Note: Spoilers for the first two episodes of Guts & Glory below!
“I’m going to hell,” horror legend Greg Nicotero tells Crafty. Based on what he puts contestants through on new Shudder competition series Guts & Glory, he might be right. But surely he’ll be rewarded for remaining enthusiastic and generous even at the end of a full day of press for the show. Not many people would offer to keep talking past the cutoff time, but Nicotero is as eager to dissect the behind-the-scenes work that went into the six episodes as any super fan.
The premise is terrifying and elegantly simple: People from across the country read and signed reams of contracts and waivers to appear on a competition show without knowing exactly what they were signing up for. By the morning of their second day, they have an inkling when one of the contestants is found murdered and hanging in a tree.
Turns out, everyone is competing in an immersive horror locked room series that involves such gruesome tasks as digging in a corpse for a medallion. And because Nicotero is running things, that corpse is a far cry from your local Halloween haunted house. One of the reasons Guts & Glory is such a breath of fresh, fetid air is that Nicotero walked in with his usual suspects… and none of them had any unscripted experience. By the way: The show shot in just six days.
“I couldn’t have done this show without my Walking Dead crew,” he says. “I hired my camera crew, my AD crew, my costume crew, my stunt crew, my makeup effects crew. We all have tons and tons of experience in television and movies, but none of us had ever shot non-scripted.”
That fresh-eyed approach is in keeping with a show that seems to break all the rules, both of unscripted and of horror effects. Need a zombie to interact with a professional actor? There’s precedent for what is required. But what if you need a handful of normies to fish around a bloated corpse in a freezing abandoned hospital?
“When you’re shooting something like this [in scripted], it’s the cinematography, it’s the lighting, it’s the effects people and how the blood comes out,” Nicotero says. “It’s the atmosphere. And then go into post. ‘How long is it on screen? How many frames? Oh, we need a sound effect here. We need a music sting here.’ I had none of that in my pocket [for the real-time challenges]. The contestants are standing there, studying it for 10 minutes at a time.”
In other words, things had to be perfect to maintain an atmosphere of hysterical terror. Based on the contestants’ reactions, things were perfect—but Nicotero and his team had a few extra tricks up their sleeves that one wouldn’t typically turn to during a narrative shoot. Cue the Smell-o-Vision.
Yes, that bloated corpse also had an odor.
“We found a company that makes smells for Halloween experiences, and they had a rotten cadaver smell,” he says. “You can order it like an ice cream flavor. I think they had strawberry, vanilla, and decomposing corpse. I wanted it to be real. I wanted it to be immersive for them.”
That’s why Nicotero kept repeating two things to himself: “These poor people” and “I’m going to hell.”
“At one point, when [contestant] Josh is digging into the body and he almost throws up, and then the rest of the contestants are like, ‘Oh my God, if he throws up, I’m gonna throw up,’ I was literally going—I am the worst human being ever—‘If they throw up, I’m not gonna be sad about it.’ So horrible of me!”
But so worth it for us.
New episodes of Guts & Glory premiere on Shudder every Tuesday through the finale on November 4.
Emmy and MUAH Award winner Greg Nicotero’s legends-only credits include everything from The Walking Dead and Creepshow to Candy, Kill Bill, and The Mist. His go-to at craft services? “Gotta be Diet Pepsi. All the crafty guys know that when it’s a show that’s mine, there’s gotta be Diet Pepsi in the cooler. And we shoot in Georgia, where it’s all Coke everywhere. And I would say the donuts with the brown glaze on top. Swedish fish, Rice Krispies Treats. Anytime you see Rice Krispies Treats on the crafty table, you can’t not eat one.”
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