12 Horror TV Shows That Deserved to Continue

If you’re a fan of excitement, spooky moments, and unexpected scares in a binge-worthy format, you’ll find numerous options to indulge in these days. From the unsettling world of MGM’s “From” to popular horror series among Looper readers like “The Walking Dead” and “American Horror Story,” television creators have figured out the winning formula that skillfully merges classic horror elements with top-tier TV storytelling, leading to a growing number of high-quality shows each year.

Unfortunately, not every horror series gets the opportunity to last as long as fans would like. Just as the storyline gains momentum, the show often gets canceled, leaving viewers wanting more. Even when showrunners for beloved series such as “Evil” and “Servant” manage to wrap up their stories with a satisfactory ending, there are always people secretly hoping for a revival.

Fans of horror movie sequels know well that when you’re dealing with supernatural elements and traditional horror themes, there’s always a possibility that some of the most beloved horror shows could return. In the meantime, raise a toast to these horror series that enthusiasts believe ended too prematurely.

“Friday the 13th: The Series” was produced by Frank Mancuso Jr., who was also involved in producing the “Friday the 13th” films. However, the similarities mostly stop there. As Mancuso recounted in the book “Curious Goods: Behind the Scenes of Friday the 13th: The Series,” Paramount wanted to leverage the films’ success, but Mancuso had a different direction in mind. Since the studio only needed the TV show to carry the franchise name, it decided to part ways with the character Jason Voorhees. Instead, “Friday the 13th: The Series” bears more resemblance to shows like “Kolchak: The Night Stalker” or the episodic styles of “The X-Files” and “Supernatural.”

The story kicks off with the sudden demise of Curious Goods antique store owner and occultist Lewis Vendredi (R. G. Armstrong), who is pulled into Hell after testing the limits of a devilish agreement. Following the deep discount fire sale of many antiques by the cousins who inherit it, Vendredi’s sophisticated niece Micki Foster (Louise Robey) and her comic book enthusiast cousin Ryan Dallion (John D. LeMay) learn they have unintentionally released multiple cursed objects — which demand human sacrifice to function — into the world. With guidance from Uncle Lewis’ occult friend and all-around expert Jack Marshak (Chris Wiggins), they resolve to reclaim each artifact and restore their uncle’s eclectic, otherworldly shop.

Conceived by Robert and Michelle King, the duo also responsible for the extravagant and sometimes surreal legal drama “The Good Fight,” “Evil” is a critically acclaimed supernatural horror series following a priest, an agnostic forensic psychologist, and an atheist tech expert, formerly Muslim, as they evaluate cases for the Catholic Church.

Like “The Good Fight,” “Evil” tackles current events through hyperbolized storylines often interwoven with absurdist and surrealist elements. Father David Acosta (Mike Colter) is a faithful priest, with a dark and complicated inner life, who approaches each case from a faith-based perspective, while psychologist Kristen Bouchard (Katja Herbers) and tech guy Ben Shakir (Aasif Mandvi) tend to bring a more skeptical viewpoint. But despite their various levels of skepticism, all are haunted by a spectrum of supernatural and demonic forces in both their personal and professional lives. 

The chemistry between the show’s central trio is nothing short of magical, and the extended cast is positively packed with beloved character actors like Kurt Fuller, Michael Emerson, Andrea Martin, Peter Scolari, Tim Matheson, and Wallace Shawn. “Evil” comes rooted in its own complicated lore and world-building. That the demonic exists is a given in the show’s reality. Whether or how much those forces might play a role in the events of each episode is typically left ambiguous. The practical effects are as outstanding as the show’s beautifully fleshed-out lore, and “Evil” even features a hidden alternate reality game puzzle.

Fans of Ryan Murphy don’t typically watch shows like “9-1-1” and “American Horror Story” looking for serious drama. They’re in it for the borderline cartoonish, campy storytelling that’s charactistic of the Murphyverse. And “Scream Queens,” a satirical black comedy horror series that feels a little like the feral love child of “Glee” and “AHS,” is arguably one of the best things to come from Murphy’s imagination.

The wacky slasher-themed horror series revolves around the fictional Wallace University’s Kappa Kappa Tau sorority, a house with dwindling membership run by the humorously overbearing and self-absorbed Chanel Oberlin (Emma Roberts). Their efforts to onboard a new batch of pledges are plagued by a serial killer dressed in a Red Devil costume, but as the body count rapidly climbs, Chanel is relatively unbothered despite a steady stream of increasingly creative kills. 

Glen Powell is hilarious as Chanel’s boyfriend Chad Radwell, and Jamie Lee Curtis rules every scene she is in as Dean Cathy Munsch. The snappy dialogue, colorful storytelling, and quirky characters are all part of the show’s charm. Niecy Nash, Ariana Grande, Kirstie Alley, John Stamos, Nick Jonas, and Keke Palmer all make an appearance at one point in the show’s two seasons. 

