Interview with HORROR’S GREATEST Showrunner Kurt Sayenga

After the massive success of Shudder’s original program 101 Greatest Horror Moments of All Time, comes the newest original program Horror’s Greatest.

Horror’s Greatest through its five episodes, “Tropes & Cliches”, “Giant Monsters”, “Japanese Horror”, “Horror Comedies”, and “Stephen King Adaptations”, showrunner Kurt Sayenga uses a unique format through deep dives with a vast variety of on-screen interviewees, including myself, to bring new perspectives on the horror films you love, while also bringing attention to the lesser-known gems for horror fans to discover.

Sayenga made a name for himself in the horror documentary world with Eli Roth’s History of Horror and 101 Greatest Horror Moments of All Time. In this interview, Sayenga shares about what inspired the show, the significance of highlighting the wide spectrum of horror, how Godzilla influenced his career, and what he hopes horror fans to take away from this show.

Bonilla: You have an extensive history with television documentaries. Before you started making horror documentaries, what was your earliest experience being involved with television?

Sayenga: I actually made an appearance on television when I was five, on a Bozo-like children’s show, because my brother’s band was playing in a local TV studio. Some producer saw me standing there and they needed another kid. So they grabbed me and had me come down this slide, and you’d slide into the set. But I realized while I was doing it that they added me as a prank on the clown because he didn’t expect me. So when he had his back turned I slid down into his butt. I chewed gum and talked through the whole thing. I figured my role was to annoy him.

How did you come up with the introduction of corpse puppets watching a movie?

I wanted to do something special that didn’t look like any other title sequence out there. Something organic and fun, all hand-made, not something generated in a computer. I went back to something I did a long time ago, a military history series called Fields of Armor, which had a title sequence shot from the point of view of a tank going through a blown-up city and ends with the series title projected on a wall. That was all done with miniatures and a snorkel camera. And I thought, “Oh, let’s do something like that, but then cross reference it with movie monsters.” So it starts with a mad scientist and his henchmen in a graveyard who are actually digging up audience members for a horror film festival, which is kind of how I think of the series. It’s like a festival, with a little something for everybody out there in the horror audience.

In the introduction, there is a corpse with a rolling head that looks just like you. How did that idea of having you as a corpse come up?

Gary Smith’s storyboards ended with a decapitated head rolling off a corpse. And that’s the place where the showrunner credit usually goes – the last-listed executive producer is the showrunner. So I said, “Why not make it my head?” All the puppets were built by Gary’s wife, Laura Plansker. Two other figures in the open were also inspired by actual people. The mad scientist at the beginning is a combination of Peter Murphy of Bauhaus and Boris Karloff in The Black Cat, and the henchman is modelled on Glen Danzig of The Misfits.

Did you intend to have the introduction coordinated with the set?

Yes, I was very pleased with that, to have the opening and the sublist intros all coordinate with the set. I wanted everything to look of one piece with a kind of outdoor moonlit look because all the previous shows were very indoor. Eli Roth’s History of Horror was inside a haunted house, and 101 Greatest Horror Moments of All Time was in that sort of 2001: Space Odyssey, Suspiria space. This has a real Mario Bava look, very color-saturated.

When did you come up with the concept of the show?

After 101 Scariest Horror Movie Moments of All Time proved to be a success. The wonderful people at Shudder and I were talking about doing something else we could do together. I had a bunch of ideas for various things. This evolved into a series that could encompass many different topics. So, it could be something like tropes and cliches or killer dates but could also be a look at Japanese horror or film scores.

Some of those are coming up next season. It would be a survey of genre high points, but it wouldn’t be a countdown like the last series. It’s more of an homage to a bunch of great stuff in horror and a way of looking at what makes the genre so special. Horror is so big and holds so much that we think it could be an ongoing series. Both sides were looking for something that can just carry on as long as you come up with fresh things to say. And there are still fresh things to say about horror in all its forms.

How did you come up with the individual themes for the episodes?

I had a list of about, I think, 45 different things. Then, I sent it to the network. Then they kind of chose the ones that they liked the most.

There are so many films throughout the episodes. How challenging was it to kind of decide on the films?

We wound up drawing from a pool of over 700 films in the archive, which was many hundreds more than we were dealing with on The 101 Scariest Horror Movie Moments of all Time, and certainly more than we were dealing with on Eli Roth’s History of Horror. So that was part of the challenge, to try to see how much we could pack in and trying to make it a mix between known genre favorites and outliers and things that even the hardest of hardcore horror fans may not have heard of. So it was really an effort to give maximum exposure to everything that I and the editors found interesting – and I cannot overstate how crucial the editors’ input was for this series. We were trying to work in as many films as possible.

And part of that discovery process came from the interviewees themselves. I wanted to find out what my subjects liked and thought were cool movies within these sub-genres. I didn’t want it to be so top-down, deterministic. Part of what makes this fun, keeps it interesting, is getting all these other perspectives on things and then trying to work those into the shows.

You got a lot more people being interviewed than I’ve seen in your previous horror series. How were you able to get so many people?

