HORROR’S GREATEST Season 2 Interview with Showrunner Kurt Sayenga

Horror’s Greatest makes a comeback with a second season filled with exciting episodes for horror fans hungry for more horror films to see in 2025. This season's episodes include “Animal Attacks”, “Killer Dates”, “Hidden Gems”, “Film Scores”, and “Space Horror”. Showrunner Kurt Sayenga brings to this season new perspectives to horror classics like The Birds and Carrie, to lesser-known frights like The Blackcoat’s Daughter and Ghostwatch, with several on-camera interviewees, including myself.

Sayenga shares with us how he developed the themes of the episodes, what new films he discovered through this season, the impact of film scores in horror cinema, and what he hopes audiences will take away from the series.

Bonilla: How would you describe the theme of this season?

Kurt Sayenga: This season takes the general idea of Horror’s Greatest and expands upon it, taking it into places that show the flexibility of the concept. The general umbrella of Horror’s Greatest lets us look at the history of horror film scores as well as putting the spotlight on essential subgenres, like animal attacks.

With so many possibilities, how did you decide on what films to highlight for the “Hidden Gems” episode?

Kurt Sayenga: I love to ask people who watch a lot of horror films, genre films, what their lesser-known or unappreciated favorites are. Everybody always has at least one. These films are generally not common knowledge but are worth seeking out. So, in putting together the “Hidden Gems” episode, I wanted a slate of movies that appealed to a wide range of tastes, from classical horror to extremely boundary-pushing horror.

Many of these cool but uncelebrated films are from outside the United States, which is something I’m very keen on trying to introduce and expose people to. One of the nice things about Shudder is it takes up that cause as well. They put on a lot of things from other regions, things like Santa Sangre, which is a batshit movie, but worth seeing because there’s nothing else quite like it. It’s a good one to see with friends if you can because you’re going to get a wide spectrum of reactions to that film. It may freak out some of those friends, so choose them wisely.

As far as choosing the titles, I asked a lot of hardcore horror people for recommendations and wound up with a list of about 100 different films, and then doing the interviews I got a sense of what people were most passionate about. During the editing process, I boiled them down to films that had good sound bites and are available in some form, because quite a few hidden gems are out of print and nearly impossible to find. Fortunately, there are physical media companies trying to rescue them, like Kino Lorber, Arrow, Severin, Indicator, and Vinegar Syndrome. A few of my guests – Michael Gingold, Nathaniel Thompson, and Howard S. Berger – have done literally hundreds of commentary tracks for them. Howard’s recommendation was for Peter Collinson’s Fright, which I had never heard of.

What were some of the hidden gems that surprised you the most? I’m assuming Fright is one of them.

Kurt Sayenga: Yeah, Fright was one of them. That’s a very intense movie that laid the ground for the “babysitter in peril” trend. It’s very British and psychosexual, very realistic in the most disturbing way. The Untamed, from the Mexican director Amat Escalante, is equally disturbing and extremely psychosexual, but not at all realistic. There’s Ghostwatch, which I started hearing about a couple of years ago but was difficult to track down until quite recently.

Freaked – Michael Gingold recommended that, and when I found out Alex Winter was coming in, I tracked down a copy – it’s been out of print for a while. I watched it and thought, “Oh, that was bizarre and entertaining and worth including.” Ganja and Hess, which Tananarive Due told me about the first time I interviewed her…and several people recommended The Blackcoat’s Daughter and I Am the Pretty Thing That Lives in the House, which I hadn’t seen.

And Messiah of Evil was a nice surprise – that was recently given a beautiful restoration, and it appears in one of the episode’s sublists. The sublists are where we put films we don’t have enough time to include. But honestly, we could do a whole series just on hidden gems.

For animal attacks, what’s your favorite animal attack horror movie in the episode?

Kurt Sayenga: There are a lot of fantastic animal attack movies. I would still have to go with The Birds, even over – and this is controversial, because I know saying that The Birds is better than Jaws is, you know, heresy or something. Jaws is a terrific film, obviously, but if I had to watch something over and over again, I would watch The Birds, because of how experimental the filmmaking is and because of the weird undercurrents of the story.

