Turn the lights down low, close the windows against the chill, and put on your favorite Type O Negative album: October is here, and with it the Halloween season. It’s a time when our viewing habits turn to the dark side, as thrillseekers and gorehounds everywhere curl up in the dark and watch the scariest stuff they can stream to get in the mood for our most horror-friendly holiday.
Searching for your next October horror binge? Sure, The X-Files and The Twilight Zone and Hannibal are reliable, but if you’re looking for something fresher, look no further than this list of the 10 best horror TV shows to recently grace the small screen. Our cutoff is 2016, a year that feels appropriately horrific in retrospect — and the start of a major new wave of television horror.
From small towns to big cities to frozen wastelands, from mesmerizing supernatural surrealism to gut-churning historical fact, and featuring a wide variety of bloodthirsty monsters both real and imagined, these shows are guaranteed to keep you up past the witching hour — first as you binge them, then as you realize you’re too scared to sleep. Put them all together and you’ve got a picture of everything horror is capable of doing on television today.
There are more scares packed into the first scene of the first episode of the first season of showrunner Nick Antosca’s exceptional horror anthology series than most horror TV shows can muster in their entire run. Amazingly, it only gets better from there. Each surreal standalone season of Channel Zero loosely adapts a famous “creepypasta” from the internet — the subjects include a cursed children’s television broadcast, a Halloween haunted house with a dark secret, a family of wealthy cannibals, and a woman haunted by her imaginary friend — and uses a different talented director. This gives story a different feeling, look, and tone, with one thing in common: All four are legitimately terrifying. The episodes and seasons are short, too, making each one a perfect weekend afternoon binge. And if you feel like the series ends too soon, don’t worry: Antosca has since co-created a quartet of killer streaming miniseries about murder and madness — The Act, Brand New Cherry Flavor, Candy, and A Friend of the Family — that are just as distinctive and chilling.
Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan’s bio-drama about America’s most infamous serial killer caught a ton of flack for allegedly glorifying the killer at the expense of his victims. To this I can only say: Watch the damn thing. As individuals and as a whole community, the people Dahmer preys upon are rendered with care and compassion. Dahmer’s own humanization — we learn about his troubled home life and his nuclear-grade alcoholism, which began as an early attempt to self-medicate his urges — makes him more frightening not less. He’s soft-spoken, kind of handsome, gay at a time when being gay is difficult, he cares about his grandma, and none of it makes any difference at all when the desire to kill and consume takes over. That’s scary. Evan Peters’s lead performance may be the final word on how to portray a serial killer.
How do you remake a David Cronenberg/Jeremy Irons project that stands as some of the best psychological horror of the 1980s? You have showrunner Alice Birch genderflip this tale of mentally ill twin gynecologists, cast Rachel Weisz in the lead roles, and create some of the best psychological horror of the 2020s. Weisz is so good as the timid, brilliant Dr. Beverly Mantle and as her predatory high-wattage sister Elliot that I quickly stopped thinking of them as being played by a single actor, and you will too. Sex, gore, childbirth, emotional incest, scathing commentary about American healthcare, and overall weirdness abound, but the horrific highlight may well be Jennifer Ehle’s guest spots as the utterly sociopathic matriarch of an opioid-funded pharmaceutical dynasty; her rictus grin as she molds the twins into money-making machines is the stuff of nightmares.
Sexy, gory, beautifully written, gothic as hell, unafraid of high camp, unapologetically gay, and absolutely sumptuous to look at: What more could you want out of an adaptation of Anne Rice’s horny vampire classic? Showrunner Rolin Jones (who also co-created HBO’s late, lamented Perry Mason reboot) makes judicious changes to the story of tormented vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac, his maker Lestat, and their “daughter” Claudia: Updating the time frame, switching Louis and Claudia from white to Black, converting the book’s queer subtext into glorious text. The narration and dialogue is laser precise, while the simultaneous allure and danger of the undead is as strong as it’s ever been on the small screen. This show was made for Halloween season.
