How Horror-Streamer Shudder Is Gearing Up for Halloween
If you’re looking for someone to curate programming at your horror streaming service, hire the guy with the trio of “Halloween 3: Season of the Witch” (1982) masks tatted on his forearm. Sam Zimmerman was built — or at least inked — for the Shudder job.
This is Zimmerman’s time of year — and it’s extra special in 2024. September and December both have Friday the 13th dates, perfect bookends for Shudder’s supersized Season of Screams. During the same window, Zimmerman is moving his young family onto what he described as the Halloween block in his new (and quaint) town. Quite the Halloween for this guy, both professionally and personally.
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With all due respect to AMC+, Shudder is the standout AMC Networks streaming service (of the many we don’t feel like counting right now), and the Season of Screams will pack the app with film releases, series, specials, and live watch parties. Come the actual holiday season, the one where an intruder brings presents and not a machete, Shudder will debut a brand new Ghoul log.
IndieWire spoke at length with Zimmerman about his favorite season — and you can do the same. Zimmerman himself mans Shudder’s Halloween Hotline, a gimmick to connect with current and potential subscribers that started during COVID. For Zimmerman, the hotline has evolved from personalized film suggestions into annual catchup sessions.
Zimmerman will roll calls on Fridays in October for “an hour or two,” he told IndieWire. If he doesn’t get to you, it’s not because he doesn’t want to — someone got him first, and got him going.
“I probably should be taking more calls, but you end up talking to someone for a few minutes and end up having a conversation,” he said. “I always find it more valuable that we had a conversation rather than I was just like ‘Watch this.'”
The phone call — and the friendship — is free, a price that Shudder itself is creeping toward this month. On any of October’s 31 days, you can get 31 percent off an annual Shudder TV plan.
Even if he were wearing long sleeves, it’s clear Zimmerman is no poser. Don’t believe him? Here is his new (actual, official) headshot, shared with IndieWire:
“This has kind of been me since a kid, and a professional iteration dropped on me, which is really lucky,” Zimmerman said.
Lucky for him, and lucky for his employer.
“I think you can learn on the job but you have to meet the genre halfway, and have affection for what the genre is,” he said. “Because there are people in film-industry positions who aren’t horror fans, and they make horror-fan films, and they discount what the genre is.”
That “shows in the end product,” Zimmerman continued. “It shows in the film you’ve made, the film you’ve bought, that you think less of the horror audience. And that is where you stumble.”
Well, this — as in, this very moment — is where Shudder thrives.
In a candidate for understatement of the year, Zimmerman called October “arguably our most important month,” both business- and programming-wise. “The whole year is gearing up toward [Halloween],” he said.
Interest in Shudder spikes as early as August, Zimmerman said, with summer camp slashers — though he maintains that the broader horror drama “really isn’t seasonal.”
As of June 30, 2024, AMC Networks had a combined 11.6 million streaming subscribers. Soon enough we’ll get an update for the quarter ended September 30, but that number won’t encapsulate the entire October bump for Shudder. (It will also remain an all-in number — AMC does not break down subs by platform. The last time we got a Shudder-specific tally was when it hit 1 million subs ahead of Halloween 2020, just as the hotline started.)
AMC+ is the single biggest of the company’s streamers. And at $4.99, it is also cheaper than Shudder. The extra dollar per month for Shudder is for the super-serving.
“We found our price point to be really solid and garner a lot of favorability,” Zimmerman said. “I think people have recognized it’s valuable, and recognized that our programming reflects it. Because while we are genre-focused and we are horror-focused… we program by instinct and atmosphere rather than here is one definition of where horror starts and one definition where horror ends.”
This Season of Screams will include “In a Violent Nature,” the new “V/H/S” TK “V/H/S/Beyond,” “The Exorcism” with Russell Crowe, Mark Duplass and Patrick Brice series “The Creep Tapes,” and the streaming return of Mike Flanagan’s “Hush.” They’ll join the existing library with all eight “Friday the 13th” films, Rob Zombie’s entire catalog (seven films), and a lot more.
Here are the live watch parties in October; IndieWire readers will probably want to circle Mischief Night on their calendars.
October 4: Found Footage – “V/H/S/Beyond” and “Hell House LLC”
October 11: Horrifying Households – “Daddy’s Head” and “Metamorphosis”
October 18: Shocking Scourges – “MadS” and “Virus:32”
October 25: TBA
October 30: “Late Night with the Devil” on Devil’s Night
October 31: “Halloween” on Halloween
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