If your plan is to stay home for Halloween, choosing Shudder will give you all the frights you need, says Dan Slevin.
Photo: AMC+
Specialist horror/thriller streaming service Shudder launched in Aotearoa back in August 2020 but didn’t appear on my radar until its parent service, AMC+, came here two years later.
Seeing as it’s the season for all of the things that make you jump, scream or gag, I thought I would take a closer look at some of the offerings on the service and encourage you to look further into it.
There’s a lot amount of content on the site – it took me a while to scroll through the whole offering – and the variety is pleasantly surprising.
Razorback
Photo: AMC+
While the core selection at Shudder is modern horror in all its forms – with a decent amount of titles produced by Shudder itself – I was pleased to see quite a few classics in the lineup. From George A. Romero’s second zombie movie, 1978’s Dawn of the Dead to Vincent Price in Roger Corman’s 1964 version of The Masque of the Red Death, there’s something from almost every era.
They’ve also given a nod to local conditions by including kiwi director Ant Timpson’s debut film Come to Daddy and a couple of Aussie classics. Sam Neill and John Clarke star in the 1990 comedy Death in Brunswick, which is borderline horror but does involve an accidental murder and attempts to dispose of the body.
And then there is the classic rogue pig story Razorback from 1984 with which Australian music video director Russell Mulcahy (Duran Duran, Elton John, Billy Joel) made his feature film debut. (At least, it’s his debut if you don’t count the offensively drunken documentary Derek and Clive Get the Horn starring Peter Cook and Dudley Moore from 1979.)
In Razorback a giant wild pig takes revenge on the outback locals who are turning the local wildlife into pet food – a classic animal revenge story – and the picture has some stylistic chops for a low budget Ozploitation film. The night-time lighting is inspired by Spielberg’s Close Encounters and ET where bright colours are shot through a diffusing haze creating a moody and unworldly atmosphere.
And, like Spielberg before him with Jaws, Mulcahy chooses to hide the snouty malevolence for as long as possible in order to build tension, but also so we don’t all just start laughing.
The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster
Photo: AMC+
Much more up to date, and much closer to the usual Shudder fare, is The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster which, like all great horror films, is about much more than what it’s about, if you know what I mean.
Low budget genre pictures can often be the vehicle for social and political messages and The Angry Black Girl is a superb case in point. If you’ve ever wondered what Frankenstein would be like if crossed with the TV show The Wire, this is the film for you.
Gifted high school student Vicaria (Laya DeLeon Hayes) lives in a deprived black community beset by gangs, guns and drugs. Her brother Chris (Edem Atsu-Swanzy) has already succumbed and it looks like her father (Chad L. Coleman) is heading the same way.
“Death is the disease that broke my family,” she says. “If death is a disease, then there’s a cure.”
Using her science talents, she preserves Chris’s body and – with the help of some scavenged extra body parts, freely available thanks to all that gang violence – she manages to reanimate him. The hope is that his return will help heal the family but it turns out it’s much too late for that.
Suitably gory but also brilliantly grounded and (ultimately) genuinely heartbreaking, The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster was a wonderful surprise. It reminds us what horror is capable of and the Shudder lineup shows us that there are plenty of young directors wanting to use the form to tell strong stories (and make us nauseous at the same time).
The Love Witch
Photo: AMC+
Described as “horror” in the Shudder schema but utterly unclassifiable in my book, Anna Biller’s The Love Witch (2016) is like nothing else that you will have seen recently.
Aesthetically inspired by '60s exploitation films but looking glossy enough to remind you of technicolour television masterpieces like the '60s Batman or The Monkees, The Love Witch is a dead serious feminist parable wrapped in pitch-perfect satire.
Samantha Robinson is Elaine, a witch, starting a new life in modern day California after being heartbroken by her loser husband.
Determined to find love again – and still with faith that men only want someone sexually available, domestically compliant and perfectly pretty – she concocts spells and potions to make her men believe that's exactly what they are getting. Except, that turns out to be too much for any man and they expire, making Elaine an unlikely serial killer.
If you can imagine that revenge thriller Promising Young Woman hadn’t been directed by Emerald Fennell but had, in fact, been made by the lecherously exploitative Russ Meyer, you might get half way to where this film is heading.
It took Biller six years to make – mainly because she wrote, directed, produced, edited and designed all the sets and costumes. No wonder she hasn't made a film since and has stuck to writing novels where that kind of control comes a lot easier.
The Love Witch screened in the Incredibly Strange section of the 2017 International Film Festival, and has been tucked away as a digital rental since then, but I’d never seen it on a streaming service until this week.
Shudder comes with your AMC+ subscription which starts at $7.99 or a Shudder-only plan which starts at $6.67 a month. They have a seven-day free trial which is perfect for Halloween season.