Between cranking out adaptations of various classics of eerie literature, horror impresario Mike Flanagan produced the scorchingly bleak, Stephen King–esque look at a small island community and the evil that preys upon it at night. Hamish Linklater delivers one of the finest television performances of the past decade as the painfully earnest parish priest who will either save the village or oversee its destruction. The scares always take center stage, but this show has things to say about small-town life, addiction, redemption, and above all the pernicious and predatory power of the Catholic Church that give those scares extra bite.
Not since John Carpenter’s The Thing have ice and snow been this scary. Jared Harris leads a stacked cast of outstanding actors from across the pond in this historically rooted story of two British ships that disappeared while exploring the Arctic for the Northwest Passage in 1845, answering the then-unsolved mystery of what the hell happened to them with a potent cocktail of mutiny, monsters, magic, and madness. The source material, Dan Simmons’s meticulously researched 2007 doorstop of a novel, is very good; with literally every single judicious change they make, showrunners David Kajganich and Soo Hugh make it great. (Just ignore the so-called second season, a failed attempt at bootstrapping an anthology series out of the “historical horror” concept which has nothing and no one in common with this masterpiece.)
This one is not for the faint of heart. One of the most relentlessly intense works of horror I’ve ever watched, creator Little Marvin’s historical horror follows a southern Black family’s relocation to sunny California during the 1950s, where they are immediately besieged by hostile forces both supernatural and all too human. Them represents racism as a non-stop onslaught of torment, ranging from minor annoyances to major indignities to life-threatening — and in this case, soul-threatening — danger. There are things in this show that, once seen, you’ll wish in vain you could unsee. That’s kind of the point.
A fascinating and largely forgotten HBO experiment, The Third Day stars Jude Law and Naomie Harris, both excellent, as grieving parents separately drawn to a remote English island that may or may not have a connection to the death of their son…or which may just be a deeply weird place where people still believe in the pagan magic of old, to the peril of any visitors unfortunate enough to come their way. Creators Felix Barrett and Dennis Kelly honor the great British folk horror tradition from The Wicker Man on down with this slow-burning horror story of pain, paranoia, sacrifice, and escape.
Nicholas Winding Refn’s collaboration with crime comics writer Ed Brubaker is many things: a stylish entry into the world of TV by the Drive director, a bottomlessly seedy Los Angeles noir, a multicultural gangland epic, a vicious swipe at corrupt and fascist police, a slow-cinema experiment, a prescient parable about vigilante justice done in the name of “our children.” It’s also one of the most harrowing and frightening series I’ve ever seen. NWR’s glacial pacing is the perfect way to generate tension, which he and Brubaker deliver with unflinching violence, unpredictable outbursts of the supernatural, and an almost unbearably bleak view of the world. Perhaps the best way I can put it is this: Too Old to Die Young would be Matthew McConaghey from True Detective’s favorite show.
“I’ll see you again in 25 years.” With those words back in 1990, the troubled, murdered prom queen Laura Palmer promised the fanatical fans of David Lynch and Mark Frost’s small-town soap/cop/horror hybrid a return to further explore its mysteries. I’m not sure anyone expected it to actually happen, though, much less that the result would surpass the original. The third season of Twin Peaks is a genuine masterpiece — equal parts slapstick comedy, experimental filmmaking, meditations on aging, and demonic horror of a sort only Lynch can deliver. The season’s eighth episode, with its Oppenheimer-topping detonation of the first atomic bomb and its black-and-white flashback to a time the sinister Woodsmen of the hellish Black Lodge arrived to wreak havoc in our world, is quite simply the best episode of television ever aired, and the scariest as well. You’ll have to binge the first two seasons and the prequel film Fire Walk With Me to make heads or tails of it of course, but no horror show is more worth it.
This piece was written during the 2023 SAG-AFTRA strike, after the victory of the WGA in their own strike over similar issues. Without the labor of the actors currently on strike, the shows being covered here wouldn’t exist.
Sean T. Collins (@theseantcollins) writes about TV for Rolling Stone, Vulture, The New York Times, and anyplace that will have him, really. He and his family live on Long Island.
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