The best (and downright creepiest) horror series on Netflix
Netflix is a treasure trove for horror series. Beyond the big hitters such as American Horror Story and The Haunting Of Hill House, there’s a world of cults, ghouls, serial killers, zombies and witches waiting to be discovered… Here’s our pick of the best
One of the only experiences scarier than watching a horror movie in a darkened cinema, surrounded by other people, is watching a horror series alone in your own darkened home, as silence reigns and the merest creak can put you on edge. You know the type – the six- or ten-part series you consume into the early hours of the morning, unable to tear your eyes away because the alternative is to be left with your own imagination, until you realise it’s almost sunrise (with a sigh of relief, of course, because you were never going to sleep anyway).
For those who like to be terrorised, Netflix has a broad swathe of options, from period Korean zombie pandemics to Indian tales of demonic possession and, well, American horror stories. There are cults of killer clowns, true-life ghost stories and inescapable curses, as well as masked slashers galore. Don’t say you haven’t been warned: these are the best offerings on the platform.
Copyright 2014 FX Networks. All rights reserved.1/20American Horror Story
It’s hard to summarise eight series of FX’s famous anthological horror series (the ninth, subtitled 1984, isn’t on British Netflix yet). Just know that if it wasn’t excellent, then even Netflix wouldn’t have bought a mind-boggling 103 hours of this show, whose various storylines – there’s one self-contained arc per season – feature a cult of murderous clowns, a haunted hotel, witches in the Deep South, post-apocalyptic struggles and dark, backwoods hauntings. Variety truly is the spice of life. netflix.com
2/20Marianne
A classic “imagined monsters become real” storyline, Marianne follows a young French horror writer, Emma, who returns to her seaside hometown after discovering that her own fictional creation – a crone called Marianne who appeared to Emma in her dreams as a child – is real and terrorising the town. “La serie que vous ne voudrez pas regarder seule”, or “the series you won’t want to watch alone”, taunts the tagline on Marianne’s promotional materials. Too right. netflix.com
Ursula Coyote/Netflix3/20Chambers
Ever see that Simpsons “Treehouse Of Horror” episode in which Homer got a hair transplant from the criminal, Snake, after he was executed, and Snake’s sentient barnet gradually took over his brain, turning him into a killer? Chambers is similar, except instead of an evil hair transplant, it’s someone else’s heart that begins to haunt its new recipient. The series was cancelled after one ten-part offering, but it’s suitably tense and features Uma Thurman among its supporting cast. netflix.com
SAEED ADYANI/NETFLIX4/20Ratched
In this prequel spin-off of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Sarah Paulson plays Nurse Ratched, the authoritarian antagonist of the original novel and Jack Nicholson film, as she infiltrates an asylum to try to spring her brother, a confessed serial killer. Not hard to imagine all the different avenues for disturbing moments, then. Like many other “horror” Netflix Originals, it spans multiple genres, with thrilling and even very darkly comic elements. netflix.com
Erica Parise / Netflix5/20Santa Clarita Diet
What part of “an undead horror-comedy in which mother-of-one Drew Barrymore develops a taste for human flesh” isn’t to love? Clearly none of it, as three series in, the list of talent to cameo on Santa Clarita Diet continues to grow – Nathan Fillion, Portia de Rossi, Patton Oswalt, Joel McHale – and fans continue to devour episodes like Barrymore’s character devours livers. Yum. netflix.com
Eliza Morse6/20Scream
MTV’s television TV adaptation of the classic 1996 slasher-movie pastiche (“It’s the millennium; motives are incidental” remains one of the great horror lines), Scream follows a series of murders in an American suburb committed by someone wearing a Ghostface mask. There are nods to the early days of the franchise throughout, and knowing references to other horror films too; Scream’s producers might be pure nostalgia merchants, but they understand perfectly that in 2020 there are few better guarantees of an audience than just that: nostalgia. netflix.com
Ishika Motawane/Netflix7/20Ghoul
Set in a totalitarian, dystopian India in the future, Ghoul is a Hindi-language three-part miniseries that focuses on the arrest and interrogation by Indian police of a terrorist named Ali Saeed who – you guessed it – is harbouring something even more malevolent than anti-government intentions. It’s all more loaded for the subtext (Indian police versus a terrorist with an Islamic, and therefore Pakistani-sounding, name) and creator and director Patrick Graham has discussed being inspired by the abuses at Abu Ghraib and torture techniques at Guantanamo Bay. netflix.com
Steve Dietl/Netflix8/20The Haunting Of Hill House
What is it about all country houses that make them so beautiful in the sunlight and so deeply, deeply creepy at night? The protagonists of The Haunting Of Hill House don’t get much time to dwell on this, as they’re too busy being terrorised by all manner of dread visions. Perhaps we should mull it over on their behalf – once we’ve wiped the sweat from our palms and brought our heart rates back down to a reasonable level, that is. netflix.com
EIKE SCHROTER/NETFLIX9/20The Haunting Of Bly Manor