If you only watched the first season of “Twin Peaks” when it came out in 1990, you might not have even realized that the David Lynch series is a surrealist horror story. But keep watching long enough, and you’ll start to pick up on details that don’t make sense in a standard network drama — elements like mysticism, visions, demonic forces, doppelgangers, and alternate planes of reality. 

Even before its 1992 follow-up film, “Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” and the 2017 third season, subtitled “The Return,” the innovative “Twin Peaks” left an indelible mark on television, challenging the boundaries of what most believed TV was capable of through its experimental storytelling. And all of it revolves around a central horror story that imagines a pair of demonic entities capable of committing unthinkable acts.

The series follows Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) as he travels to Twin Peaks, a sleepy little town somewhere in the Pacific Northwest, to investigate the murder of homecoming queen and hometown sweetheart Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). As Agent Cooper delves deeper into the mystery, his open-mindedness leads him down a rabbit hole to the extra-dimensional Black Lodge and White Lodge, accessible somewhere in the thick forests surrounding Twin Peaks. Strange, trippy, and existentially terrifying, “Twin Peaks” is still one of the best horror series ever. And although David Lynch is no longer around to write it, many fans are still hoping someone will give it a true ending in “Twin Peaks” Season 4.

It’s hard to say why “Castle Rock” didn’t get the love and attention it deserved. But had the series continued, many fans believe it would have eventually garnered a cult following to rival that of some of the best horror series. Drawing on tales from across the Stephen King multiverse, “Castle Rock” imagined a sort of alternate reality where King’s characters and various mythologies collide or, at the very least, pass in parallel lanes. 

It’s something that makes a whole lot of sense for diehard Stephen King fans, given the author’s reuse of character and town names from one story to the next. The show is set in Castle Rock, Maine, a fictional town recurrent in King’s stories, and is set up as a somewhat interconnected anthology with each of the show’s two seasons focused on a different central story. 

Season 1 revolves around Henry Matthew Deaver (André Holland), a criminal defense attorney who leaves his hometown to escape the judgment of his community after getting implicated in his adoptive father’s (Adam Rothenberg) death. Henry returns to Castle Rock after a mysterious and apparently ageless inmate (Bill Skarsgård) held captive by the late Warden Dale Lacy (Terry O’Quinn) says his name. The second season tells the story of how Annie Wilkes (Lizzy Caplan) becomes the woman we meet in the film “Misery” and outlines the mythology behind “‘Salem’s Lot.” It’s incredibly well done, especially for Stephen King geeks.

Found footage films like “The Blair Witch Project,” “Paranormal Activity,” and “Cloverfield” prove how eerie and unsettling the genre can be. But aside from the found footage segments of “American Horror Story: Roanoke” and “Archive 81,” few horror series have attempted to translate the format to television. Before it was canceled after only eight episodes, ABC’s “The River” was doing a pretty decent job of this, something reflected briefly in the show’s solid ratings and the fact that Netflix even considered picking the series up for a hot minute. 

In a supernatural horror landscape that is arguably overpopulated with priests, ghosts, and exorcists, “The River” offered something refreshingly different. Set along the deepest unexplored segment of the Amazon River, the series follows the family of TV nature show personality Dr. Emmet Cole (Bruce Greenwood) and their crew as they set out to search for the missing explorer in the depths of the vast waterway. The deeper they travel into uncharted waters, the stranger, more frightening, and ultimately deadlier the phenomena they experience. Like the apparently doomed crew of the Magus, the show didn’t make it nearly as far as it deserved to. 

If you love the Satanic, old New York City vibes of “Rosemary’s Baby” and the short-lived 2023 series “The Watchful Eye,” “666 Park Avenue” is for you. The tale is set in the Drake, a luxury high-rise residential hotel located on Manhattan’s Upper East Side at 999 Park Avenue. Youngish couple Jane Van Veen (Rachael Taylor) and Henry Martin (David Annable) take up residence in the decadent Beaux-Arts art deco building as part of their new roles co-managing the place, where they cross paths with other enigmatic tenants, demonic birds, and a host of dark forces. 

Terry O’Quinn and Vanessa Williams play the building’s charismatic billionaire owners, a pair of demonic agents who fund their lavish lifestyle by onboarding souls of the tenants they manage to corrupt. The series managed to set up a solidly spooky story in its sole season despite catching plenty of flak from the conservative Christian group One Million Moms, who targeted the series by urging advertisers to abandon their sponsorship. 

