How the Horror Streamer Found Success By Fostering Filmmakers

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…