Shudder Is the Curated Horror Experience Streaming Needs
The Netflix of scary movies has a terrifying human touch
Miami isn’t exactly a small town, but growing up there in the ’90s, it was downright provincial when it came to hunting down my favorite movies. And those have always been horror movies — the more traumatizing, the better. I rifled through the slim “suspense” section at Blockbuster with its seemingly carefully organized shelves choosing (and gambling on) titles based on their lurid cover art, with a little help from the clerks — devouring Children of the Corn, the junky-looking original Pet Sematary, and eventually The Silence of the Lambs and Suspiria. When my parents gave in and bought me a VHS copy of The Witches, I wore down the tape until it showed fuzzy lines, disturbed and delighted in equal measure each time I hit play to take in Anjelica Huston’s heaving, perversely sexual performance as the head witch who was out to exterminate all children.
But I knew there was a whole deranged world out there I was missing. When I could finally drive myself, I ventured to the area’s only real arthouse theater in South Beach and paid student admission (the ticket taker didn’t seem sure I should be there at all, but relented) to watch a special screening of Jean-Luc Godard’s stunning, hilarious, cannibalistic parable Weekend, in which…
