Halfway To Halloween: Sam Zimmerman Shares The Best Shudder Titles To Watch This Spring
Mary Beth McAndrews
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We all know and love the horror streaming service Shudder. From unearthing unknown gems to producing new and terrifying genre stories, the folks at Shudder know what fans want from their scary movies. One of those folks is their Head of Programming, Sam Zimmerman, who is first and foremost a genre fan. And that shows through what his work has brought to the platform.
Since this month marks halfway to Halloween, we sat down with Zimmerman to discuss underseen 90s horror gems, the power of Ghostwatch, and why everyone needs to watch Infested ASAP.
Dread Central: How is it already halfway to Halloween?? Can you tell me a little bit about what people can be excited about coming to Shudder this Spring?
Sam Zimmerman: Yeah, there’s a lot. When I started at Shudder in 2015, I basically had a mental list in my back pocket of movies that I’ve always wanted to see on [the platform] that would be made more easily available by being on streaming. There are so many movies that I think if you’re a horror fan you’re interested in, you’ve heard of, you maybe saw once, you’d like to see again, preferably not paying too much money. A lot of those have worked out, right? Possession is on Shudder. Cemetery Man is on Shudder. The Devils has been on Shudder.
Dread Central: That’s how I saw The Devils. You guys are the reason I could finally see The Devils.
Sam Zimmerman: It’s been this project and now, on April 1st was Mute Witness. I’ve been waiting for this one for so long.
Dread Central: Yes, I’m so glad that you brought that up!
Sam Zimmerman: I love this movie so much and I’ve also just recognized that as a movie, people are like, “I’ve always heard of that. I’ve been dying to see it.” I’m just so happy. Some of the most spectacular suspense of the 90s in a crazy way. But it’s also just a crowd-pleaser. It’s a super fun time. You can sit down with people and have a great time. These [are] gems of the 90s, and there’s another one I’ll get to. Another one already on Shudder is Ghostwatch. It really makes my heart sing to be able to say it’s there for you to see.
Dread Central: You guys are also the reason I saw Ghostwatch for the first time years ago! Shudder has given me access to a lot of things that I would never have had access to before.
Sam Zimmerman: I just want people to watch movies and see movies they love. The experience I’ve had in a room full of 6, 7, 8 people just showing people Ghostwatch around Halloween and the journey from “this is fun and kitschy and Cool to “oh, I’m deeply unsettled”, it’s just great to watch people have that [experience].
We also kicked off the month with Baghead, which is just a terrific cellar-dwelling, witchy, funhouse horror film. Alberto Rador just absolutely knocked it out of the park. It’s a genuine treat in terms of Friday night, shut off all the lights movies, and I think weirdly at this moment in horror, some of those are the hardest to come by. I feel like a lot of people are interested in expanding what the world of the horror genre can be that sometimes we forget that what you want is to light a candle and get scared.
Late Night With The Devil obviously is having such an incredible run. We’re so grateful for it and to me is the anchor of halfway to Halloween. Set on Halloween night, it captures the exact feeling we’ve always wanted out of what this month is because in our minds it’s like, well, why wait a whole year to feel like you do in October? If you want to watch it with Ghostwatch together, I think it’s truly the best night you can have.
Dread Central: I was going to say, it’s a pretty good double feature.
SZ: We’re going to close out the month with Infested, which is in my opinion, the best creature feature of the last five or 10 years. I mean, I am sure people have other opinions, but I think this is a really fantastic, fantastic film. Sebastian is such a talent and he’s going to do a new Evil Dead film. Once you watch Infested, you know exactly why.
Much like Baghead or Late Night With The Devil, Infested is not only clever and thoughtful and terrifically made, but it is creepy crawly and it is goopy and it is gory. It’s all of these things that satisfy both our brains and our real horror hearts. One of the last times I felt like that was another movie we released a few years ago called The Queen of Black Magic from Indonesia which just rips and Infested just rips.
Dread Central: It really does rip. We don’t have a lot of good spider movies and this one is deeply upsetting in a good way
SZ: There is something that I want more of when it comes to creature features. It’s not that it’s easy to make it humorous, but I think it’s difficult to make it scary. And I think it’s similar to Christmas horror, to be honest. I mean, we released a film called The Advent Calendar and I love it because it takes the atmosphere of scary Christmas seriously and Infested takes scary spider stuff seriously.
Dread Central: OK, Shudder has some really awesome new stuff, and also Mute Witness. But it’s also springtime and I feel like spring is peak folk horror time. What are some good folk horror options for people to check out on Shudder right now?
SZ: Top of mind, The Medium, from Thailand.
Dread Central: It is one of the best film footage movies in the last 10 years.
SZ: It’s also such an incredible collaboration between Banjong Pisanthanakun who directed the original Shutter, which is a legendary East Asian ghost story film, and Na Hong-jin who made The Wailing. Supergroups rarely become more than the sum of their parts and I feel like The Medium does.