It was a very diverse group, not as heavily weighted toward actors, though there are still a bunch in there. Part of that was out of necessity because we did a couple of waves of interviews, but the first wave happened to occur just as everybody in

Hollywood went on strike. So we had a lot of people lined up who had to drop out for union reasons. Many of them came back after the strike when we did some more interviews, but in the meantime, I still had all this time booked and needed to get people.

So we cast an even broader net, which actually worked to our advantage in that we do have an even more diverse group of horror experts who have different perspectives from top-line film industry people. There are more indie film people, scholars, critics, and fans. And I always strive to have as many different voices from as many different kinds of cultures and walks of life come in. That helped the process.

What are some of your favorite Japanese horror films?

There are so many. But, Audition, of course. Onibaba and Tetsuo: The Iron Man. If I had to edge anything into that, it would be something by Kiyoshi Kurosawa, because his films are just beautiful. Cure and Pulse are classics.

Which trope do you think is one of the silliest, but probably one of the more essential ones in horror?

Cursed books are pretty silly when you think about it. Although books certainly have power, as Mein Kampf has proven. But the idea that you are going to read something in a book and it’s going to create supernatural manifestations is pretty silly if you think about it. Which is why I’m so glad we got the cursed book from The Care Bears Movie in there. But without the cursed book, we wouldn’t have The Evil Dead, which is pretty essential.

What are some horror comedy films that you wish more people knew?

The Cabin in the Woods and certainly Tucker & Dale vs. Evil. If you haven’t seen The Cabin in the Woods, you’re missing out on life. I would also say the Dr. Phibes movies with Vincent Price, definitely. And there’s a Price movie called Theater of Blood made around the same time which is similar to Phibes, but a little darker. It also has Diana Rigg in it. It’s Shakespearean and has an interesting combination of camp and very violent murders. Like the Saw movies, but funny.

For the giant monsters, which is your favorite scene in a giant monster movie?

Well, most recently in Godzilla Minus One, there’s the scene where the hero and his wife are out there in the street as Godzilla attacks, and then the shock wave hits. He’s trying to pull her into an alley, and then this massive wave of force just blows her away. And that was fantastic.

Godzilla is special to me because it was one of the first things I had on TV. When I was a kid there was a horror movie host named Sir Graves Ghastly who used to run monster movies. And I watched his show religiously. He would have a bulletin board and they would pan across it with kids’ artwork. And so I drew this masterful drawing of Godzilla destroying Tokyo and sent it in. And it got a big close-up when he was going across the board. So that was the birth of my television career. I was like, “Wow, I can get things on television?”

When was that?

A million years ago. I don’t know when that was. Maybe 1970 or something.

With Stephen King, having so many cameos in movies and TV shows, what are a few of your favorite King cameos?

Well, the one in It Chapter Two is good as the shopkeeper. But I also kind of like the one in The Langoliers because it’s so off the wall. Stephen King is a corporate executive in a pinstripe suit. I don’t think I’ve ever seen Stephen King that way before or since. But his best performance was playing a “cleaner” – the guy who makes the bodies disappear – in Sons of Anarchy.

You’ve done so many interviews for this series. Did you learn about any new films or a new idea for a film you know well?

I certainly learned about some new films, particularly in the “Tropes & Cliches” episode where editor Caleb Emerson pulled out a lot of films that I was not familiar with, which was fantastic. I’ve seen a lot of horror movies, but Caleb had a deep knowledge of some really strange and unusual stuff, and a great eye for visual clichés. He had a running joke about people crashing through second-story windows, something that happens with surprising frequency in horror movies.

In this series, your daughter Lilly was an associate producer. What was it like working with Lily?

Oh, it was really fun. Lilly was very good in that role, because she has a real attention to detail, which is what was required, and she has a broad familiarity with the genre after years of digging through my film library. Among many other things, she had to maintain all the databases of the hundreds of films we were referencing and track who was talking about what, then gather the material into a framework that fed into my scripts. That requires someone who knows how I think. It’s nice to have somebody in that position who I could trust.

What do you hope viewers will take away from this series?

I hope viewers will take away from this an appreciation of how big the horror tent is and how much it can hold. That there’s always something to find out, always something to explore. In my case, I’ve been immersed in this for years now, and yet, there are so many films I wasn’t familiar with and so many new ways of looking at classic films. Joe Dante talks a lot about how films are different when you see them at different times, different ages. You can have a completely different read on them, a completely different understanding. And that’s very true. So that’s a good reason to revisit some of your favorites, because they may hit you in a different way than they did at the time. That’s also a good reason to revisit films that you didn’t care for very much, but that other people told you were good, and you thought were terrible. When you watch them again, you realize maybe there was something there that either you missed, or something just didn’t speak to you at that point of your life.

So this series is a way of saying, yes, here are these great horror films, both famous and obscure, and check them out. Keep probing because you will find something you like. Even if you don’t like slashers or monsters, there will be other parts of horror that you do like.

Horror’s Greatest premiered this week on Shudder, with four weekly episodes. Author’s note: Thank you, Kurt, for including me on-camera in this exciting series.