What is a curio shop?

Answer 1

A curio is "A curious or unusual object of art or piece of bric-a-brac." A curio shop then is by extension a shop that sells curios. They're often seen in movies as having disturbing/incredibly out of the ordinary objects, but most curio shops simply have interesting or unusual things.

Also note that apparently there is a curio shop in Webkinz (as the last answerer noted), but in the real world, the above is what a curio shop is.

Answer 2

ten years too late but better than to lose an interesting piece of macabre history.

we'll go backwards with that word.

curio = curious = curiosity

curiosities used to be quite creepy, things that could scare the timid to death, which seemed to be the point. the curiosity shops used to have lots of taxidermy projects, not just normal animal mounts but freaky two-headed things designed to give nightmares, aside from the animals there were also human projects, human parts, anything you can imagine that was fodder for bad experiences, sometime YOU ended up the curio or parts of you did. where taking family portraits with your dead relatives was a normal thing we have nothing on the curiosity shops, what would seem today to be a trick hand made of plastic would be a stuffed human hand. as deep as you want to go with this you will probably never reach their lust for macabre. they even put dead human body parts in food recipes that were considered delicacies. the prior answer of unusual objects or bric-a-brac just doesn't come close. i saw a whole museum that was dedicated to the human body with pickled parts in jars everywhere & endless shelves of bones & whatever - the less normal it was the better, 2 or 3 stories, i forget which, maybe even 4 & a large build too all stuffed together so tight making it seem small. that saying "there's nothing new under the sun comes to mind" when i think of some of the demented things people do today.