Movie night sure ain't what it used to be.
In the era of streaming video, the options seem limitless. The likes of Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Crackle, Vudu and even YouTube offer so many movies that scrolling through them can turn into a sort of all-you-can-eat nightmare, the media equivalent of pushing Olive Garden breadsticks down your throat until dough's coming out of your nostrils. With so many options at your fingertips, it's hard for anything to stand out.
But Shudder, a new streaming service just for the horror genre, may have the answers to movie overload we didn't know we were looking for.
The service, which is backed by AMC Networks, offers relatively little content -- you might call it "limited," but "specialized" or "curated" fit the bill, too. There are just 269 movies to choose from, according to our count, and they're broken into collections like "Alien Intruders," "Romantic Bloodsuckers" and "Monster Mash," so you know exactly what type of horror flick you're in for. The curators who select the movies for Shudder aim to present a mix of classics -- a "canon," in their words -- in addition to total obscurities you probably haven't heard about. More on this later.
By contrast, there are well over 300 titles in Netflix's "Horror" section alone, though it also includes not-so-horrory horrors like "Sharknado 2" and lacks entries like "Pulse," an acclaimed Japanese flick offered on Shudder.
As with other platforms, each movie on Shudder is rated and reviewed by community members. And, if you're truly indecisive, there's the Shudder TV experience, which drops you right into the middle of a film, emulating the experience of stumbling upon a movie while channel-surfing.
You can sign up for a free 14-day trial on Shudder.com. The service also offers apps for Android and iPhone. A subscription is $5 per month, or $50 for the whole year.
In fairness, it's Shudder's smaller library that helps it avoid the discoverability problem common to Netflix, where the glut of content can be a hinderance. Since there are fewer movies to sift through on Shudder, it's harder to get lost finding something you want to watch, especially if you're enough of a horror fan to sign up for the service to begin with.
Above: What your Friday night looks like on Amazon, Netflix and Hulu. So much scrolling! So little time!
But while this seems like the exception to the rule for now, it's possible that streaming platforms could become similarly specialized -- music services are already starting to lock down exclusive licensing deals to distinguish themselves from competitors, perhaps setting the stage for streaming products that don't aim to provide everything to everyone.
To find out more about how Shudder distinguishes itself in the movie streaming marketplace and the challenges other specialized services could face in the future, The Huffington Post spoke with Colin Geddes and Samuel Zimmerman, curators who help pick the content that streams on Shudder.
Shudder is a "curated" platform -- that's where you two guys come in. This is very, very different from the model of Amazon or Netflix or Hulu where the idea is basically, "let's offer everything to everyone." Talk to me about that.
Colin Geddes: Shudder is like a video store. It's very unlike other streaming services. They just see "horror" as content. They're not making the distinction of what's actually good, what actually has critical traction, what actually has fans.
Would this model work for other genres?
CG: The market is flooded with crap. Just because you like a Western doesn't mean you like all Westerns. It doesn't mean all Westerns are good. There has to be a vision, a dedication behind it, which is going after the films that are true classics, building that foundation.
Samuel Zimmerman: I don't know that there's another genre that has the same passion. Horror fans are film fans. They're adventurous, they're dedicated. There's a similar passion in comedy, so something like that could fit.
Tell me about the challenges to curating a collection of movies online.
CG: I come from a film festival background. Part of my mandate is finding and discovering new films. That's part of the joy of my job. It's the drive to seek out new, strange, odd and wonderful movies and share them with people for the first time, or going back and discovering old films and classic films, or films from another country. One of the struggles with doing it online is the detective work it actually takes to track down all of these films. It's actually much easier to stock a video store than stock an online store. A lot of companies have not transferred their assets into digital formats, and a lot of rights have lapsed and fallen through the cracks. It's kind of a detective's job to track these things down.
SZ: Colin's right. As much as we love the canon stuff, there are also so many films out there that film lovers haven't seen because they're not streaming. We want to say, how can we get these films on Shudder that they've only seen half of on TV years ago.
CG: In the transition from video store to online, there's a lot of films that have fallen through the cracks -- current films, independent films. Shudder is providing us with the chance to champion these films that missed that window.
Is there a lot of red tape to get these movies?
CG: There is. We have to figure out licensing rights, figure out who really does have the rights. We're looking at films from the 1950s and 1960s that have been languishing in catalogues because they think no one wants to watch these films. Anytime we find an old film that's a black and white lost classic -- a lot of this stuff has just been lost.
Are you concerned about the ephemeral nature of streaming? You can spend all of this time getting the rights to a movie, but when those rights expire, the movie's just gone.
CG: Unfortunately that's just the nature of the business. But as we progress, we're getting longer and longer licenses. There's a distinction between people who want to buy and own movies and people who just want to watch them. We're getting into a new era where people are getting rid of more things and just having things on cloud-based services. I don't need to own my copy of the DVD of the old movie "House," because it's going to be on Shudder. That's an interesting shift from, if you want to watch these films you have to own them. I don't think that's what the casual fan wants to do. They don't want to go out and buy a Blu-Ray for $20 to $30.
SZ: Not only that, but a lot of physical media is moving toward a very collector space. The stuff I buy, there are a lot of movies that are expensive. Shudder should be a space where they can discover the movies they always meant to.
CG: Shudder is flipping between a video store, a film festival, the cool second-run theater down the street. It's about giving the audience the chance to discover.
Anything else?
CG: I think about when I ran a video store. We were running out of room to store these movies. We'd look it up, and there'd be one movie that someone hadn't rented in four years. We'd have a debate back and forth about whether we keep it. With Shudder, we don't have that.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.