As the spiritual successor series to The Haunting Of Hill House, expectations have been very high for Bly Manor. Its source material certainly has the proper calibre, inspired as it is by Henry James’ The Turn Of The Screw (you’ll be hard-pressed to find a more unnerving ghost story), and, broadly, the message seems to be that if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. So we have all the classic elements, again: distant children, an apparent suicide, young, isolated protagonist and, of course, a huge, old house again, ready to creak and scrape until you’re a mess. netflix.com
Netflix10/20Stranger Things
We don’t need to explain Netflix’s most popular series to you. But given Stranger Things has undeniably horror elements (from literal monsters in the Upside-Down to dystopian, Twilight Zone-style government experiments), it’s impossible to ignore. If you somehow haven’t yet taken the dive into the series that offered us not only unparalleled 1980s nostalgia, but also a wonderful mid-career renaissance for Winona Ryder, then do. netflix.com
Loris T. Zambelli / Netflix11/20Curon
Lots of small-town creepiness in this Italian thriller, which follows two 17-year-old twins who move to a lakeside village in the Italian Alps with their mother, 17 years after she left under dark circumstances. Central to the mythology of the series is the still-visible belltower (which exists in real life) of a flooded church poking out of the depths of Lake Reschen – a genius move that places the drama immediately in one of the eerier, more remote corners of Europe. netflix.com
Juhan Noh/Netflix12/20Kingdom
It is an undeniable fact that there are not enough zombie films set in the past, but South Korean series Kingdom attempts to remedy this. In a nutshell, a Game Of Thrones-style succession crisis unfolds in the kingdom of Korea in the late 1500s, meaning when a mysterious pandemic unfolds simultaneously, spreading a disease that turns people into zombies, all the powers that be are otherwise occupied. When it first aired early last year, it was Netflix’s first original Korean series; it didn’t disappoint. netflix.com
13/20Ares
An eight-part Dutch horror about a student who joins a murderous secret society – the titular Areas – at her university, replete with Eyes Wide Shut-style Venetian masks and robes, as well as ritual initiation and hazing. And we all know what kind of wonderful perversions the Dutch can come up with – things get very dark, very quickly. netflix.com
14/20Hemlock Grove
Hemlock Grove is produced by Eli Roth, and while there’s no modern-day Elisabeth Bathory scene (google it – we’d give you a link, but it’s way too inappropriate) or severing of Achilles tendons here, it still relies heavily on gross-out, gory moments. A critically divisive, gothic combination of murder mystery and fantasy series, it will satisfy Roth fans and the “torture-porn” gang. We’re not judging. Much. netflix.com
15/20Slasher
Canada’s answer to American Horror Story is Slasher, an anthology series that follows, well, a slasher murder spree to its conclusion in each of its three series so far. With a similar premise to the Scream franchise, there’s a whodunnit element to these stories too: the killer is someone close to the action, rather than a supernatural monster revealed two-thirds of the way through. netflix.com
Christos Kalohoridis16/20Locke & Key
A high-end supernatural comic book adaptation, Locke & Key follows a family who move to an old house in Massachusetts following the death of the father. Gradually, they discover inter-dimensional keys throughout the house with various paranormal effects, but, unfortunately, something – or someone – nasty is after the keys too. More of a young-adult supernatural fantasy with scary elements than a pure horror series, think of Locke & Key as a more low-key, less dark Stranger Things. netflix.com
17/20Haunted
Even if you’re not into horror on its own merits, this is still worth a sceptical watch, as Haunted invites real people who believe they have grown up amid the paranormal recount their experience with deadly seriousness in bite-sized episodes. That there is not a shred of evidence for any of these stories isn’t really important – it’s part of that long tradition of telling spooky stories after dark. Except instead of your teenage best friend, it’s an American with a questionable taste in tattoos who’s telling the tall tale. netflix.com
18/20Bloodride
This Norwegian-produced anthology has a simple premise: a group of passengers ride on a bus driven by the world’s creepiest bus driver through the rainy night to an unknown destination, and each of the six episodes zeroes in on one of their backstories. The series’ widespread comparisons to Black Mirror generally hold up: each tale is equal parts twisted, bloodthirsty and darkly comic. netflix.com
19/20The Mist
The TV series of The Mist went relatively unnoticed when it first came out; it was cancelled after one series. But this is a very passable adaptation of the classic Stephen King story about a killer mist that hides murderous, nightmarish creatures (though here there is a slight twist on how the mist actually affects people, which we won’t spoil). netflix.com
20/20Ju-On: Origins
Ju-On, for those of us who prefer our Western remakes to the Japanese originals, is the franchise known in the UK and US as The Grudge, a series that has now been around for a pretty substantial 22 years. Not surprising, then, that the makers of Origins thought it was time to explore just how and where that vengeful curse began. netflix.com
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