I returned to find it a little beefier than I remembered, with its menu of films and series healthily expanded and the addition of Shudder TV – multiple channels of pre-selected programming for that rarest of geeks, the undiscriminating genre obsessive. I sampled the free-to-stream channel, which can be watched by non-subscribers, to find Shrew's Nest playing. Juan Fernando Andrés and Esteban Roel's enjoyably ripe Spanish gothic piece is a lively choice, and there's no arguing with the value, though I suspect most horrorheads would rather pick their tasty poison.
The selection, after all, is more diverse than you might expect, covering the art-trash spectrum rather nicely. Traditionalists of varying gore capacities can access Tobe Hooper's original The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in its slick 40th-anniversary restoration, Mario Bava's sticky-stylish giallo classic Blood and Black Lace or, more cosily, Ealing Studios' elegantly shivery anthology Dead of Night.
More modern tastes predominate, particularly when it comes to the service's sidebar of exclusive acquisitions. Here's the place to find, if you dare, Emiliano Rocha Minter's We Are the Flesh, a stunningly extreme incest-and-cannibalism exercise; Lake Bodom, a smart, self-reflexive Finnish spin on the old-school slasher flick that doesn't forget to tuck a few good sharp scares in amid the winks; or Anna Biller's gorgeously retro-styled occult fantasia The Love Witch. Shudder's genre remit is pleasingly catholic: arthouse titles such as Lucile Hadžihalilović's head-scrambling, nightmare-igniting vision Evolution, or Mother, Bong Joon-ho's thrillingly derailed blend of icy noir and high melodrama, aren't obvious Halloween-marathon fodder, but they'll leave your nerves suitably disarranged.
And on the series side, a month's subscription is worth it if only to belatedly discover, as I did, Beyond the Walls, a delicious French-Belgian miniseries that takes an old-as-the-hills haunted-house premise and probes every cobwebbed corner of it. Led with steely conviction by the excellent Veerle Baetens and ravishingly designed throughout, it's a treat for those who prefer a mounting wall of eeriness to violently bone-crunching terror.
