I love Guillermo del Toro: he’s a Renaissance man who makes deeply artful and emotional horror films and revels in his work. What’s not to like? His soul is bottomless as a well and seems to replenish itself from some miraculous underground source. The humanity in his Spanish-language films Cronos, The Devil’s Backbone, and Pan’s Labyrinth plunges right to the heart. His viewpoint as a film maker is unique. His English-language films, on the other hand, have an entirely different sensibility — they’re more pulpy fanboy funhouse. Hellboy and Hellboy II are trippy; Pacific Rim is, well, dreck (sorry about that). Only Crimson Peak, a marvelously lush cinematic 19th century gothic melodrama — a genre extinct for a century — that has strong elements of the supernatural fits comfortably with his Spanish-language films. It was horribly mismarketed by the studio as a horror film, but movies in which the ghosts assist the protagonist are spooky melodramas and not “horror” per se. Read the rest

Danish artist Steffen Dam creates exquisite, minimalist "cabinets of curiosity" fashioned from glass and containing specimens of his own creation.

"My aim is to describe the world as I see it," Dam says. "One could also say to describe what’s not tangible and understandable with our everyday senses. My cylinders contain nothing that exists in the ocean, my specimens are plausible but not from this world, my plants are only to be found in my compost heap, and my flowers are still unnamed."

See more at his site: Steffen Dam (via Instagram/saatchi_gallery)

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