Scarier than Requiem? The most terrifying TV shows of all time
Turning Fridays into fright night, BBC One's new six-part supernatural thriller Requiem has been dubbed “the most terrifying BBC drama ever made”.
This atmospheric psychological horror story features a sinister yet strangely familiar house, inexplicable suicides, broken mirrors, missing children, strange whispering voices and a cellist with a directional fringe. But will it deliver enough chills to enter TV’s all-time creepy canon?
Clutch a sofa cushion and put the big light on as we count down the 20 scariest TV shows ever made. Don’t have nightmares…
20. Hannibal (2013-2015)
Dear old Hannibal the Cannibal had been feasting on human livers (with a side order of fava beans) for more than 20 years in cinemas before he made his small screen debut in this stylishly sinister NBC prequel series. Dapper Mads Mikkelsen made a worthy successor to Anthony Hopkins with his icy portrayal of serial-killing, flesh-eating psychiatrist Dr Lecter. Brit actor Hugh Dancy was the gifted-but-unstable FBI profiler on his trail..
Hannibal was big on designer interiors, dream sequences and gourmet offal cookery – punctuated by graphic murders and baroque set pieces. See the totem pole of limbs, skin-flayed angels, human cello and corpse mural. Bon appétit, viewers.
19. Inside No 9 (2014-present)
Reece Shearsmith and Steve Pemberton’s inventive anthology series operates in the comedy-horror-tales-with-a-twist ballpark but there’s some genuine frighteners among the 23 episodes so far.
Series one’s Hammer Horror spoof The Harrowing builds from Gothic camp to true demonic nastiness. Series two’s Trial of Elizabeth Gadge and Séance Time conjure up witchfinders and ghosts respectively, while series three’s decidedly un-festive The Devil of Christmas was a snuff movie by stealth. All manner of surprises lurk behind door number nine…
18. Chocky (1984)
This children’s sci-fi series, adapted from the 1968 novel by John “Triffids” Wyndham, followed bowlcut-haired schoolboy Matthew Gore and his imaginary friend Chocky – who turned out to be all too real. This mysterious alien consciousness was using Matthew to gather information about Earth ahead of colonisation. When Matthew developed prodigious abilities, shadowy government forces soon started to show interest.
It spawned two sequels, Chocky’s Challenge and Chocky’s Children. Surprisingly sophisticated and scary stuff, especially for teatime ITV, it was a huge hit in Eastern Europe and Steven Spielberg has shown interest in making a film version.
17. Outcast (2016-2017)
Demonic possession is always spine-chilling on-screen and it formed the premise of this grungy supernatural Cinemax series, adapted by Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman from his own creepy comic books.
In rural West Virginia, brooding Kyle Barnes’ life had been blighted by his loved ones being possessed, so he hooked up with a boozy local priest (played by our own Philip Glenister) to investigate similar cases, help with exorcisms and generally ward off invading hellspawn. Limbs whirl. Black-eyed people levitate. Goo gets vomited. Children gnaw off their own fingers. Night night, sleep tight.
16. The Tripods (1984-1985)
Based on John Christopher’s post-apocalyptic novel trilogy, this BBC sci-fi series felt thrillingly state-of-the-art at the time. It was one of the first UK shows to use computer-generated effects and buzzed to a beepy synth soundtrack by Ken Freeman (best known for his work on Jeff Wayne's musical version of The War of the Worlds). How modern.
In 2089, Earth was enslaved by a sinister alien race who stalked the land in towering three-legged machines and fitted mankind with mind-controlling caps. Teen cousins Will and Henry went on the run to link up with the human resistance movement and fight their three-legged overlords.
Meanwhile, a generation of young viewers had nightmares about giant tripods appearing on the horizon and marching up to our bedroom windows.
15. Tales From The Crypt (1989-1996)
"Hello, boils and ghouls!" One of the HBO network’s early hits was this notoriously grisly anthology series, based on the Fifties horror comics and hosted by a cackling corpse called The Crypt Keeper.
Its self-contained format and cable-enabled lack of censorship meant episodes were directed by Hollywood heavy-hitters and attracted high-calibre stars including Tom Hanks, Demi Moore, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Whoopi Goldberg and Kirk Douglas.
Memorably hair-raising tales included body horror “Abra Cadaver”, Santa slasher "And All Through the House”, found-footage frightener “Television Terror” and ones with self-explanatory titles including “Werewolf Concerto” and “The Ventriloquist’s Dummy”. Gottle o' gore.
14. The Walking Dead (2010-present)
After eight series, 107 episodes and thousands of shuffling undead, AMC’s gritty post-apocalyptic zombie saga has become the most-watched show in US cable TV history and jostles with Game Of Thrones for the title of world’s biggest drama.
It tends to steer away from trad horror tropes, instead concentrating on twisted power games, suspenseful set-pieces and occasional bursts of manic gore-spattered violence. Andrew Lincoln’s sheriff’s deputy Rick Grimes might be the hero but David Morrissey’s mighty, eyepatched Governor and Jeffrey Dean Morgan’s baseball bat-wielding psycho Negan stole the show.
