Hulu Orders New Monthly Horror Anthology Series From Blumhouse Television

Hulu and Blumhouse Television have joined forces to create a never-before-done horror series. The new anthology will feature twelve standalone episodes that are connected in some mysterious way, much like Netflix’s Black Mirror. Unlike Black Mirror, however, the standalone episodes will be released monthly, spanning one full year. The first episode is set to debut this October. The unique project has no writers or producers attached as of yet.

The untitled series will be Hulu chief content officer Joel Stillerman’s first original program. Stillerman previously served as president of original programming and development at AMC and Sundance TV. Stillerman said in a statement (per Variety):

If there’s been one guiding principal that is in place from the day I walked in the door, I wanted to look at that Hulu logo and remember that making TV for an over-the-top SVOD platform, if it isn’t today, is going to be a very different proposition than the approach to making television for what is still the majority of the landscape. I wanted to focus on this question of what does it mean to make television for a place like Hulu.

Blumhouse Television is part of Jason Blum’s Blumhouse Productions, known for their horror franchise The Purge, M. Night Shyamalan’s Split, Jordan Peele’s Get Out and many more acclaimed horror works. Blumhouse is also the production company behind the forthcoming HBO limited series Sharp Objects, starring Amy Adams.

The new anthology series offers a number of helpful benefits for Hulu, including attracting horror-genre audiences, a genre very underrepresented in television, and allowing Hulu to release original content throughout the year. Usually, Hulu original episodes are released one week at a time to avoid the crazed, Netflix-esque “binging” of their shows immediately after their release. The anthology will also give its creators plenty of artistic freedom, but at a price of lower budgets and tighter scheduling windows.

The co-president of Blumhouse Television, Marc Wiseman, says this collaboration is “an innovation,” also stating that “Hulu’s commitment to create episodic installments of an anthology series and to event-ize each of them—you don’t get that kind of commitment from partners very often, and we’re really excited and enthused.”