This article contains spoilers for Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities Season 1, Episode 8, "The Murmuring." This article contains discussion of suicide and child abuse.

Guillermo del Toro has a special connection to ghost stories, having returned to them multiple times in the course of his storied career. Naturally Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities carries its share, and they tend to gravitate towards his specific perspective about the nature of hauntings. Del Toro's ghosts are rarely monsters, but victims of tragedy that they can't move past.

This premise informs a number of entries in the Netflix anthology horror series, whose ghosts are very different from the ghoulish hauntings modern audiences may be accustomed to. Nowhere is that more apparent than in Season 1, Episode 8, "The Murmuring," based on a short story from del Toro and directed by Jennifer Kent. It's in keeping with many of del Toro's earlier stories about spirits. It also subverts common haunted house tropes at almost every turn: providing an unexpectedly gentle conclusion to a deliciously dark and sinister season.

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"The Murmuring" Is About Grief More Than Terror

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"The Murmuring" concerns a married pair of ornithologists in the early 1960s, Nancy and Edgar Bradley, who are studying the flight patterns of birds. They seek answers to the cause of murmuration, the real-life swarming behavior in which flocks wheel and turn in striking patterns. They're also grieving the loss of a young daughter one year earlier, which creates an unspoken rift between them. They come to an abandoned mansion on a remote island to study the local avian population. Naturally, the place is haunted.

During their stay, it's Nancy who picks up on the presence of ghosts, which initially deepens the divide between her and her husband. The house's original owner was a mother, who abused her son and accidentally drowned him in the bath, then committed suicide by jumping from a top-floor window. Their spirits still roam the halls and Nancy brings them closure by telling the ghost of the child that he is loved, and that what happened wasn't his fault. She then watches the mother's ghost leap out of the window one final time before dispersing in a giant pattern of flying birds. The event leads Nancy to emotionally confront her daughter's death and reconcile with her husband.

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"The Murmuring" Speaks to the Living as Much as the Dead

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From the beginning, "The Murmuring" defies expectations with its measured pace. The ghosts take their time arriving, and Kent spends much of the first half exploring the emotional wounds shared by the Bradleys. The ghosts arrive almost in response to their pain, and only Nancy can perceive them. While frightening, their appearance only punctuates the slow-burn opening rather than serving as the focus of the story.

The cause of the haunting follows a different arc as well. The ghosts are both victims of tragedy, but their anger isn't directed at the living. They're simply unable to find peace, instead re-living the circumstances of their deaths over and over again, until Nancy recognizes and validates their pain. That makes them neither evil nor unholy, though their circumstances are heartbreaking. Nancy herself experiences a catharsis in the process, but it’s not caused by the trauma of the haunting. Rather, the act of recognizing the spirits' grief shines a light on her own sense of loss: helping her to understand it and grapple with it at last.

It's very much in keeping with previous ghost stories from del Toro such as Crimson Peak and The Devil's Backbone. Both detailed similar hauntings linked to living tragedies, and while their circumstances were more gruesome, they carried the same spirit. "The Murmuring" provides a sense of healing that those earlier efforts would recognize, upending the expectations set by the rest of the series and giving the audience a comparatively happy ending to close out Cabinet of Curiosities' season of fiends.

The first season of Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities is streaming in its entirety on Netflix.