Apropos of nothing, here’s my guide to the biggest horror TV shows. Oh, I’ve just learned it’s Halloween.
Stranger Things
Netflix
Loveable, floppy-haired scamps battle gruesomely violent monsters while John Carpenter-style synths play. Exciting! Of course, the true horror is less in all extra-dimensional beasties as the fact its characters are locked forever in a retromaniacal referential version of the 1980s. This is clearly designed to ensure that the audience isn’t just young people but also includes solipsistic, nostalgia-drunk Gen Xers. Kids aren’t even allowed have their own youth culture any more, they can only have a remix of ours. Also, due to the long gaps between series, the once teenage stars are in their thirties and forties now, which is also scary for those of us terrified by the ageing process.
The X Files
Disney+
In the mid-1990s, conspiracy theories were the domain of burnt-out stoners or they were the subject of science fiction. Now, most days you can find someone reciting the plot of X-Files episodes online absolutely convinced that it has literally just happened and is funded by George Soros via this newspaper (I’m Soros’s bagman, as you know). Chris Carter’s X-Files is an ingenious slice of creepy Americana from an era when episodic TV was evolving into something more complex. Each week, FBI agents, true believer Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and scientifically trained sceptic Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), quipped and smouldered (more accurately Mulder sMuldered) as they investigated paranormal events that were, for the most part, being covered up by the government. Nowadays, Mulder would be your angry, shut-in uncle who’s very active on Facebook and Scully would have recently lost an election by appealing to sanity and calm.
Black Mirror
Netflix
The original iteration of Charlie Brooker’s anthology sci-fi horror show came out on Channel 4 during a period when tech billionaires were still held up as well-meaning philanthropists performing science magic for the masses. Brooker’s counterintuitive subtext was, essentially, smartphones are terrible, actually. It could have just been called “Phones!!!” and it really did make us think about how phones might be terrible actually. Nowadays the Netflix-funded version feels a little left behind and each new episode, while well written, directed and acted, feels less horrifying than the last video any of us saw on TikTok. These days, our nerves are perpetually frayed and our children are square-eyed, feral monsters. Early episodes of Black Mirror now seem quaint and comforting and Black Mirror simply no longer has a handle on the dystopian zeitgeist it once did. Nonetheless, it’s worth watching just to take a break from your phone.
We already have Great House Revival. What we need now is Feck the Preservation Order, Let’s Knock It and Build an Office Block
Patrick Freyne’s guide to the biggest horror TV shows, from Stranger Things to Sesame Street
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The Celebrity Traitors is clearly ripped off from Traitors Ireland: A Nation Once Again
Scooby Doo
Apple TV
Teenagers from all four of the basic types – cheerleader, nerd, stoner and Young Fine Gaeler (Fred) – drive around in their van, the Mystery Machine, investigating monsters without noticing that they have in their midst a sentient talking dog. That dog, Scooby Doo, is surely one of the Elder Gods feeding on their life force as they travel. “Ruh Roh!” to quote the beast himself.
Baywatch Nights
Apple TV
This is a genuine spin-off from Baywatch, the show that innovated by having people in swimwear running around in slow motion. In this later iteration, the franchise’s star David Hasselhoff partnered with an old police buddy to investigate crimes, many of which turned out to have paranormal elements. And thus on Baywatch Nights we got werewolves but far fewer people in swimwear running in slow motion. It could have been both, Hasselhoff! It could have been both!
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Disney+
The complex 1990s teen fantasy from which all stylish romantasy is derived. “Which is harder for a teenager, being besieged by ruthless vampires or dealing with getting a date for prom?” showrunner Joss Whedon asked in every episode. “It’s clearly the vampire thing, Joss Whedon!” I’d shout at the telly, but it was amazingly written stuff nonetheless and now we have a glut of feisty teen heroines and pop cultural savvy dialogue.
Black Summer/Z Nation/The Last of Us/Marvel Zombies/The Walking Dead/all Walking Dead spin-offs (in order of quality)
Television seems to really need to have a zombie show on the go at all times. In the past the zombie hordes in such stories were meant to represent thoughtless totalitarianism or kneejerk consumerism or just the darkness in the human heart, but nowadays it’s hard not to conclude that the zombies in zombie shows are a metaphor for having too many zombie shows. That said, Black Summer on Netflix is an absolutely terrifying riot and I highly recommend it.
Sapphire and Steel
ITV, the olden days
Chilly, nicely-suited extraterrestrial beings Sapphire (Joanna Lumley) and Steel (David McCallum) turn up whenever there’s a rift in the fabric of space time and horrible things are about to happen. The pitch: a little like Doctor Who but it will psychologically scar a six-year-old Irish child named Patrick Freyne for life. I still don’t know what was going on on Sapphire and Steel but I think of it often.
Alien Earth
Disney+
The new Noah Hawley adaptation of the Ridley Scott franchise sees the slimy, toothy, murdery alien beastie running around, not in space, but on this very planet where you can very definitely hear people scream. It’s good but with its childish, manic pixie-dream android protagonist it does sometimes seem less like a horror and more like a girls’-own adventure featuring a robot child and her alien chum. Think Skippy but with human guts flying everywhere (“What’s that Alien Skippy? Little Timmy’s stuck down the well and, also, you ate his head?”)
Wednesday
Netflix
Look, if any day is horrific, it’s Wednesday sitting midway through the work week in all its soul-deadening ennui. It was fitting then that the cartoonist Charles Addams named a member of his grotesque cartoon family after that day back in the 1930s and maybe less fitting that the Netflix iteration imports that spirit into a Hogwarts-style private school for supposed freaks who are really just attractive conformist goths. Go to any school in the midlands to see some real freaks, you cowards.
Squid Game
Netflix
A viscerally violent yet oddly humane indictment of capitalism and the debt industrial complex that is now destined to be milked forever as a profitable Netflix franchise. How ironic, we all say wisely, stroking our chins.
What We Do in the Shadows
Disney
A bunch of pleasantly idiotic vampires share a house. It’s slightly sillier than Being Human in which a vampire, werewolf and ghost share a house, and it is of similar silliness to Ghosts, which is about a human couple and a bunch of ghosts sharing a house. Paranormal flatsharing might be one of my favourite genres, actually. All of these programmes are amazing.
Sesame Street
Soon on Netflix
Featuring a vampiric numerologist, a gluttonous blue monster who never stops eating, a needy avian giant and a hysterical talking frog, I think the scariest thing about Sesame Street is that it’s a product of American public television so it’s basically communism. Also: Elmo, what’s with that emotionally dysregulated freak?
