Shudder’s Second Helping of Bite-Sized Horror History

“Horror’s Greatest” returns, examining space-set screamers, demented love stories, cutting edge film scores and beyond spanning another five episodes that hit the streaming service December 31st.

celluloid consommé
2 min readJan 1, 2025

If you’re browsing Shudder right at the end of the year, chances are you might be looking to experience one more shock or scare before 2024 comes to a close. Maybe you’re looking for some fresh recommendations to follow through on in the new year. The site’s previous programmatic offerings have brought an illustrious array of titles forward for exploration into the deepening sub-genres of horror.

The second season of Shudder’s celebratory series, Horror’s Greatest, sees its second season begin right before the end of 2024 in a compact five-episode stretch encompassing horror’s best in animal attacks, film scores, killer dates, hidden gems, and space horror. Episodes feel very much like they did in the previous season with the same and other similar talking heads, ranging from David Dastmalchian and Joe Hill to Tananarive Due and Morgana Ignis.

Horror’s Greatest also continues Shudder’s tradition of providing background information on horror films as well as giving some insight to how films are read. As a self-labeled horror fan I have found myself expanding on the boundaries of film, re-evaluating what makes something a horror movie. This season makes some compelling arguments and honestly surprised me a little in places. This I would attribute to Kurt Sayenga and how he directs the discourse around sub-genres of horror to allow for a constantly shifting class of film and style.

The show does tend to slide between recycling titles a tad too much across other episodes and getting into some intriguing & fresh sentiments on the usage of the genre’s tropes. The reality of the densely populated nature of horror exhibiting all each episode covers can sometimes rub against Shudder’s limited library of titles to discuss, creating a much more crowded Venn diagram of examples rather than being as expansive as it wants to be.

But for where the series goes in its second season has me hopeful for what could be covered in an inevitable third season. It’s important that the genre of horror remain fluid and ever-changing; the nature of pinning down specific parts of something so nebulous as horror is Sisyphean but necessary to catalogue and understand the medium and ourselves. Of Shudder’s docuseries, Horror’s Greatest is proving to be the best out of all of them and once the final episode releases I hope you would agree.

Horror’s Greatest season 2 premieres today, December 31st with its first episode, “Animal Attacks,” with future episodes set to release weekly on Tuesdays until January 28th.

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celluloid consommé
celluloid consommé

Written by celluloid consommé

90s kid raised by cartoon movie wolves. Twitter: @demonidisco letterboxd.com/HamburgerHarry

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