From Squid Game to The Last of Us, here are 10 spooky shows to stream just in time for Halloween.
Scary movies have been around for ages, but scary TV shows are a lot harder to pull off. How do you keep up consistent scares with the same cast of characters week after week? Well, we’ve found 10 hair-raising shows that we think have pulled it off spectacularly. Some of them are new on the scene and are already making quite a splash, while others are old favorites that have multiple seasons for you to catch up on. No matter which one you choose, any of these horror TV shows are sure to get your heart racing just in time for Halloween.
10 Best Horror TV Shows to Stream Right Now
Squid Game (Netflix)
In 2021, Squid Game captured the attention of the masses. You couldn’t go anywhere without hearing someone raving about the show. The premise of Squid Game (which is dubbed in English) is like The Hunger Games on steroids: Hundreds of people are offered the opportunity to make some quick cash by participating in a children’s game, but it’s not until they start to play that they realize that what they’ve agreed to has deadly consequences.
Midnight Mass (Netflix)
From the creator of The Haunting of Hill House and The Haunting of Bly Manor comes Midnight Mass. It’s quite a departure from Mike Flanagan’s previous Netflix series. which as their titles indicate, are firmly cemented in the haunted house genre. Midnight Mass is quite firmly planted in another horror genre, but we don’t want to give that away to you just yet. The show follows a charismatic, benevolent young Catholic priest who arrives on a small struggling island with a plan that he genuinely believes will save the souls of the people living there. It’s a show that proves that the road to hell is paved with good intentions.
American Horror Story: Murder House (FX/Hulu)
Considering the fact that Kim Kardashian just made her FX debut in American Horror Story: Delicate, it might be time to rehash the best previous seasons. Of the 10 that have come out so far, Murder House — the very first season — is pretty widely acknowledged as being the best. In Murder House, the Harmon family — Ben (Dylan McDermott), Vivien (Connie Britton), and their daughter Violet (Taissa Farmiga) move from Boston to Los Angeles to start over after a family tragedy. Unfortunately, the mansion they move into is positively teeming with ghosts who are sometimes hard to differentiate from the living.
American Horror Story: Asylum (FX/Hulu)
If American Horror Story: Murder House takes the cake in the series, then Asylum is a close second. Ryan Murphy just basically took everything creepy and nightmarish he could think of and jammed it into a single TV series: a mental hospital for the criminally insane! A serial killer named Bloody Face! Very creepy clergy members! A doctor performing eugenics experiments on patients! An angel of death! Alien abductions! When you write it all out in a row it sounds absolutely ridiculous, but if you can suspend your disbelief a bit this season — particularly if you focus your attention on the inimitable Jessica Lange as a sociopathic and ruthless nun — you won’t be able to turn it off.
The Haunting of Hill House (Netflix)
This was Flanagan’s first scary series for Netflix, and it certainly did not disappoint. Based on the book by American horror author Shirley Jackson (remember that short story you probably had to read in high school, The Lottery? That’s her’s, too), The Haunting of Hill House bounces between the past and present of five siblings who have been plagued by misery and nightmares ever since they moved into a beautiful Victorian mansion called Hill House as children. It’s been said that each of the five Crain children represents one of the five stages of grief, so make sure to look out for that as you watch the show between your slightly parted fingers.
The Servant (Apple TV+)
The Servant is a bit slow to start, but the dark, chilling scenes of normally banal activities — a woman eating breakfast, a man cooking dinner — will keep you on the edge of your seat, knowing that something sinister is just around the corner. The premise of this show is a weird one. After a young couple loses their baby, the mother enters a catatonic state in her grief, which she’s only brought out of when given a lifelike doll that looks just like her deceased son. She treats the doll like a real baby, even hiring a nanny for him. When the nanny arrives, her husband is weirded out to see that the young woman also treats the doll like a human baby…until one night he hears it crying and realizes that it might not be a doll at all.
Lovecraft Country (Max)
We would be lying if we said we totally understood what was going on in Lovecraft Country — it’s chock-full of references to the original science fiction book series that only a diehard Lovecraft fan would pick up on. But part of what makes the show so terrifying is the way that each episode confronts racism through the lens of the traditional horror genre. One minute you’ll be watching it and feel terrified by the monsters that have suddenly sprung up from the ground, and the next you’ll be even more disturbed by scenes from the Tulsa Race Massacre. The show stars the late Michael K. Williams in one of his last roles, and he’s absolutely brilliant in it. It’s a crime that HBO decided not to renew this for a second season, so make sure to really savor all 10 episodes.
Stranger Things (Netflix)
The ‘80s nostalgia that has swept streaming services in the past five years really started with Stranger Things. There’s something delightfully Stephen King-esque about a group of kids in a pre-cellphone era hopping on their bikes and banding together to fight off an evil force that grownups don’t even know exists.
The Walking Dead (Netflix, AMC+)
The Walking Dead is the original zombie TV show. Like any show that runs for 11 seasons, it most certainly jumped the shark at some point. We think that it’s worth watching through season seven, and then calling it quits — but that’s still seven whole seasons of terrifying zombie gore. Long after the humans figured out how to live among the slow-moving zombie hoards, The Walking Dead did a very impressive job of keeping the show original and fresh by showing time and time again that after the apocalypse, more often than not the most dangerous monsters are other people.
The Last of Us (Max)
If you think you’re incapable of emotionally connecting with a television show based on a video game, this Emmy-nominated hit is here to prove you wrong. Joel (Pedro Pascal) is a hardworking single father who’s hyper-focused on caring for his precocious young daughter. But when a deadly fungus spreads across the United States, Joel and his family are thrown into a post-apocalyptic nightmare that threatens to stretch Joel’s humanity to its breaking point. And yes, saying anything more would result in the spoiler alert to end all spoiler alerts.
