Best Horror Shows of All Time

Y ou don't have to live in a haunted suburban house to get dragged into the terror of your television. Many of the best horror shows have revolved around things that cause havoc in the night to things that come for you in broad daylight. We're listing the 10 best horror shows in television history, because to be fair, it doesn't have to be Halloween for us to appreciate them.

The Vampire Diaries

The list of best horror shows starts off with this all-time favourite show. The joy of witnessing sexy, young people strip down to their underwear and rip each other's hearts out is unmatched. That's the formula for almost every horror show's success, and The Vampire Diaries makes the metaphor more real than any other horror show. The Vampire Diaries is a teen soap with all the lust and angst you'd expect. It's alluring, humorous, and often shockingly intense for a teen soap. However, it also has a very intricate magical mythos, in which the characters gradually unveil one dangerous layer at a time.

Tales from the Crypt

"Hello, boils and ghouls!" says the narrator in every episode of this horror show. During the seven-year span of this infamous anthology series, many monsters would parade by viewers, but the Cryptkeeper's puns may have been the show's deadliest aspect. But it was only part of the charm of the show. Tales from the Crypt is a celebration of horror's history, taking full advantage of the network's free reign over violence and nudity it played on.

The Outer Limits

Each episode of the 1960s anthology series opened with an opening monologue rather than a declaration of aesthetic warfare. The show is now mostly recognised as "the one that wasn't The Twilight Zone," yet its tone was more confronting in certain respects, both physically and ethically.

Ghost Hunters

This intrepid group of amateur paranormal investigators has created eerie horror show magic out of their haphazard investigations of haunted houses by tapping into a vital component of any good horror story: the audience's inclination to believe. It's never been so much fun to jump at shadows as much as it has been while watching this show.

The Returned

When the dead emerge from the grave, there's a good chance that hell will follow them. This French series took a unique approach, asking what would happen if the dead resurfaced in much the same form as before? Yes, the unexplained otherworldly powers that caused the late citizens of one little French town to return and try to resume their lives were often terrifying. However, the documentary was at its darkest when it looked at how the community responded —or failed to adjust— to people they'd learned to live without, often with fatal results.

Dark Shadows

Barnabas Collins, the vampire (played by Jonathan Frid) who made Dark Shadows a bright spot on the daytime channel, paved the way for all supernatural soaps. His appearance enthralled the show's young-skewing fans after he was unchained from a coffin. From then on, the afternoon serial transitioned from a somewhat Gothic story to a full-fledged paranormal romance, incorporating witchcraft and werewolves into its sudsy love stories. It's now regarded as a cult masterpiece.

True Blood

Lust and terror have always been linked. The origins of horror are all about the tug of war between sexual suppression and sexual expression. Young maidens are pitted against a sinister seducer in Gothic tales. The vampire's fangs conjure up images of oral intercourse, and the monster's thirst for blood represents a down-and-dirty want for life force. At its most terrible, horror is more concerned with our terror of living than with our fear of dying. The catharsis of dread and the lurid explorations of our own most wicked urges lure us to the genre.

True Blood is credited with launching a new approach to horror. The show was bloody, campy, outrageous, and, above all, sensual. True Blood's sexuality wasn't explored in analogies or articulated in debates about virginity's purity. It was right in front of your eyes. There was a delightful lasciviousness to the show. The blood vampires craved was more than simply a source of life —they also wanted a source of sex.

A Haunting

This Discovery Channel best horror show dramatises real-life encounters with ghosts, demons, and poltergeists with jump scares and face-in-the-mirror terror, based on the case files of Amityville Horror investigators Ed and Lorraine Warren.