Horror miniboom is redefining fear
Rash of scary new TV shows prove psychological thrillers are more frightening than monsters
Something scary is happening on TV.
Sabrina the Teenage Witch is back, but now she’s dealing with Satan instead of mean teachers. The Purge has come to prime time. Even The Twilight Zone will be gracing your TV screens again.
We’re in the midst of a miniboom in horror on TV that has fuelled greater diversity in storytelling.
October saw the premieres of two buzzy horror shows on Netflix, The Haunt
ing of Hill House and Chilling Adventures of Sabrina. Syfy’s latest season of anthology series Channel Zero premiered Friday in the U.S. and debuts Monday in Canada on Showcase.
Horror isn’t exactly new to television, but it’s certainly more acclaimed, more successful and more prolific than ever. Unlike its big-screen counterparts, horror shows are harder to pull off convincingly. Jump scares, a staple of many horror films, are less scary when done repeatedly over 10 hours. The communal experience is also lost when fans are isolated at home instead of feeling the fear with fellow moviegoers.
But horror TV is thriving and it can do things that films can’t.
“TV offers you (the ability) to do a deep dive into character, it offers you the chance to braid in threads of things that you can pay off much later,” says Hill
House producer Trevor Macy, who has worked on horror films including Ocu
lus and The Stranger.
Hill House, Zero and AMC’s recent The Terror are all excellent examples of how TV can make horror better, allowing psychological and character-driven stories to scare you more than any monster hiding behind the door could. Zero takes its inspiration from another modern phenomenon: the internet. Sourcing each season’s story from the Creepypasta forum, where the Slender Man myth began, Zero taps into anxieties both universal and specific. Its new season, The Dream Door, focuses on marital anxiety.
The source material for Hill House is more old-school: Shirley Jackson’s classic 1959 novel. The Netflix series, which reimagines the story of a famously haunted house in a modern setting, makes great use of the “slow burn” TV format, lulling its audience into a sense of complacency before things get scary.
Last spring’s The Terror brilliantly used this format, embellishing the story of a crew of 19th-century sailors who went looking for the fabled Northwest Passage, never to return.
None of these series have enjoyed the broad commercial success of recent films like Halloween or A Quiet Place, but they’re massive improvements on mainstream failures like Fox’s Scream Queens. And though wildly uneven, Queens creator Ryan Murphy’s Amer
ican Horror Story remains a ratings hit for FX in its eighth season.
“We live in a scary time,” says Zero producer Nick Antosca.
“When things are great and our culture is in a great place, then horror doesn’t necessarily come to the forefront in the same way. But when people are feeling anxiety in their daily lives, when they look at the news or they feel under threat, horror tends to thrive as a cathartic place to go.”
“TV offers you (the ability) to do a deep dive into character, it offers you the chance to braid in threads of things that you can pay off much later.” TREVOR MACY HILL HOUSE PRODUCER