The zombie walkers might be monstrous but it’s the sadistic human survivors who are more frightening. Season eight resumes on 26 February. The ninth will lurch towards us in late 2018.
13. Children of the Stones (1977)
Comedian Stewart Lee is a superfan of this HTV folk fantasy series, calling it "the scariest programme ever made for children”. An astrophysicist and his son arrived in a sleepy Wiltshire village to find it under the grip of strange psychic powers, originating from a megalithic stone circle and unleashed by the sinister local squire.
Cue creepy business involving time rifts, mystic amulets, Pagan priests, black holes and brainwashing – plus the eeriest theme music in TV history. Mummy, I’ve had a bad dream.
12. Penny Dreadful (2014-2016)
What do Dorian Gray, Dracula, Frankenstein, Jekyll and Hyde have in common? They’re not just Penguin Classics on every Goth’s shelf. They also appear in this classy period horror-drama, co-produced by Showtime and Sky Atlantic: essentially a superhero-style team-up of characters from Victorian fiction but made with substantially more seriousness and style than that sounds.
Explorers, Egyptologists, clairvoyants and sharp-shooting cowboys battled vampires, witches, werewolves and other assorted nasties in fog-shrouded London to fend off a demonic apocalypse. It lasted three series, getting better – and more blood-soaked – as it went. And Eva Green was astonishing.
11. The League Of Gentlemen (1999-2002, 2017)
“Hello Dave!” With his minstrel-painted face, rasping voice, rotting teeth and penchant for stealing wives, demonic ringmaster Papa Lazarou was the scary standout in sinister village Royston Vasey – setting for the scariest sitcom ever made.
However, the other residents weren’t exactly harmless, including demon butchers, cursed vets, German paedophiles and in-bred serial killers who breast-feed piglets.
"You're my wife now!” Or, after Papa Lazarou built a subterranean prison in the recent comeback specials, "It's a wife mine now!"
10. Penda’s Fen (1974)
Directed by Alan Clarke, this haunting Play For Today was a provocative pastoral psycho-drama set in the Malvern Hills. Priggish adolescent Stephen, a rural vicar’s son, has a series of bizarre encounters with angels, demons, the ghost composer Edward Elgar and King Penda, the last pagan ruler of England – causing Stephen to question his faith, parentage, sexuality and entire identity.
Boys get burned. Hands are chopped off. Creatures appear at the foot of beds. Church floors crack open. Frequently baffling, hard-to-classify but wholly unforgettable, Penda’s Fen has become a cult classic and attained mythic status, despite Clarke claiming he never really understood what it was about.
9. Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1955-1965)
"Good eeeeevening." When Hollywood’s master of suspense migrated to the small screen for a weekly anthology series, Hitch himself was the main attraction – hence his unmistakable silhouette accompanying the creepy theme song (Funeral March Of A Marionette by Charles Gounod, fact fans) and his drolly deadpan introductions to each mystery. Hitchcock directed 18 episodes, earning two Emmy nominations, with others were helmed by the likes of Robert Altman and William Friedkin.
Memorable chillers include doppelganger tale The Case Of Mr Pelham; Lamb To The Slaughter, where a housewife bludgeons her husband to death with a frozen cut of meat; three wishes parable The Monkey’s Paw; and Roald Dahl’s Man From The South, starring Steve McQueen and Peter Lorre, in which a man bets his finger that he can light his Zippo ten times in a row. Hitchcock was so impressed with the show’s crew, he used them to shoot Psycho.
8. The X Files (1993-2002, 2016-present)
Chris Carter's cult 90s series is usually remembered for its sprawling sci-fi conspiracy – “The truth is out there” and all that alien stuff – but many of its 202 original episodes were flat-out monster-of-the-week horror, as FBI duo Mulder and Scully (David Duchovny and Gillian Anderson) encountered skin-crawlingly creepy threats.
Stretchy serial killer Eugene Tooms slunk through air vents to eat victims’ livers. There were those alien worms at an isolated Alaskan research station, the Predator-like tree-bark creatures of Detour, cancer-eating Leonard Betts, the tapewormy Flukeman, and conjoined twins Lanny and Leonard. Most petrifying of all was controversial haunted house episode Home, with the disturbingly disfigured Peacock family gruesomely slaughtering anyone who came near their Pennsylvania farmstead.
7. Hammer House Of Horror (1980)
This home-grown Gothic anthology series from the London studio that produced all those Christopher Lee films lasted just one series but left a legacy of thrills and chills. The 13 hour-long stories attracted acting talent like Peter Cushing, Diana Dors and Denholm Elliot.
Its two most memorably morbid frighteners were freaky haunted house tale The House That Bled to Death (with its gore-splattered children’s party scene) and The Two Faces of Evil, where a driver encounters a sinister hitchhiker who looks exactly like him ” but with rotting teeth and (the creepiest detail of all) one long, pointy brown fingernail.
6. Salem's Lot (1979)
"Open the window, Mark.” [Scratch, scratch] "Open the window, Mark, please.” Stephen King’s best-selling 1975 vampire novel was adapted into a triple Emmy-nominated miniseries, starring James Mason and a post-Starsky & Hutch David Soul, and directed by Tobe Hooper of Texas Chainsaw Massacre infamy.
