The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula is coming back for a seventh season on Tuesday, October 27, streaming on Shudder and AMC+. Shudder made the announcement Thursday and put out the season’s official key art with it, which you can see above.
The date is not an accident. Dragula first went out on Halloween 2016 as a micro-budget independent series, which makes this the show’s tenth anniversary season, and the Boulets are treating it that way.
Who Is Sitting at the Judges’ Table
The guest judge list is the most horror-literate one the show has assembled. Rose McGowan, Doug Jones, David Dastmalchian, Harvey Guillén, Rachel True, Darren Stein, Lloyd Kaufman, Brandon Rogers, James A. Janisse, Chelsea Rebecca, Yvie Oddly, Lauren LaVera, Bailey Sarian and Howard Berger are all confirmed, along with three previous Dragula winners: Landon Cider, Dahli and Asia Consent.
A few of those names tell you what kind of season this is. LaVera is Sienna from the Terrifier films. Berger co-founded KNB EFX and has an Oscar for makeup. Janisse and Rebecca run the Dead Meat channel, and Rogers is the YouTube comedian whose horror feature Weird Party just added Giancarlo Esposito to its cast. True is still The Craft to a generation of horror fans, and Kaufman is Troma. This is a panel that will know when a look is referencing something.
The season is billed as the show’s most ambitious yet in the challenge department, and it is leaning hard into a specific era. Per Shudder, season seven will pay homage to the grimy, tactile VHS horror of the 1980s and ’90s through cinematic sequences built around some of the genre’s most iconic films. The key art, with the Boulets looming over a wood-panel television, is already telling you that.
Back to the Beginning, On Purpose
“Ten years ago, we opened the gates to our world without a roadmap, a television network or any idea of how far this strange underground experiment would take us,” the Boulet Brothers said in the announcement. “For season 7, we wanted to celebrate everything that has always made Dragula dangerous and different while pushing the series into its next era. We cast raw, hungry artists who were completely unprepared for what was waiting for them, creating a season that feels unpredictable, cinematic and alive in a way that takes us back to the beginning.”
The beginning was a long way from where the show is now. Shudder picked Dragula up starting with season four in 2021, and the series has since become the platform’s highest-performing unscripted original. Along the way it has collected four Emmy nominations, three GLAAD Media Award nominations, two Make-Up Artists and Hair Stylists Guild Awards, and, earlier this year, the Critics Choice Association’s Reality TV Award at its Celebration of LGBTQ+ Cinema and Television. The Boulets themselves are now playable characters in Dead by Daylight and hosted Knott’s Scary Farm in 2025, which is a hell of a résumé for a show that started as a self-made Halloween project.
“Over the last decade, The Boulet Brothers’ Dragula has grown into a genre-defining franchise and a cornerstone of Shudder’s programming,” said Nick Lazo, SVP of Development and Production at Shudder, who called the Boulets “influential voices in modern horror.”
For Those Keeping Score
Seven crowns have been handed out across six seasons and one special: Vander Von Odd (season one), Biqtch Puddin’ (two), Landon Cider (three), Dahli (four), Niohuru X (five) and Asia Consent (six), plus Saint in the Resurrection special. Three of them will be judging this year, which should make the eliminations interesting for the contestants and uncomfortable in the way Dragula prefers.
Season seven arrives at the tail end of Shudder’s four-month Season of Screams lineup, four days before Halloween. The cast has not been announced yet. For a sense of how the last cycle went, iHorror sat down with the Titans season two winner last December.
