron grip on Thurber. “I think Thurber’s journey is that essentially he sees all these terrible things in Pickman’s paintings, and he feels all this disgust and fear and darkness,” Barnes says. “It catches ahold of him even though he’s trying to fight against it.”
For Glover, the relationship between the pair remains open to interpretation. “You could interpret it a number of different ways, and you could play a lot of different things,” the actor says. “Even with what I’ve chosen, there’s a bit of back and forth.”
For the team behind “Pickman’s Model,” Glover was the only choice for the role. “When I had first read the script and had been thinking about Pickman, Crispin’s name was the very first one,” Thomas says. “But Guillermo was the one who contacted me and said, ‘We’ve got to reach out to Crispin Glover because this is a role made for him. This is so much in his wheelhouse.’ ”
“It brings a whole reality,” Cabinet of Curiosities creator del Toro says of Glover’s performance. “When you see Pickman and he says, ‘I saw these things every day of my life,’ you understand it. You believe it.”
Glover shares Pickman’s love for the art of painting, even if he isn’t quite as perverse about it. “I tend toward having older landscapes from the 1800s. I like older things,” Glover says. “Actually, that was something Keith and I talked about when we were first talking about the script. We talked a fair amount about art.”
But at the same time, Glover tried not to focus too hard on Pickman’s paintings. “I feel and have felt that it’s important that it isn’t about the paintings,” he says. “My sense is that it should be something [that’s]either internal of the characters or external of the paintings.”
Of course, Glover isn’t the only person bringing Pickman’s reality to the screen. The team also had to create real scares for the audience — and for Thurber, as he dives deeper into his friend’s twisted artistic mind. “It just takes a lot of trial and error of figuring things out and then having scares that are different enough that, overall, even if someone’s not scared by this, they’ll still be scared by that,” Thomas says.
Del Toro gave episode directors plenty of leeway with their installments in the anthology — except for in one place. “The one thing that he really wanted to be much more hands-on was the monsters,” Thomas laughs. Because of course there are monsters. Whether or not they’re a symptom of Thurber’s slowly devolving sanity? That’s another question.
“The stakes here aren’t huge,” Thomas says. “Pickman’s art doesn’t cause an entire city to explode or bring some sort of alien up out of the ocean to stomp all over a town. It’s really about one man and those closest to him. The stakes are his sanity.” And, crucially, the sanity of the audience. “I want people to watch this and come away kind of breathless,” Thomas adds.
Barnes certainly did. The Chronicles of Narnia star had never worked in the horror genre before, and he found it thrilling. “I’ve enjoyed doing the [scary] stuff, the noises that suddenly take you by surprise,” Barnes says with a put-on little gasp. “That’s been quite fun.”
“Pickman’s Model” is streaming on Netflix right now, along with seven more stories from Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.