“Hemlock Grove” is of Netflix’s many hidden gem series that never quite got the attention it deserved during its run. A supernatural sci-fi horror series set in the small titular Pennsylvania community, the lore-heavy three-season tale envisions a world where the two ends of extreme economic disparity live in close proximity and often collide with each other. Although Hemlock Grove never recovered from the closure of its steel mill years ago, leaving many of its residents struggling in poverty, it now exists under the shadow of the Godfrey Institute for Biomedical Technologies and its wealthy owners, ruled by matriarch Olivia Godfrey (Famke Janssen).  

But the divisions of Hemlock Grove go far beyond wealth disparities. Like the world of “Twilight,” Hemlock Grove is populated with two clashing supernatural species, werewolves and upiórs, a type of proto-vampiric immortal being. The series largely follows the friendship between upiór Roman Godfrey (Bill Skarsgård) and Romani werewolf Peter Rumancek (Landon Liboiron), as well as the various experiments of the Godfrey Institute’s mad scientist, Dr. Johann Pryce (Joel de la Fuente), offering a fascinating take on vampire lore.

“Helix” is a science fiction horror series that had tons of potential — not to mention the added benefit of having Ronald D. Moore, the sci-fi legend behind “Outlander” and the reimagined “Battlestar Galactica,” on its list of executive producers. The series follows a crew of CDC scientists sent to investigate a viral outbreak at Arctic Biosystems’ remote Arctic research outpost, where scientists have been hard at work on a secretive genetic engineering project under the guiding hand of the enigmatic Ilaria Corporation. 

They rapidly find themeselves cut off from the world while contending with two very different strains of the Narvik virus, one with a 100% fatality rate and one that turns the infected into walking vectors driven by a primal, collective urge to infect anyone they come into contact with. 

Those who survive long enough come to realize that the virus was created by a group of immortals as part of their efforts toward world domination, with the shadowy folks behind Ilaria ultimately planning to kill, control, or confer immortality depending on who you’re talking to. Season 2 takes the action out of the Arctic and onto a remote island, bringing a cult into the mix while further exploring the immortals’ mythology.

Arguably the best thing M. Night Shyamalan has ever made, “Servant” is a horror series about a mysterious woman who moves into the home of a couple torn apart with grief after the sudden death of their infant son. Set in a gorgeous Philadelphia rowhouse, the series introduces Dorothy (Lauren Ambrose) and Sean Turner (Toby Kebbell), a successful news reporter and chef whose lives fall apart after their 13-week-old child Jericho dies. When Dorothy experiences a severe mental breakdown, a friend recommends object therapy using a hyperrealistic reborn doll, which Dorothy believes is the real Jericho. 

After young nanny Leanne (Nell Tiger Free) arrives to help so that Dorothy can return to work, the doll is seemingly replaced by a living baby, which leaves Sean and Dorothy’s brother Julian Pearce (Rupert Grint) questioning their sanity and the nature of reality. The horror in this series is largely psychological, although “Servant” somehow manages to present Sean’s culinary work in almost horrific visual terms. The themes of grief, mental illness, and the inability to trust one’s own mind offer as terrifying a tale as they come. 

“Harper’s Island” was only ever marketed as a limited series, but that hasn’t stopped many fans from wishing it would get picked up again as an anthology show. Had the ratings been high enough, insiders say that might have been the case. Yet despite its short 13-episode run, the CBS series still managed to pick up something of a cult following in its brief time on the air. 

The slasher horror series takes place on the titular island, a locale just off the coast of Seattle where a group of folks are heading to a destination wedding seven years after John Wakefield (Callum Keith Rennie) killed six victims there — including the mom of the groom’s best friend, Abby Mills (Elaine Cassidy). The wedding party doesn’t even make it to the island on the ferry before the body count starts piling up in this convuluted and completely over-the-top mystery.

Despite Syfy canceling the underrated anthology series “Channel Zero” after four seasons, many fans still insist it’s the best genre program of its kind ever aired. Each of the show’s seasons takes on a popular internet creepypasta. The first is based on Kris Straub’s creepypasta “Candle Cove,” which deals with a bizarre, “cursed media” type low-budget kids’ show connected to the disappearance of children. 

The second, “No-End House,” is a wonderfully atmospheric interpretation of haunted house lore set in a six-room house that may or may not be real. Season 3, “Butcher’s Block,” is based on Kerry Hammond’s Reddit creepypasta “The Search and Rescue Woods.” And the final season, “The Dream Door,” imagines a young couple discovering a mysterious door that simply appears in the basement of the husband’s childhood home one day. 

With just six episodes per season, the stories are just the right length to get the point across without drawing things out too long. Much like the creepypastas the series is based on, “Channel Zero” has a way of getting under its audiences’ skin by scratching away at the childhood nightmares that never leave us.