Masters of Horror

Two Philipstown residents want to scare you
Sam Zimmerman loves Halloween. He really, really loves it. As the senior vice president of programming and acquisitions for Shudder, AMC Networks' streaming service, he has seen any frightening film you can mention - that's his job.
It's also now a central part of his life at home. In February, he and his wife and their two young sons moved to Parrott Street in Cold Spring, the heart of the village's annual trick-or-treating ritual.
Zimmerman likely didn't realize it, but another fright aficionado, Tore Knos, was already in place in Philipstown. In April, The New York Times called Knos' 2024 film, Snakeeater, one of "five horror films to stream now."
Although horror is booming at the box office, and there are seemingly unlimited viewing options online, Zimmerman says he most enjoys introducing viewers to sub-genres like giallo (Italian horror from the 1970s, such as films by Dario Argento) or folk horror, such as The Wicker Man (1973) and Midsommar (2019).

When Shudder launched, there weren't many boutique streaming services. As VP of programming, Zimmerman helps create collections so viewers "don't spend all their time browsing; they find things they want to watch and care about and explore within the genre.
"You can continuously come up with different nooks and crannies," he says. "It's fun to create pathways, to be able to say, 'Here are five or 10 films within this genre,' with some classics and some undiscovered gems. You'll get a good sense of the hallmarks and tropes." The Washington Post last year called Zimmerman "the man who picks your nightmares."
Zimmerman grew up in the Bronx and says he was probably too young when he became a horror fan, "but I couldn't help it." He read the Goosebumps series, as well as books and stories by Stephen King, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. "I remember my dad showing me An American Werewolf in London and my grandmother buying me Psycho," he says.
In 2004, while he was in high school, his mother, stepfather and two sisters moved to Cold Spring. He would visit often, and the family hit Parrott Street at Halloween. At SUNY Purchase, Zimmerman majored in cinema studies and interned in New York City at Fangoria. "I stuck around the office until they hired me," he says. "I started going to film festivals and understood my interest was in programming, development, acquisition and production." In 2014, he became a consultant to the fledgling Shudder, then joined full-time.
His focus initially was on building the catalog by licensing classic and cult films. "There were all these films that, at the time, hadn't streamed," he recalls. "I knew this was our opportunity to showcase movies that had a reputation or had been celebrated but that most people hadn't been able to see." One example: Andrzej Zulawski's Possession (1981), which had limited home video distribution.

In 2016, Shudder began producing new films. Some highlights: Host, which was made quickly during the pandemic, about teens who conduct a Zoom seance (what could go wrong?), A Violent Nature ("something of an art house reinvention of what a slasher film is") and Oddity, an Irish film about a blind medium.
"In some ways, horror is one of the oldest forms of storytelling," Zimmerman says. "There have always been scary stories and cautionary tales, so there's something primal there. Even intellectual horror movies are trading on instinct and provocation. They reflect our anxieties at any given moment. But they're also fun, with that satisfaction of getting a thrill."
When Tore Knos needed moody, misty footage for Snakeeater, which is available on Amazon Prime, he didn't have to go far. Much of the film was set in a shadowy New York City. But he realized, during editing, that he needed a "pillow shot" to create atmosphere.
"I needed a shot looking up into the fog," he recalls. "One day it was super foggy, so I drove under the Bear Mountain Bridge and got a great shot."

While re...