Shudder GM Craig Engler On The Runaway Success of ‘Creepshow’

Today is Halloween. You wanna see a scary movie?

Since launching in 2015, AMC Networks’ Shudder has become the top streaming destination for horror movies and is loaded with classic scares like Hellraiser, The Changeling and Prom Night. That’s for amateurs, though. Shudder has become a top buyer for indie and international horror films like One Cut of the Dead, which is one of the best-reviewed films 2019 in any genre with an 85 on Metacritic.

And Shudder’s original series Creepshow has become a straight-up hit. The streamer announced last week that 54 percent of its direct-to-consumer subscribers have watched at least one episode of the horror anthology series created by The Walking Dead director/producer Greg Nicotero. On Wednesday, Shudder renewed Creepshow for a second season.

Decider spoke with Shudder GM Craig Engler to talk about Creepshow, the streamer’s growth over the last few years, and some Halloween night viewing recommendations.

DECIDER: Creepshow has pretty quickly become your flagship original series. Did Greg Nicotero develop that through his deal with AMC?

CRAIG ENGLER: We’ve had a list of properties that we think would be right for Shudder, and there are franchises on there you’d expect like Friday the 13th and Halloween. Creepshow was a formative movie written by Stephen King and directed by George A. Romero, who are two giants in the field.

The Cartel came to us and asked if we’d be interested in Creepshow, and we said absolutely yes. They were already talking to Greg Nicotero about it totally unrelated to our discussions with him about project ideas. That was the first film set Nicotero ever visited and where he met his mentor [and special-effects producer] Tom Savini, so we were all glad to get to work on the project together.

Two big things that come forward from the film are the allegorical stories and the camp factor. Were those two things you wanted to see in the series?

Yeah, absolutely. We consider the Creepshow series to be a continuation of the two Creepshow movies and not a reboot or reimagining. The series has the elements that made the originals so successful, and we updated them for a modern audience.

Those morality tales — the comeuppance that many characters get — is certainly integral to Creepshow. The films moved between campy and serious, and we have that. You’ll see the comic book elements. Greg Nicotero is the modern master of practical effects, and that’s ultimately what distinguishes it from everything else out there.

Did you have a writers room for Creepshow, or did you go out to writers like the episodes were movies?

It was very interesting. For most of Creepshow, we adapted short stories. The very first segment is “Gray Matter,” which is my favorite Stephen King short story. Stephen King was the first person Nicotero called about adapting something for the new Creepshow, and we have a story by Joe Hill — King’s son — who was actually in the original Creepshow movie as a child actor.

The D.J. Qualls episode, “The Finger,” which Nicotero directed, has a great monster. Was that all practical effects?

That was all practical effects except for a little bit of CGI to remove the puppeteering rods. Bob, that cute creature, is a practical effect that Nicotero did. I love the scene where he’s eating popcorn. The No. 1 comment we’ve gotten is that everyone wants a Bob plush doll.

You renewed Creepshow for a second season. Are you thinking about doing more than six episodes or doing a binge release in 2020?

Six episodes is about right for us. Creepshow is an anthology series rather than a serialized drama, and it’s something we’ve been running weekly and getting great response from that. We’ve had more viewers thank us for running the series weekly by a wide margin than people complaining that we didn’t put it all out at one time. People want to watch the episodes weekly and have time to talk about them.

The weekly model is what HBO, Hulu, Apple TV+ and Disney+ are mostly following. Do you see that in some part as a reaction to Netflix?

Netflix started primarily with library shows, so putting everything out at once is what they’ve always done. One of the reactions to that has been that people don’t know when shows go up, and there’s such a short window for people to talk about binge-released shows. Running episodes weekly is something that out viewers really seem to like.

One of the appealing things about weekly shows is that you can miss the first few episodes, catch up, and get that fizzy feeling of being involved in something while it’s still happening instead of finding it three years later.

We talk about that a lot. We want to foster a sense of community and communal viewing. We have a series called The Last Drive-in with Joe Bob Briggs that introduces an old movie and comments on it. We decided to roll that out weekly and live for nine weeks, and it trended on Twitter with every airing. Horror is something people like to experience together; they want a communal experience.

How many originals do you want to have for 2020?

Ideally, we’d like to have four originals next year. We’ve already got Creepshow and The Last Drive-in coming back next year. We’ll have Season 2 of A Discovery of Witches, which was a big hit for us that we share with Sundance Now. We’ll have a new show called The Dead Lands. We also have at least two original or exclusive films every month, and we’ve got a documentary called Horror Noire: A History of Black Horror that was very successful for us this year, and we’ll have a series in 2020 on queer horror.

Shudder licenses most of its catalog titles. Do you expect to see those doors start to close as Netflix, Hulu, HBO Max and Peacock begin hoarding their studio-produced titles as their own exclusives?

The bigger studios are doing that, but we’re in a genre where there are a tremendous number of indie and international horror producers, so there’s a deep well for us. We go to almost every festival that has horror, and we’re one of the biggest buyers out there for those titles. Producers see us as a place that will handle their film well. We did a theatrical release for a film called Tigers Are Not Afraid that Guillermo del Toro introduced for us at a screening in Toronto.

What do you know about where your viewers are watching horror? Are they also watching things like Castle Rock on Hulu and theatrical horror films?

Most Shudder subscribers also subscribe to bigger mainstream services like Netflix or Prime Video or Hulu. They find that there are some pretty good horror films on those services, but they watch the two or three big titles and then find the catalog getting thin. So they come to Shudder.

We’re hand-picking every single title we have on the service. We’re not a small section of a bigger service. Rotten Tomatoes has a list of the best-reviewed horror films of 2019, and we have three of the top four titles on that list.

Give me a recommendation for Halloween night that will scare the absolute hell out of me.

One of the scariest movies we have is called Terrified, which is scarier in the first eight minutes than most two-hour horror films in their entirety. We also just launched a movie called Haunt, which is super scary and maybe the scariest movies of the year. It’s terrifying.

Scott Porch writes about the TV business for Decider and is a contributing writer for The Daily Beast. You can follow him on Twitter @ScottPorch.

Stream Terrified on Shudder

Stream Haunt on Shudder