Greg Nicotero is just like anyone else. When he’s done at the office, he sits down and unwinds in front of a comfort show, often in the form of reality TV. He watches Jeff Probst, Phil Keoghan and Alan Cumming terrorize and enthrall their captive Survivors, Amazing Racers and Traitors, and wonders what it might be like to live in those competition spaces for a while.
That’s where the similarities end between Nicotero and most everyone else. Because unlike the other lifelong reality show viewers, and even unlike the ones who defy the odds and wind up competing on one of these shows, the Walking Dead mastermind has taken things a step further by creating a horrifying TV reality all of its own.
Enter: Guts and Glory, Nicotero’s horror-filled reality competition show, now airing in its entirety on Shudder. Most easily described as Survivor meets The Blair Witch Project, the series sees a group of contestants abandoned in the middle of nowhere, forced to team together and against one another for a top prize. Unlike standard reality shows, however, folks aren’t voting one another out. They are trying to survive, quite literally, against a demonic soul hellbent on killing each and every one of them.
Obviously, “quite literally” is quite literally untrue. No one’s getting killed making Guts and Glory. But that’s not stopping Nicotero from doing all within his power to scare the living daylights out of his contestants. Serving as both the creator of the series and as its host, Nicotero combines his iconic special effects history with his reality tv hobby to churn out episodes in which players get “killed off” in graphic fashion, just like a horror movie.
How exactly does Nicotero pull it off? The season finale, airing now, explains all the secrets in glorious fashion. Below, Nicotero tells THR all about his journey from reality show viewer to reality show host, and all the gory details therein.
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I’ve known about your reality TV fandom for a while now. Before even asking about Guts and Glory, I have to ask, would you ever do Survivor or another one of these shows?
I would be the first one out.
That’s what [White Lotus creator] Mike White said before Survivor — and he got second place!
I do love Mike. You never know! But I always joke about how if I did The Amazing Race, my wife would push me off a building before I put my harness on. (Laughs.) But I love The Traitors, Top Chef, all of these shows. I don’t know how I have all this time to watch them, but I do really love it.
Which leads us into Guts and Glory. If you won’t play the game, you might as well host it. How did the idea come together?
When we started talking about it, I didn’t want it to be a prank show because it’s not a prank show. And it’s not like one of those “you got to eat gross stuff” shows. So as we developed it, I kept thinking, “Well maybe it’s this swamp area where the contestants were dropped off. Maybe there’s this evil spirit that lives there and attaches itself to one of the contestants.” And none of the contestants have any idea that that was our backstory.
What were they thinking, then?
I have to give them a lot of credit, because they got on a plane, and had no idea what was coming. We told them they might be sleeping outside: “Pack some of this, bring some of that.” Even after filming the first episode, they really had no idea what was going on.
Guts and Glory.
Curtis Bonds Baker/AMC
The first episode ends with this fourth-wall breaking moment: a contestant is “pulled” from the game for having snuck in a cell phone, only to be found “murdered” the next day. For a second there watching, I really thought someone ran afoul of a compliance person on set. How did it play out, staging the first “death” of the season?
Originally, the first episode was going to start with them showing up at the camp late in the day and then going to bed. Then my original idea was somebody wanders off to use the restroom and starts screaming, comes back and says, “I think I got bit by something. I don’t know what it was. Oh god, I’m not feeling great.” “Do you need the medic?” “No, I’m just going to lay down…”
Eerily similar to something that happened on Survivor this season.
Oh my god, I didn’t even think about that.
But we were going to hire identical twins. And we were going to replace the guy who got bitten with an identical twin that had this bloated, horrible makeup on. And in the middle of the night, he was going to start screaming and wake everybody else up in the area and run off. Then the idea was they’re running around the woods trying to find this guy to get him to the hospital. That was my original idea up until a week before we started shooting. Then we learned we can’t bring them in during the day and shoot all night, and then take them to the hospital because that’s a 24-hour day. So we had to break it up into two days.
You reveal yourself as the host, and the basic premise of the show, after the first “kill,” but even then, not immediately. You take your time unveiling the premise. How hard was it to keep up some measure of mystery and, for lack of better word, “reality” during the opening days?
My big thing was that I have to keep the contestants in it until I’m revealed as the host. Once I get them into the morgue [in episode two], I can breathe. Because I thought, “Okay, when Juliene’s body is being wheeled into the hospital, they’re going to start suspecting something.” But so what? They can suspect something. That’s part of the fun.
What I wanted was a real reaction to what the show was presenting, which is now we know that an evil spirit has latched onto one of the contestants and has now possessed that contestant, and that contestant is now fucking with ’em. The show is really an immersive version of Halloween Horror Nights in Orlando. But there’s a story and a throughline. We made it so when you got to episode six, we would pull back the curtain and show you how it’s all made, and we even show you scenes where I’m like, “Guys, I have no idea how we do this.”
Guts and Glory.
Curtis Bonds Baker/AMC
You’re used to working in scripted, where you have time to set up takes and following a carefully laid plan. With reality, you’re in the moment, and in the case of this reality show, you’re also trying to pull off on-the-fly horror effects. It’s a really different beast.
It’s a really different way for me to work. I hired mostly from the Walking Dead crew, so we’re all used to shooting scripted narratives, storytelling. Here we dip our toes into the non-scripted pool where we have eight cameras going at once. And the big thing is that it all has to happen live. When you have a complicated effect like the creature, you have to have sound effects going on set the whole time. So when the people walk into the junkyard and hear a roar, they really heard a roar. Then they see the creature, and their reactions of seeing that creature are real. We literally put a rope on the ground so that the guy in the creature suit could walk and follow the rope, so that he could only be within their eyesight for a couple of seconds. Then we had to misdirect them, and you have to do it without saying cut.
It’s like shooting a football game or a live sporting event. We did have a few pickup shots, but maybe only five percent of the show, because we didn’t physically have the time and I didn’t want to spoil the illusion for the contestants. So even with that creature and some stuff in the final episodes, if you really sit back and look at it, you’re like, “There’s no way that that happened in front of them, or did it?” I don’t know if we pulled it off. Maybe we did, maybe we didn’t. But that was a huge part of the fun.
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Guts and Glory season one is available now on Shudder.
