Hulu has had some fun carrying us through the horrors of the last few years with its monthly Into The Dark anthology series, which is produced by Blumhouse Television and pairs up-and-coming indie directors with timely horror premises (a New Year’s Eve thing for the end of the year, a spooky mom-related story for May, etc.). Now, Amazon has decided that it would also like to do that, but without the whole “it’s sort of about holidays” conceit. It’s even working with Blumhouse Television to do it, but in Amazon’s defense, those are the people you’d call if you wanted to make an anthology series of horror movies for your streaming service. They have some experience doing that sort of thing.
Amazon’s program is called Welcome To The Blumhouse, and it will consist of eight spooky films (a press release says “genre,” so they might not all be strictly horror) that are all “thematically connected.” They’ll also feature “exciting up-and-coming talent” (like Into The Dark) alongside “established actors.” The series will launch in October (“timed for the Halloween season”), though the second four movies won’t launch until 2021.
The first four movies are writer/director Veena Sud’s The Lie, (starring Mireille Enos, Peter Sarsagaard, and Joey King, about parents covering for their daughter after she murders a friend), writer/director Emmanuel Osei-Kuffour Jr.’s Black Box (starring Mamoudou Athie and Phylicia Rashad, about a man with amnesia undergoing an experimental treatment), Madhuri Shekar’s podcast adaptation Evil Eye (with Sarita Choudhury, Sunita Mani, and Bernard White, about a mom suspecting her daughter’s boyfriend of terrible things), and finally Zu Quirke’s Nocturne (with Sydney Sweeney and Madison Iseman, about a mysterious notebook that somehow allows a shy music student to outshine her outgoing twin sister). You can see Amazon’s full promotional poster for the series below.