Screams on the Small Screen: 5 Shows to Binge This Spooky Season

Scary movies are a trademark of spooky season, but the growth of prestige television has provided more than a few great options to check out at home. When it comes to addictive content, the weeks leading up to Halloween have a plethora of options for those looking for ghost stories, true crime thrillers and frightening supernatural dramas destined to put a chill down everyone’s spines.

This year has already had an abundance of new horror-themed television shows worth binging, including Ryan Murphy’s serial killer origin tale Monsters: The Ed Gein Story and the Stephen King adaptation It: Welcome to Derry. On the psychological thriller end, Wayward and the latest installments of The Last of Us, Dexter: Resurrection and The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon have made for can’t-miss picks. If those options aren’t frightening enough, then these twisted television treasures should go to the top of your watchlist.

Mindhunter (2017-2019)
No one does serial killers quite like David Fincher, the filmmaker behind thrillers like Se7en, Zodiac, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and Gone Girl. With Mindhunter, Fincher decided to look back at how the phrase was coined and drew inspiration from the nonfiction memoir by former FBI profiler John Douglas. Douglas, who is portrayed by Jonathan Groff, conducted years of interviews with psychopathic killers to understand their psychology and often got dangerously close to his subjects as he tried to determine what drove them to violence. Those who have enjoyed The Ed Gein Story might appreciate the many infamous “monsters” that pop up in Mindhunter, as the show features the BTK killer, the Son of Sam, Edmund Kemper and Charles Manson.

Hannibal (2013-2015)
Anthony Hopkins’ performance as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs has frequently been cited as one of the greatest villains of all time, but at this point, he might not even be the definitive version of the character. Hannibal drew inspiration from the same source material to show how a young Dr. Lector (Mads Mikkelsen) managed to mask his gruesome indulgences while assisting FBI agents Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) and Jack Crawford (Laurence Fishburne). Hannibal may have been canceled after its third season, but showrunner Bryan Fuller has pitched a continuation in which Zendaya would take on the role of Clarice Starling, the heroine originally played by Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs.

Midnight Mass (2021)
Netflix hasn’t had many creative partners who have been as productive as Mike Flanagan, the showrunner who created The Haunting of Hill House, The Haunting of Bly Manor, The Midnight Club and Fall of the House of Usher. Each of Flanagan’s shows is creepy in its own way, but Midnight Mass is a particularly unnerving miniseries for anyone who has ever felt uncomfortable about returning to their hometown. Zach Gilford (who got his start on the Texas-set football drama Friday Night Lights) stars as a former venture capitalist who tries to make amends with his former community after a deadly accident, but discovers that the town he grew up in has fallen under the influence of a charismatic religious zealot (Hamish Linklater). Midnight Mass has the type of slow, methodical beginning that Flanagan’s monologue-heavy shows tend to incorporate, but the gripping conclusion includes some of the scariest imagery ever seen on television.

Servant (2019-2023)
M. Night Shyamalan has a decidedly mixed track record as a writer-director; for every masterpiece on the level of The Sixth Sense or Split, there will be a complete disaster in the vein of After Earth or The Last Airbender. Thankfully, Shyamalan’s four-season Apple TV+ show Servant is a return to his former glory, as this intimate horror-drama explores the life of an unusual family after a tragedy leads them to make a deal with the devil. There’s some emotional stuff to get through in Servant, but rest assured, it’s not pure “trauma horror” — it’s a surprisingly fun show with some truly unpredictable moments, especially since Shyamalan has become self-aware about his reliance on twist endings. Although the entire cast is terrific, Servant’s best performance is from Rupert Grint, who earned his best post-Harry Potter role as the troubled black sheep of a family haunted by supernatural forces.

Alien: Earth (2025)
The Alien franchise may be almost 50 years old now, but watching spaceship crews get picked off one by one by a ruthless xenomorph never gets old, does it? Alien: Earth includes the chest-bursting gore that one would expect from the storied franchise, but it also goes deeper in its depiction of the integration of androids with human society, and how a cabal of faceless corporations has monopolized free markets. There are several clever tie-ins to the original films, but Alien: Earth introduces a new batch of characters and may serve as a good starting point for new fans of the saga. When the original Alien debuted in 1979, these concepts were considered to be science fiction; today, the universe of Alien: Earth has become startlingly similar to reality.