{"id":148110,"date":"2025-11-19T10:49:13","date_gmt":"2025-11-19T10:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/148110\/"},"modified":"2025-11-19T10:49:13","modified_gmt":"2025-11-19T10:49:13","slug":"guts-and-glory-horror-reality-show-is-survivor-meets-the-walking-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/148110\/","title":{"rendered":"‘Guts and Glory’ Horror Reality Show Is ‘Survivor’ Meets ‘The Walking Dead’"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n\tGreg Nicotero<\/a> is just like anyone else. When he\u2019s 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.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tThat\u2019s 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\u00a0Walking Dead\u00a0mastermind has taken things a step further by creating a horrifying TV reality all of its own.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tEnter:\u00a0Guts and Glory, Nicotero\u2019s horror<\/a>-filled reality competition show, now airing in its entirety on Shudder. Most easily described as\u00a0Survivor\u00a0meets\u00a0The 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\u2019t voting one another out. They are trying to survive, quite literally, against a demonic soul hellbent on killing each and every one of them.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tObviously, \u201cquite literally\u201d is quite literally untrue. No one\u2019s getting killed making\u00a0Guts and Glory. But that\u2019s 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 \u201ckilled off\u201d in graphic fashion, just like a horror movie.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tHow exactly does Nicotero pull it off? The season finale, airing now, explains all the secrets in glorious fashion. Below, Nicotero tells\u00a0THR\u00a0all about his journey from reality show viewer to reality show host, and all the gory details therein.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tI\u2019ve known about your reality TV fandom for a while now. Before even asking about\u00a0Guts and Glory, I have to ask, would you ever do\u00a0Survivor\u00a0or another one of these shows?<\/p>\n

\n\tI would be the first one out.<\/p>\n

That\u2019s what [White Lotus creator] Mike White said before\u00a0Survivor <\/a> \u2014 and he got second place!<\/p>\n

\n\tI do love Mike. You never know! But I always joke about how if I did\u00a0The Amazing Race,\u00a0my wife would push me off a building before I put my harness on. (Laughs.) But I love\u00a0The Traitors, Top Chef, all of these shows. I don\u2019t know how I have all this time to watch them, but I do really love it.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhich leads us into\u00a0Guts and Glory. If you won\u2019t play the game, you might as well host it. How did the idea come together?<\/p>\n

\n\tWhen we started talking about it, I didn\u2019t want it to be a prank show because it\u2019s not a prank show. And it\u2019s not like one of those \u201cyou got to eat gross stuff\u201d shows. So as we developed it, I kept thinking, \u201cWell maybe it\u2019s this swamp area where the contestants were dropped off. Maybe there\u2019s this evil spirit that lives there and attaches itself to one of the contestants.\u201d And none of the contestants have any idea that that was our backstory.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat were they thinking, then?<\/p>\n

\n\tI 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: \u201cPack some of this, bring some of that.\u201d Even after filming the first episode, they really had no idea what was going on.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tGuts and Glory.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCurtis Bonds Baker\/AMC<\/p>\n

\n\tThe first episode ends with this fourth-wall breaking moment: a contestant is \u201cpulled\u201d from the game for having snuck in a cell phone, only to be found \u201cmurdered\u201d 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 \u201cdeath\u201d of the season?<\/p>\n

\n\tOriginally, 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, \u201cI think I got bit by something. I don\u2019t know what it was. Oh god, I\u2019m not feeling great.\u201d \u201cDo you need the medic?\u201d \u201cNo, I\u2019m just going to lay down\u2026\u201d<\/p>\n

\n\tEerily similar to something that happened on\u00a0Survivor\u00a0this season.<\/p>\n

\n\tOh my god, I didn\u2019t even think about that.<\/p>\n

\n\tBut 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\u2019re 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\u2019t bring them in during the day and shoot all night, and then take them to the hospital because that\u2019s a 24-hour day. So we had to break it up into two days.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\n\tYou reveal yourself as the host, and the basic premise of the show, after the first \u201ckill,\u201d 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, \u201creality\u201d during the opening days?<\/p>\n

\n\tMy big thing was that I have to keep the contestants in it until I\u2019m revealed as the host. Once I get them into the morgue [in episode two], I can breathe. Because I thought, \u201cOkay, when Juliene\u2019s body is being wheeled into the hospital, they\u2019re going to start suspecting something.\u201d But so what? They can suspect something. That\u2019s part of the fun.<\/p>\n

\n\tWhat 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 \u2019em. The show is really an immersive version of\u00a0Halloween Horror Nights\u00a0in Orlando. But there\u2019s 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\u2019s all made, and we even show you scenes where I\u2019m like, \u201cGuys, I have no idea how we do this.\u201d<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\"\"<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\tGuts and Glory.<\/p>\n

\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\t\tCurtis Bonds Baker\/AMC<\/p>\n

\n\tYou\u2019re used to working in scripted, where you have time to set up takes and following a carefully laid plan. With reality, you\u2019re in the moment, and in the case of\u00a0this\u00a0reality show, you\u2019re also trying to pull off on-the-fly horror effects. It\u2019s a really different beast.<\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s a really different way for me to work. I hired mostly from the\u00a0Walking Dead\u00a0crew, so we\u2019re 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. <\/p>\n

\n\tIt\u2019s 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\u2019t physically have the time and I didn\u2019t 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\u2019re like, \u201cThere\u2019s no way that that happened in front of them, or did it?\u201d I don\u2019t know if we pulled it off. Maybe we did, maybe we didn\u2019t. But that was a huge part of the fun.<\/p>\n

\n\t***<\/p>\n

\n\tGuts and Glory\u00a0season one is available now on Shudder.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Greg Nicotero is just like anyone else. When he\u2019s done at the office, he sits down and unwinds…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":148111,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[93,20178,11311,61,60,84272,282],"class_list":{"0":"post-148110","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-tv","8":"tag-entertainment","9":"tag-greg-nicotero","10":"tag-horror","11":"tag-ie","12":"tag-ireland","13":"tag-the-walking-dead","14":"tag-tv"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148110","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=148110"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/148110\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/148111"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=148110"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=148110"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ie\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=148110"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}