Goodbye, Chiller, we hardly knew anyone who got ye

By Katie Rife | November 16, 2017 | 11:24pm

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NBCUniversal has announced plans to shut down all-horror cable channel Chiller at the end of 2017, an ending that will presumably carry more weight than Friday The 13th: The Final Chapter, Saw 3D: The Final Chapter, or Freddy’s Dead: The Final Nightmare. The reason for the channel’s premature demise? Its parent company’s failure to get it picked up by cable and satellite services like Dish and Verizon. Deadline reports that the channel currently reaches an estimated 40 million households, which seems awfully high based on an informal survey of the A.V. Club offices; it doesn’t say if that statistic is in the U.S. or worldwide, though.

Regardless, not to pour salt into Chiller’s wound or anything (we’re not really into torture porn), but the channel’s only original series, Slasher, is now on Netflix. So all that’s being lost here are horror films—which have their own dedicated streaming service in the form of Shudder—and reruns of horror series like Tales From The Crypt, The Twilight Zone, and Buffy The Vampire Slayer. Those last two are currently available on Hulu, but at the moment, Tales From The Crypt is still absent from streaming services, presumably the victim of the same complicated tangle of rights that killed TNT’s reboot of the series earlier this year.