Now, Jaws is obviously a fantastic piece of commercial filmmaking. Steven Spielberg really directs the hell out of this thing, firing on all cylinders. But to me, it’s not disturbing the way The Birds is. And Jaws doesn’t really have much subtext. I’m sure somebody could make a whole argument that the shark [in Jaws] represents capitalism or it’s about masculinity or whatever. But I think it’s exactly what it appears to be: a classic man versus nature story.

But clearly darker things are going on beneath the surface of The Birds, and Alfred Hitchcock is channeling all of this. There’s the whole twisted relationship of Rod Taylor’s character with his mother. Suzanne Pleshette and Tippi Hedren both desire him, which is quite an enviable position to be in, and his mother’s repressed rage over losing her son seems to manifest itself through the bird attacks. The Freudian subtext is so strong that it’s kind of funny, and of course, Hitchcock as a visual filmmaker can’t be beat. You can see Hitchcock’s influence on Spielberg all over Jaws.

There are so many iconic film scores. How difficult was it to pick the film scores in the episode?

Kurt Sayenga: It was a great pleasure to make that episode, but it was challenging to explain some of the musical concepts in a way that non-musicians would understand. Because much like physics, when you’re talking about music, you’re literally talking about another language. Musicians work with the language of music just as physicists work with the language of math.

And, at the practical level, there are all sorts of music rights issues that are really tricky. You have to be very specific about the film clips you use and how long you use them. So, that was a tricky episode to do from that perspective. But mostly it was hard because I wish it was at least two hours long, not an hour long. I tried to focus on the landmark composers who created horror film scores as we know them today, and overall I think we were successful.

Is there a difference between the classic and contemporary scores?

Kurt Sayenga: Contemporary horror scores seem to have turned away from melody and big orchestration. Jerry Goldsmith, Max Steiner, and all of the classicists, even John Williams, it’s not really in style at the moment, at least not in horror. Part of that is driven by budgets. Full orchestras are expensive. That’s why synthesizers dominated low-budget horror films in the 1980s. These days more ambient tracks are in style, which I also love – when they’re done right. Like Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, they have their own vibe they bring to everything, which is very, very cool. But they use ostinatos, simple repeated phrases, that make their scores memorable.

Some modern composers don’t even give you that – they create more of an overall vibe of dread, which can be very effective, but there’s not much in the way of melody. But that’s a deliberate choice, and that choice is usually made by the director, because, as Randy Newman famously said, “The relationship of the composer to the director is that of the monkey to the organ grinder.” You give them what they’re asking for.

One of my favorite contemporary works is Mica Levi’s soundtrack for Under the Skin, which is kind of atonal, not really melodic at all, and uses a lot of noise and effects, but it’s terrifying and singular enough to be memorable. But it’s not something you can hum, like the leitmotifs of The Bride of Frankenstein or the main theme to Jaws.

Do you think that film scores can make or break a film?

Kurt Sayenga: Yeah, for sure, definitely. And soundtracks – meaning the music and effects and dialogue recording – those can break a film if they’re not properly recorded and mixed. Often when an independent film, a low-budget independent film, gets acquired, the first thing that a studio spends money on is upgrading the soundtrack. There are a lot of magic machines and talented people now that can clean things up and make them sound much better. It can make all the difference, particularly in horror films.

Robert Eggers’ Nosferatu is a fine example of the importance of sound. It looks gorgeous, but it also sounds terrific. There’s a timbre they bring to the voice of the vampire that’s really interesting and chilling – they must do some sort of processing on Bill Skarsgård’s voice. The music and sound effects are very tightly integrated, much the same way that Alan Howarth, who’s one of our interviewees, worked with John Carpenter on a lot of his famous scores of the 1980s and 1990s. Alan also was a sound designer for Bram Stoker’s Dracula, which he talks about in the show. All the strange, custom-made sounds for Bram Stoker’s Dracula added a huge element that it made it so much more interesting.

Even though the sounds sometimes are completely unnatural, it grounds the horror in a way, throwing in sounds that are out of place in a normal environment. It’s unsettling enough that it hits you, probably even at the subconscious level, that something is off here.

Which are your favorite scariest killer date movies or killer couples?