When an ancient master vampire comes to sleepy smalltown Maine, local citizens gradually get turned undead too. Its creepy atmosphere and Nosferatu-influenced special effects (all glowing contact lenses and levitating ghouls) chilled a generation. Even a still image of a child-vampire floating outside a bedroom window was enough to spook unsuspecting viewers when it popped up on Barry Took’s Points Of View.
5. American Horror Story (2011-present)
Writer Ryan Murphy’s hit anthology series is currently the scariest affair on-air, home to well-worn but still terrifying tropes like killer clowns, demonic nuns, carnival freak shows, witches’ covens, masked cults and haunted hotels.
It’s also laden with big-name actors relishing the chance to go fully grand guignol: see Ian McShane as a serial-killing Santa, asylum inmate Franka Potente claiming she’s Anne Frank, deranged doctor Zachary Quinto’s Clockwork Orange-esque aversion therapy, James Cromwell’s sadistic Nazi doctor, Lady Gaga’s S&M vampire, Jessica Lange’s supreme witch or Kathy Bates as an immortal severed head.
Throw in jolting jump cuts, freaky cinematography and a deeply morbid sense of humour, and you’ve got enough nightmare fodder to last a lifetime.
4. Doctor Who (1963-present)
Not every episode of the BBC’s time travel institution is a scary one but the sci-fi franchise has always packed sufficient frights to send generations of children scurrying behind the sofa. The Daleks and their crazed, crippled creator Davros definitely do the job but the Doctor has faced all manner of other fear-inducing foes throughout his incarnations.
Patrick Troughton tackled Yetis in the London Underground, Jon Pertwee scuttled after giant spiders and Tom Baker battled Egyptian god Sutekh the Destroyer in Pyramids Of Mars.
Since the 2005 reboot, there’s been the Weeping Angel statues, scarecrows coming to life, that gas-masked wartime child (“Are you my mummy?”), The Veil stalking the shape-shifting castle in Heaven Sent, and the everyday foreboding of Midnight and Listen. The simplest Who concepts are often the creepiest. Is there still room behind that sofa?
3. Twin Peaks (1990-1991, 2017)
Visionary director David Lynch’s dark, deliciously twisted crime drama was often downright impenetrable but remains burned in the consciousness of anyone who watched its two-hour pilot ("event TV" before the term was coined) and became hooked.
This small-town murder masterpiece boasted not one but three unforgettably frightening characters: red-suited, backwards-speaking dwarf The Man from Another Place, lumber-cuddling clairvoyant Log Lady and, of course, cackling silver-haired spirit Killer BOB, played by set dresser Frank Silva. In one of the happiest accidents in TV history, Silva mistakenly appeared on camera while crouching behind Laura Palmer’s bed. The shot proved so creepy, Lynch promptly had him written into the series.
After a 26-year wait, the sequel series (tagline: “It is happening again”) aired last year and was even weirder. But damn good.
2. The Twilight Zone (1959-1964)
Brrrr, that music. Creator and narrator Rod Serling’s groundbreaking CBS classic remains the greatest anthology series of all time. Its standalone 30 or 60-minute stories mixed psychological horror with bleak sci-fi and trippy, twisty thrillers - often with a hauntingly simple central premise.
Scary standouts include Little Girl Lost, which saw a six-year-old swallowed up by her bedroom wall; creepy ventriloquist’s doll tale The Dummy; The Hitch-Hiker, about a female driver haunted by the same man appearing at roadsides; Nightmare at 20,000 Feet, with William Shatner as an airline passenger (“There's a man on the wing of this plane!”); the department store mannequins in The After Hours; eerie doppelg?nger chiller Mirror Image; ghost-of-Hitler parable He's Alive, starring a young Dennis Hopper; and the unforgettable Living Doll ("My name is Talky Tina and I'm going to kill you”). You are about to enter another dimension…
1. Ghostwatch (1992)
“The programme you’re about to watch is a unique live investigation of the supernatural.”
Broadcast on Halloween and the brainchild of horror writer Stephen Volk, this horror mockumentary duped the nation, being taken at face value by many of its 11m viewers.
Trustworthy BBC presenters Michael Parkinson, Mike Smith and Sarah Greene hosted a deeply creepy, convincingly chaotic “live” investigation into poltergeist activity in a suburban London home believed to be haunted by malevolent entity “Pipes” (because the parents told their children that eerie noises were caused by the plumbing).
Pipes turned out to be the spirit of paedophile Raymond Tunstall, who committed suicide at the house – after in turn being possessed by Victorian child killer Mother Seddons. The 90-minute film seemed to act as a “national séance”, giving Pipes huge power and enabling him to drag Greene to her death, possess Parky and escape.
The Beeb got 30,000 calls within an hour, was forced to issue an apology and never repeated it – although Halloween night DVD and cinema screenings have since become a tradition among fans. Ghostwatch also holds the dubious honour of being the first TV show to be cited in the British Medical Journal as causing Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder in children.