When announced in a press release by Adult Swim in May 2017, The Shivering Truth was described as "a delicately crafted, darkly surreal anthology comedy, a miniature propulsive omnibus cluster bomb of painfully riotous all dripping with the orange goo of dream logic. A series of loosely-linked emotional parables about stories within tales that crawled out of the deepest caverns of your unconscious mind and became lovingly animated in breath-slapping stop motion – in other words, it is the TRUTH". The characters in the show are puppets with wire-based armatures, created with silicon, wool, polystyrene, and resin. Chatman stated that around six months of physical production, a month of recording, and two-and-a-half months of post-production were needed to complete six episodes. Chatman has noted several inspirations for his work on the show, including Terry Gilliam's work on Monty Python's Flying Circus, stating that "I saw it when I was very young, so it scared me. I didn't know when the animation was beginning or ending." He also explained that "A lot of my influences are non-animated, primarily in short films, novels, even radio shows. A recent one is David Eagleman's books on the brain. He's a neuroscientist and he gives you 40 different versions of the afterlife, and none of them can co-exist." Solen has spoken on her inspirations as well, saying that "I loved the movie The Wizard of Speed and Time, which is a cautionary tale about making movies. Another film that I loved as a kid was Nicolas Roeg's The Witches | adaptation of Roald Dahl's The Witches, which featured both Anjelica Huston and Jim Henson's puppets. It scared me so much!"
Music
The song played during the closing credits is usually some version of the old English ballad "Long." The music is often distorted in some way and usually begins near the end of the ballad, at the lines "There's blood in the kitchen, there's blood in the hall / There's blood in the parlour where my lady did fall." Original score by Heather Christian.
The pilot episode premiered on the Adult Swim website on May 22, 2018. Before the television premiere at midnight on December 9, 2018, Adult Swim created an "online scavenger hunt" by releasing all six episodes on multiple websites and platforms.
Critical reception
Daniel Kurland of Den of Geek praised the pilot along with the subsequent first episodes to premiere, giving the show a score of 5/5 and calling it "straight up one of the best things that I’ve ever seen in my life". Jonathan Barkan of Dread Central called the show "pure nightmare fuel genius", writing that it "looks like the cast aside baby of Charlie Kaufman and Wes Anderson... it's packed full of absurdist humor, the kind of stuff that you will watch and not be sure if you should laugh, wince, or look at your friends and ask, 'What the fuck?'" Dave Trumbore of Collider wrote that "It’s not often you get to put this level of artistry and insanity on display on an international television network", and that "You’ll definitely laugh while watching The Shivering Truth, but there’s just as good a chance that you’ll throw upa bit, too".
