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Theme Festival - Sci-Fi and Horror

C21 DIGITAL SCREENINGS

Theme Festival - Sci-Fi and Horror

Overview

Designed to help audiences carry on screaming and dreaming, we enter the sci-fi and horror dimension to help buyers populate slots that appeal to audiences worldwide.

Programming Profile

Carry on screaming…

06-12-2021

With horror and sci-fi programmes proving more popular than ever, execs including Blumhouse Television’s Chris McCumber speak to Ruth Lawes about what’s driving the trend and where the genres are heading.

 

Horror and sci-fi films, unlike their characters, refuse to die. Perhaps more than any other movie genre, horror films tend to be endlessly rebooted or spawn countless sequels. This year, the Halloween franchise welcomed its 12th instalment, Halloween Kills, starring original actor Jamie Lee Curtis, while next year will bring the fourth sequel to 1996’s Scream, also featuring original actors Courtney Cox and David Arquette.

 

But while a mainstay of cinema, horror content is a comparatively new genre for television audiences. Executives such as Craig Junner, VP of programming at Blue Ant Media, and Craig Engler, general manager of Shudder, point to 2010, and specifically the launch of US cablenet AMC Networks’ post-apocalyptic series The Walking Dead as the watershed moment for the genres on the small screen. The zombie drama, which is based on a comic book series, will have survived for 12 years when it gives up the ghost in late 2022.

 

Never one to miss a trend, the global streamers have also picked up on the growing popularity of horror and sci-fi programming in the years since the premiere of The Walking Dead. Netflix is behind Mike Flanagan’s gothic horror anthology series The Haunting, which to date includes The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor, while Amazon has greenlit a series adaptation of 1997 film I Know What You Did Last Summer, to name but a few.
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