Horror’s Greatest (Episodes 1-7 Review)

For those late to the party, the series Horror’s Greatest premiered via Shudder on August 27, 2024. A series dubbed as celebrating the best in genre film, it features commentary from David Dastmalchian, Joe Hill, Tom Holland, Jenn Wexler, Dewayne Perkins, Jonah Ray Rodrigues, Gigi Saul Guerrero, Alex Winter, Jordan Vogt-Roberts, Tananarive Due, Swanthula and Dracmorda Boulet, Kate Siegel, Jeffrey Reddick, Dana Gould, Brea Grant, and many more. 

In short, the series offers a thrilling ride through Horror films with insights from the masterminds behind your favorite scares. With season one being a success, Horror’s Greatest was brought back for a second season in 2025. The first season, with its five episodes, set the stage for a quirky, interesting deep dive into everything Horror that has been put to celluloid and now digital, from tropes that become a Horror staple to deep insight into well-known movies as well as unknown. So let’s recap…

Episode one, Tropes and Cliches, dives into Horror tropes and cliches as the panels talk about creepy houses like 1979’s The Amityville Horror, killer rednecks like 1977’s The Hills Have Eyes, final girls like any one of the Friday the 13ths, and a plethora of others that were cool in the ’70s and ’80s. However, they started being caricatures of themselves in the ’90s, so movies like 1996’s Scream worked to subvert them. This was interesting because they didn’t just stick with American Horror, showing how tropes infiltrated other countries’ movies.

Episode two, Giant Monsters, dives into how King Kong first ran amok in New York in 1933 and how giant marauding monsters continue to captivate us. We learn that Godzilla was a metaphor for the Japanese reaction to the bomb, and filmmakers like Bong Joon-ho, J.J. Abrams, and Jordan Peele have all added their unique spins to the genre with movies like 2006’s Host and 2022’s Nope.

Episode three, Japanese Horror, goes into J-Horror’s use of the Japanese’s rich mythology and beliefs that birthes movies that go between slow dread and shocking violence all in the same movie in many instances with movies like 1953’s Ugetsu to 1998’s Ring, 1964’s Onibaba to 1999’s Audition,  1989’s Tetsuo to 2000’s Battle Royale. The greatest J-Horror films are essential for viewing by the well-rounded cinephile. It was crazy to see the blacks & whites were really out there and contained nudity, which is considered inappropriate outside of onsens.

Episode four, Horror Comedies, shows how the genre makes us laugh at things we might cringe at in real life if it is handled right. Horror comedies come in many flavors: splatstick like the 1987 classic Evil Dead II, high camps like 2022’s M3GAN, subversive quasi-family entertainment like 1984’s Gremlins, and classics like 1948’s Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein.

Lastly, episode five, Stephen King Adaptations, finished Season One as King’s stories have been the basis of over a dozen Horror classics…and just as many failures. What elements need to come together to successfully adapt King on the page to King on the screen? Joe Hill talks about his dad’s thoughts about individual books, comparing them to the adaptations. The only downside to this episode is they did not highlight the 1990 mini-series It with the far scarier Pennywise or the 1997 mini-series The Shining, which follows the book closer than Stanley Kubrick’s.

Now up to speed, Season Two launched on December 31, 2024, with Animals Attack. Here they dive into animal attacks, talking about how a great animal attack movie pushes all of our human-against-nature buttons, beginning with the black & whites like 1963’s The Birds using real magnified creatures that gave way to sharks like 1975’s Jaws to unhinged chimps like 1988’s Monkey Shines. This episode also brings back 1983’s Cujo, which is supposed to be pronounced “Cuho” since it is Spanish.

This led to Killer Dates, which showed up on January 7, 2025. As the synopsis says, dates in horror are worst-case scenarios that go way past awkward silences. Your lovemate is either a serial killer, a tormented psychic, or comes from a family that wants to hunt you for sport. Looking for love inevitably leads to blood and carnage.  Movies like 1976’s Carrie, 2014’s It Follows and 1983’s Christine are covered.

So far, the only complaint about the show is that it tends to use the same movies for most of its episodes. Hopefully, the next episode, Hidden Gems, which will premiere on January 14, 2025, will show more of the genre’s offerings than just the well-known fare.

Relatively fresh, Horror’s Greatest is still catching on with audiences, so it is certainly recommended that you give it a shot. As it stands, Cryptic Rock cannot wait for the next dose, giving the series 4.5 out of 5 stars.

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