Kurt Sayenga: Carrie will always be important to me because seeing that when I was young made a really big impact on me. There’s so much pain in that movie, and that film captures the worst parts of high school and toxic teen couples. But Audition is probably my favorite date movie. That’s a film about adults and skewed power dynamics, but also just about how dating can be terrifying because you never know if you’re hooking up with a psychopath. And The Bride of

Frankenstein captures the yearning and pain of unrequited love.

What do you think makes killer date films uniquely terrifying, versus something like space horror or animal attacks?

Kurt Sayenga: Oh, I think they are universally relatable. Whatever your orientation is, human beings want to hook up with other human beings. Trying to have some sort of close personal relationship involves trust, and that involves opening yourself up and exposing yourself to other people. And when you open yourself up, people can get in and wreck the furniture inside. That’s the risk you take.

How does space horror set itself apart from other sci-fi horror movies?

Kurt Sayenga: Space horror is about our urge to explore the unknown and not being cognizant or blithely ignoring the fact that we as a species do not know everything. And when we go out into the universe, there could be all sorts of unspeakable things that are beyond our comprehension. In other words, classic HP Lovecraft. Pretty much every good space horror film owes something to Lovecraft, even 2001: A Space Odyssey, which on its surface seems technical and sterile, because of its clinical presentation of a space voyage. But by the end, the astronaut is confronting something that he literally cannot understand; he cannot wrap his mind around what he is seeing.

All of these strange images are coming at him and at the audience that makes no sense. Part of it is just like, “What the hell is this?” But you aren’t meant to understand. It’s a representation of something that can’t be described.

What would you consider the three most important space horror films, and why?

Kurt Sayenga: Alien, for all the obvious reasons. Alien puts us in a haunted house in space. Alien follows a blueprint laid down by several films, most prominently It! The Terror from Beyond Space and Planet of the Vampires. But Alien gives it this high gloss, beautifully constructed Ridley Scott treatment, and it just works. It still holds up, still scary, still good.

2001: A Space Odyssey again, because it is a film that dwells upon the insignificance of human beings in relation to the vastness of the universe and our attempts to evolve. The second half of 2001: A Space Odyssey is the part that hits the hardest, first because it has HAL-9000. And with every second, HAL becomes more of a reality.

Alexa and Siri are listening to everything you say, collecting data points, then tailoring ads towards you. It’s a form of surveillance that George Orwell couldn’t have dreamed of, deployed in the service of capitalism. 2001: A Space Odyssey warns us that if we create a truly intelligent machine, that machine could be more neurotic than the humans, because in this case the machine actually has more of a soul than the humans it is serving.

The second key of 2001: A Space Odyssey is the confrontation with the unknown and unknowable. The unknowable can be horrific because we can’t understand what it is and what it wants. We don’t know what the Monolith did to the astronaut or what the star baby is at the end. It appears that Bowman was reborn as the next step in evolution, but look what happened with the last evolutionary step! Homo sapiens wiped out the previous species and took over. So, 2001: A Space Odyssey does not necessarily have a happy ending. It just has an ending: “Get ready for whatever comes next.”

Science fiction films and horror films are closely aligned because they are all warnings. They’re like our collective unconscious attempting to tell people to wake up, be careful, and watch out for danger. But their lessons are ignored. We’ve been warned about AI for decades, but the tech lords smell money and they are going to make AI happen regardless of the consequences.

My third choice is Forbidden Planet. That’s one of the first great science fiction films, and it has a monster that rips people apart, so it is horror, but the real horror is its message: humans can go to the outer reaches of outer space, but we will take our problems with us. We take our goodness, but we also take our jealousies and petty hatreds, the traits we think that we have transcended. We may think that we aren’t animals, but underneath that is still what we are. It’s a message that gets repeated in a recent science fiction film I really love called Aniara, which is a Swedish-Danish movie that I like to call “the nightmare version of Wall-E.”

What do you hope audiences will take away from the season?

Kurt Sayenga: I hope that audiences will respond to our appreciation of the craft of moviemaking and that they’ll seek out the wide range of movies that we examine and celebrate. Horror takes many forms, and there are many subgenres, and I really believe there is something in horror for everyone, whatever your taste.

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Horror’s Greatest Season 2 is now streaming on Shudder.