I think on a base level we have Woodlands Dark and Days Bewitched, which is the filmic text of folk horror. So if you want to understand folk horror, you can sit for three hours and watch one of the most captivating film documentaries ever. Then I would also say Eyes of Fire. It was on that list of movies we wanted to get streaming and make easier to access. I think this is one of the gems of American folk horror and for so long it wasn’t available to be seen, which sucks. I am so happy it’s here. I really thank the team at Severin Films for doing that restoration. It’s a deeply strange hypnotic.
Dread Central: It’s so weird.
SZ: Yeah, it’s a weird movie, but it’s freaky too. That’s the best part about it. And there’s just something fun too about watching period pieces from different decades, meaning in the early 80s, making a movie set in the 16, 1700s. It is a fascinating thing to watch and kind of what it feels like. Same with how Blood on Satan’s Claw, you can feel the hippie movement even though the film is set in the 15th century.
Dread Central: Again, you guys are the reason I saw that movie, too.
SZ: Extremely cool movie. Yeah, those would be my big ones: The Medium Woodlands Dark and Eyes of Fire.
Dread Central: Hell yeah. That’s amazing. And then because we have a big creature feature with Infested, what are some other monster movies people could pair with the spider film?
SZ: So we have a wild mid-90s film called Mosquito about a mosquito that bites an extraterrestrial and grows to large size. It is really fun, really kitschy. Synapse did a great release of it and how it’s on Shudder. So Mosquito, I would point to you, especially for your abnormally sized insect fix. And then I think from there it kind of depends on how you describe creature feature, right? Because some people might say an animal attack movie is a creature feature. I wouldn’t disagree depending on the size of it. So Alligator, you can’t go wrong watching Alligator.
Dread Central: You can’t go wrong with Alligator.
SZ: Alligator is the best when an unreal-sized alligator comes out of that sewer. It really is everything that horror movies can be. Then, Q The Winged Serpent.
Dread Central: Oh yes.
SZ: It has all the idiosyncrasies of Larry Cohen and Michael Moriarty working together in the best way. Then we have a big monster movie called Monstrum from Korea from a few years ago and it’s so enjoyable. It’s so much fun and it’s just like a killer time to watch.
DC: Is that one a period piece as well?
SZ: Yeah. It came out around the time as the Netflix show Kingdom. There are some similar aesthetics going on there and it’s a Korean period piece about a giant monster. Some of the discussion in the movie is whether the monster is real or not. Is it something that the kingdom has made up or is it out in the hills? And ultimately you’ll find out, but when you do, it’s pretty rad.
DC: Okay, there are so many cool things to watch, but is there anything you can tease coming up on Shudder in the next couple of months that you can talk about that people should be excited about before past April?
SZ: In theaters at the end of May is In A Violent Nature, which we premiered at Sundance and is a very, very special slasher film that is a slasher like you’ve never seen, but is also somehow like every slasher you’ve seen. That’s a convoluted way of describing it, but I think when people see it, they’ll really understand what we’re getting at aesthetically. It’s brilliant and there’s a top 10 kill in this film. I don’t feel shy about saying that.
DC: Yeah, I’m so excited to see it. I’ve heard so many amazing things.
SZ: Chris Nash is pretty visionary with it. Then there’s Night Watch, which I’m really excited about. So we’re releasing Night Watch: Demons Are Forever in a few weeks on May 17th. This is a sequel to the original Night Watch from 1994, which is a Danish thriller by Ole Bornedal and Nikolaj Coster-Waldau who played Jamie Lannister in Game of Thrones. This was one of his early films in the 90s in Denmark.
So they made a long-gap legacy sequel. In the film, his daughter takes the job of the night watch at the morgue to really understand what happened to him in the 90s when he faced off against a serial killer. It’s just an absolutely killer psychological thriller that edges into horror. It’s so much fun, it’s tense, it’s gruesome. And the original film has not been in circulation, so we bought that, too. So we’ll be premiering both on the same day on May 17th for just a really stupendous double feature. I’m really happy about that.
DC: What a cool job you have.
SZ: It’s truly the best part about it and I’m just slowly working my way through these underseen 90s thrillers. There are more on my brain, but I can’t talk about them yet.
DC: We talk shit about 90s horror, but there’s a lot of good stuff and I’m glad that y’all are unearthing some of that stuff. I think people really looked down on the 90s unfairly. I know it was a weird decade for horror, but there’s cool stuff in there that people don’t give enough credit.
SZ: I think what people often are reflecting on is that there wasn’t quite a unified thing. I mean, post Scream, there was this sort of reemergence of teen slashers, but you look at that first half of the decade and so many people are just like, “I’m not seeing the thread that binds everything.” But there’s Candyman, Tales From The Hood, In The Mouth Of Madness. Unbeatable stuff.
DC: Exactly. Well Sam, thank you so much for chatting with me about all the cool things on Shudder. I can’t wait for everyone to experience all of these, especially Infested. I can’t wait to see the reactions online.
SZ: It’s such a terrific film. Also, go back, if you haven’t seen You’ll Never Find Me Yet, which premiered at the end of March. I highly recommend it!
Categorized:Interviews
