(Photo by FX)
The 100 Best Horror TV Series of All Time
With season 1 of Netflix’s newest horror offering Chilling Adventures of Sabrina burning up the Tomatometer — currently 96% on 27 reviews — we thought we’d make a list to see how she measures up against the best horror TV of all time. Our ranking includes the Friday release’s Netflix brethren The Haunting of Hill House, which is Certified Fresh at 92% (with 63 reviews of season 1) and lands at No. 9 on our list of 100 binge-worthy horror shows.
But choosing the best ever horror TV show can make your eyes twitch and head spin until you take a chainsaw to your computer — debating whether Lucifer belongs in the horror genre or is more of a crime procedural finally put us over the edge.
For one, horror bleeds into so many other genres; it sometimes dabbles in star-crossed romance like in HBO’s True Blood and conjures the dark humor of Starz’s Ash vs. Evil Dead. It even takes a stab at social commentary through the FX anthology American Horror Story. And, for a genre that so often portrays death and carnage, it has an amazing ability to endure – even if shows like CBS classic The Twilight Zone don’t make today’s audiences kick over their TV-dinner trays as much as it did their parents and grandparents. Horror even brings cultures together, as evidenced by Netflix’s popular German sci-fi thriller Dark, Indian series Ghoul, and director Lars von Trier’s Danish mini-series Riget (The Kingdom). These and many more shows are on this list.
You may wonder why we slashed others: The blue-eyed Night King and his ilk are certainly terrifying on HBO’s Game of Thrones, but with those dragons and Red priestesses, “best horror TV show”? Not exactly. GoT falls more into the fantasy category. The Magicians, Dead Like Me, and Lost Girl met the same fate. Similarly, Black Mirror falls under sci-fi; in fact, it turns up as No. 9 on our list of the “100 Best Sci-Fi TV Shows of All Time.” True-crime documentaries and dramas — like Netflix’s Making a Murderer or its serial killer drama Mindhunter — are left off this list even if the acts depicted there are more terrifying than anything we might see on AMC’s zombie series The Walking Dead (which, of course, is included).
To rank the scary TV shows in this monster list, we took the critics’ Tomatometer score (where available) into consideration, plus the rankings of a number of reputable “best of” lists, and then applied some editorial discretion, asking ourselves which horror TV series have stood the test of time, inspired spin-offs and copycats, and even made their influence known on the big screen. We also had a look at your own audience scores on each of the series.
Read on to find out if Lucifer made the cut.
Disagree about our exclusion of The Magicians? Or did we miss another title you think should be included? Rip us apart in the comments section.
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65%
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67%
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82%
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67%
72%
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66%
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69%
70%
100%
82%
77%
100%
89%
63%
59%
63%
69%
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72%
59%
71%
58%
45%
35%
88%
65%
91%
65%
76%
61%
59%
80%
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61%
87%
70%
69%
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49%
67%
59%
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77%
69%
46%
80%
87%
67%
73%
92%
93%
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57%
73%
75%
80%
78%
88%
80%
81%
65%
87%
73%
84%
72%
80%
83%
81%
86%
39%
82%
77%
90%
50%
79%
38%
41%
85%
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100%
78%
100%
85%
92%
78%
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83%
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91%
90%
92%
80%
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100%
86%
77%
76%
89%
94%
95%
95%
74%
74%
93%
85%
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74%
57%
88%
58%
86%
73%
97%
96%
63%
79%
89%
90%
89%
90%
88%
78%
87%
88%
97%
90%
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61%
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100%
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87%
77%
71%
82%
93%
92%
99%
95%
92%
69%
87%
75%
93%
91%
100%
81%
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91%
79%
79%
82%
72%
82%
92%
91%
90%
68%
73%
93%
91%
85%
93%
93%
94%
78%
92%
93%
73%
92%
95%
79%
78%
90%
83%
77%
66%
Chilling Adventures of Sabrina launches Friday, October 26 on Netflix.
