I’m canceling my Netflix subscription. Although its collection of new wave noir is good, it is not infinite. It has taken a long time, but after many evenings of numbed clicking I must accept that I have run through all of Netflix’s programming that is up my alley. And that’s okay—I don’t have a regular television because most programming is not up my alley.

Those of us with niche tastes (I’m into murders, almost exclusively) could be spending our TV-money better elsewhere. HBO is, of course, the high-end alternative of choice, while the free version of Hulu is, I guess, a low-end version. Paying for cable seems like madness to many, but I hear it is still common in many households.

Meanwhile, niche streaming services are catering to the specific tastes that broader television connoisseurship has fostered among the American viewership. Living as we do in the great golden age ushered in by The Sopranos, we expect sophistication and variety in programming. So why do so many of us pay for the same subscription service?

AMC’s horror-oriented service Shudder is $5 per month, squarely in the middle of the market. Shudder’s offerings show that horror takes many forms. The service divides its programming into curated groups. Some are tongue-in-cheek and genre-aware, like Bad Genes and Killer Kids, or Slashics, but others are oriented to the deeper history of the form (Hammer’s Hellions, Bava-thon).

Living as we do in the great golden age ushered in by The Sopranos, we expect sophistication and variety in programming.

“Bites” is Shudder’s collection of short pieces by new filmmakers, like the 15-minute hairdressing gorefest The Stylist, or the rape revenge fantasy Consommé. In this last film, a woman is attacked in Brooklyn. She wakes up covered in bruises. Via flashback we learn that she was dragged off the street by a man who tries to rape her. She bites his face. The next morning she throws up an ear and some flesh and looks satisfied. Then she flosses her teeth.