#1
American Horror Story
When cable television decided to tackle anthologies again in 2011, it traded shadowy studio flats for bleeding-edge digital gloss. Ryan Murphy crammed every haunted house trope into the Harmon family's cursed basement. You can see the lineage stretching back to Boris Karloff’s Thriller, though modern editing replaces the slow, suffocating dread of live television with frenzied jump scares and baroque shock value. Still, Jessica Lange chews the scenery like an old-school grande dame under high-key arc lights.
#2
The Sixth Sense
Gary Collins wandered through 1972 investigating psychic distress calls for ABC, looking handsome under harsh tungsten lighting. It carried that quintessential seventies Universal television look: beige office sets, dramatic telephoto zooms, and music cues blaring from an overactive brass section. Network executives later chopped these hour-long episodes into half-hour syndication filler for Rod Serling’s Night Gallery. That butchery was a crime, because Collins gave parapsychology a sincere, unhurried gravity that you simply cannot buy on modern sets.
#3
Dead of Night
The BBC staged this short-lived British anthology entirely on video, and nothing curdles the blood quite like raw PAL magnetic tape. Seven plays aired, but careless tape wiping erased all but three. What remains, especially Don Taylor’s "The Exorcism," feels dangerously alive. You watch actors sweating through dinner party dialogue on soundstages that look like theatrical black-box spaces. When the studio lights suddenly drop to pitch black, the sheer silence hits you harder than any computerized visual effect ever could.
#4
Supernatural
Robert Muller penned this eight-part Gothic cycle for the BBC, framing classic monster folklore inside an eerie gentleman's club. It features the classic British formula: exterior scenes captured on murky 16mm film, while interior parlor debates unfold under cold studio cameras on two-inch videotape. Jeremy Brett and Billie Whitelaw recite literary horrors with stage-trained diction, treating vampires and doppelgängers like Shakespearean tragedies. You smell the dry ice and dust burning off the stage lights right through the phosphor screen.
#5
The Evil Touch
Shot down in Australia to dodge high American production costs, this syndicated relic belongs to late-night independent channels of the seventies. Host Anthony Quayle stood beside an open flame to introduce half-hour morality plays starring faded Hollywood legends like Darren McGavin and Leslie Nielsen. The sets wobbled occasionally, and the audio had that hollow, boxy room echo unique to Sydney soundstages. Yet that cheapness gives the series an uncanny edge, mimicking a recurring fever dream caught between station sign-offs.
#6
Shades of Darkness
Granada Television handled period adaptations better than anybody, and this anthology of Victorian and Edwardian ghost tales proved it. Instead of modern gore, directors leaned on ticking mantel clocks, creaking floorboards, and whispering curtains across stately country manors. Actors like John Duttine and Charles Gray let dread gather slowly in parlor corners. Watching these episodes feels like pulling a heavy velvet drape shut against an autumn storm, letting the soft glow of cathode scanlines warm your living room.
#7
Poltergeist: The Legacy
Mid-nineties cable television loved secret societies, and this Canadian-filmed drama built an entire mythology around a dignified brotherhood fighting ancient evil from a San Francisco mansion. Derek de Lint brought old-school theatrical dignity to Dr. Derek Rayne, anchoring storylines involving demonic relics and ghostly hauntings. Vancouver fog filled the exterior shoots, while moody blue stage lighting defined the interiors. It carried the torch of classic syndicated horror into the early digital era, relying on crisp, stately pacing rather than shock.
2 critics · 2 lists →
#8
Brimstone
Fox had a golden habit of burying inventive genre television on Friday nights, and this underworld procedural vanished far too quickly. Peter Horton played a dead detective recruited by Satan to hunt escaped damned souls across earth. John Glover stole every frame as the Prince of Darkness, delivering wicked lines with the playful theatricality of Vincent Price. Shot on gorgeous 35mm film, the show possessed rich blacks and practical pyrotechnics that made network broadcasting feel genuinely dangerous after dark.
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#9
Ultraviolet
Joe Ahearne stripped vampire lore down to sterile forensic science in this six-part Channel 4 production. Jack Davenport and Idris Elba hunt bloodsuckers using carbon-fiber bolts and surveillance tech, never once speaking the word vampire aloud. The cold, fluorescent color palette turned London office blocks into terrifying technological tombs. It revived the tight, writer-driven focus of classic British teleplays, proving that six sharply paced episodes shot with cinematic discipline beat twenty-two weeks of flabby network filler every single time.
#10
Strange
Richard Coyle spent one gloriously grim season playing a defrocked priest tracking down demonic incursions across the English countryside. The BBC gave writer Paul Joyce free rein to marry ancient ecclesiastical folklore with gritty turn-of-the-century procedural television. While early digital effects creep into certain creature climaxes, the real terror thrives in damp crypts, misty churchyards, and shadowed stone corridors. Coyle played the material with exhausted sincerity, reminding us why Britain remains the undisputed home of brooding, liturgical television dread.
#11
Apparitions
Martin Shaw delivered a career-defining performance here as Father Jacob Murray, an English Catholic priest confronting genuine demonic possession. Writer Joe Ahearne bypassed sensational Hollywood theatrics to focus on heavy theological debate, quiet psychological warfare, and ritualistic exorcisms. The lighting is harsh and naturalistic, making council estates and quiet parish houses feel spiritually besieged. It captures that vanished BBC tradition where serious writers treated television as a platform for moral gravity, trusting the audience to endure real spiritual unease.
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