Ten years after its launch, horror streamer Shudder has grown and retained a loyal audience. The secret? Backburning trends and analytics in favor of the personal taste of a dedicated team of fanatics.
“For a lot of people, horror is personal. It certainly is for me,” says Shudder senior VP of programming and acquisitions, Samuel Zimmerman, who has an encyclopedic knowledge of horror movies. “When Shudder first started, I was given a lot of support. ‘You’re the curator of this, because Shudder is meant to feel hand-picked, programmed for people who love the genre.’ As we’ve grown, sticking to that ambition has been really important, because it shines a light on who we are as a team.”
Shudder started as a niche streaming service launched by AMC Networks midway through the run of the flagship channel’s massive success with “The Walking Dead.” Originally, the platform was focused on catalog titles curated into different genres by Zimmerman, but exclusives and acquisitions quickly became a focus.
Cut to 2025, with the streamer coming off of a 2024 that set new viewership records, doubled the total hours watched over the last five years and saw average hours watched per user balloon to an all-time high, according to internal data provided by the company. This year, the surge in popularity continues, with Shudder kicking off its best-ever start in subscriber engagement, based on average hours per user.
Emily Gotto, Shudder’s senior VP of acquisitions and production, joined the company in 2017 and was involved in the purchase of three festival titles that set the tone for the type of filmmakers the team wanted to work with: Flying Lotus’ surreal “Kuso,” Coralie Fargeat’s neon-drenched thriller “Revenge” and Issa López’s Spanish-language horror fantasy “Tigers Are Not Afraid.” Gotto cites the adventurous filmmaking and bold ideas of this trio as core values for the films that thrive on Shudder.
“If you’re going to have a platform that specializes and celebrates the world of horror, you need to be able to represent the length and breadth of what that genre encapsulates,” she says. “There are the more bombastic, straightforward, entertaining, fun movies. And then you’ve got the more challenging titles that are really brave; a lot of our international slate is recognized in terms of its provocation. We really want people to come to the service and find something for them.”
López, who went on to direct and co-write “True Detective: Night Country,” says she doubts “Tigers” would have had the cultural impact and success it received without Shudder’s support.
“When they acquired the movie, they waited,” she says. “We sat together and they said, ‘We finalized acquiring the movie earlier this year, but we’re not going to drop it until late summer, because that’s the window where we can get more attention for this.’ That gave them the time to build massive word of mouth, so by the time that the movie opened, first in theaters before going to the platform, it was incredible the amount of press and attention … for a really small movie.”
Beyond pushing boundaries with film, Shudder has also launched unique genre TV shows, including small screen continuations of famous film franchises (“Creepshow,” “The Creep Tapes”), a reality competition series (“The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula”), docuseries (“Cursed Films”) and more. Nicholas Lazo, Shudder’s VP of development and production, describes how finding the right type of series to put on the platform is challenging.
“You want to do something that’s going to have the potential to carry for many seasons moving forward,” he says. “To keep a TV show scary is a challenge we’ve looked at from every different direction. Timing is really powerful. It enables you to set up a story, tell something really spooky, get people unsettled and send them on their way. The question I’ve always asked myself and our creative partners: ‘How do you make something scary? In an environment or in a plot line where your main characters have a tendency to die, how are you going to have that return when everybody’s dead? What happens?’”
Greg Nicotero, an executive producer and director of “The Walking Dead,” developed the “Creepshow” series at Shudder and is set to launch its first reality competition series this year. He says that Shudder let him have unprecedented latitude to make “Creepshow.”
“They gave me the freedom to explore and let me shift the tone,” Nicotero says. “They were super supportive in terms of any of the creature designs. They really never gave me a direction. They’re like, ‘Look, why would we give you notes? You know exactly how to do this.’”
Throughout the years, Shudder has also increased its theatrical distribution footprint. While it started early with a Neon partnership to get “Revenge” in theaters, there have been more and more buzzy engagements along the way, with films like 2022’s “Skinamarink” and 2023’s “When Evil Lurks” drawing in adventurous theatergoers. While some streamers shy away from theatrical distribution, the experience is an essential part of the horror community, and the team at Shudder fosters that aspect of the fandom.
“The model we’ve built released films like ‘Late Night With the Devil,’ like ‘Oddity,’ and we will continue to do so,” Gotto says. “The best thing about Shudder is that it doesn’t isolate content onto an SVOD platform. We are SVOD-led as a brand, but we believe in films getting seen by as wide an audience as possible, be it theatrically or on the small screen.”
Looking forward, Shudder is planning to celebrate its 10th anniversary with plenty of new content as it approaches the busy Halloween season. Box office successes like this summer’s “Clown in a Cornfield” and “Dangerous Animals” are set to debut on the streamer, alongside new chapters in the “V/H/S” and “Hell House LLC” franchises.
Team Shudder is also leaning in to live events, including a traditional second line parade and party in New Orleans that kicked off a birthday celebration during April’s Overlook Film Festival, a presence at both San Diego and New York Comic Cons, and presentations of some of the company’s key titles in Shudder Anniversary Selects Series set up at arthouse theaters across the country.
Lazo believes that although the company is growing, sticking to core beliefs set into place in the beginning will continue their success.
“I think between myself, Sam, Emily and all the other people who work on the brand, we have a wide range of tastes with a killer Venn diagram of overlaps,” he says. “I’m trying to make things for me because I believe that other people are going to want to watch them too.”
Zimmerman agrees, noting that one of the best parts of the industry is being curious and surprised, because horror always delivers something different.
“Going into Shudder, I was so burned out on zombie films I never wanted to see another in my life,” he says. “I think for a time we weren’t going to do them. And then you see things that blow your mind: ‘One Cut of the Dead,’ or ‘The Sadness.’ There’s always going to be interesting and really good new stuff in whatever subgenre.”
variety.com
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