10 Best Horror TV Shows Ever (and What You Can Learn From Them)

Horror television has evolved far beyond cheap jump scares and formulaic “monster-of-the-week” stories. From satirical slasher comedies to character-driven supernatural epics, the best horror TV shows demonstrate how long-form storytelling can build suspense, explore human psychology, and keep audiences emotionally invested over multiple seasons.

For screenwriters, these shows offer a masterclass in blending character, tension, and theme to create horror that resonates beyond the screen. Let’s look at the 10 best horror shows and what screenwriters can learn from each show. 

Ryan Murphy’s dark comedy Scream Queens satirizes the slasher genre for the modern age. Following the women of Kappa House, an elite sorority led by Chanel Oberlin (Emma Roberts),  all hell breaks loose when a masked killer begins picking off pledges one by one.

While the show’s over-the-top kills harken back to the outrageous deaths of late 80s slashers like A Nightmare on Elm Street 3 and Jason Takes Manhattan, it’s the millennial cringe humor and tongue-in-cheek writing that keep viewers hooked. Because television requires sustained emotional investment, the series succeeds by giving us characters we both root for and want to see destroyed, a balance that makes its self-aware horror world so fun to watch.

Scream Queens proves that even the campiest horror-comedy works best when it grounds its satire in character. Balancing irony with sincerity or hate gives audiences someone to root for, even when they’re next in line for the chainsaw.

What happens when you normalize the very thing that makes horror so scary? What We Do in the Shadows, the TV adaptation of Taika Waititi’s feature film, does just that, driving its tension through humor.

Each character fuels both the plot and the comedy through their distinct archetype. From Nandor’s (Kayvan Novak) naïveté to Nadja’s (Natasia Demetriou) ferocity to Laszlo’s (Matt Berry) debauchery, the jokes emerge naturally from how their personalities clash within the world’s rules.

Every episode builds a mini horror-comedy premise, like a cursed hat or a visit from the vampire council, into larger arcs such as Guillermo’s lineage, Nadja’s club, or the vampires’ social standing. Each conflict carries emotional consequences that serialize the stakes, evolving the traditional “monster-of-the-week” format into something more character-driven and cohesive.

Interview with the Vampire, adapted from Anne Rice’s novel by way of its film, follows vampire Louis de Pointe du Lac (Jacob Anderson) as he details his complex relationship with Lestat du Lioncourt (Sam Reid) and the unconventional family they form.

Interview with the Vampire shows that horror thrives in intimacy and emotion. Television gives you more time to explore the evolving relationships and psychology of the characters, allowing the horror to emerge organically. The show often uses conversation and stillness to build dread about what will happen next. Focusing on relationships, perspective, and emotion reveals the terror of the characters and the monstrous actions they are willing to commit. 

It doesn’t help that Louis is an unreliable narrator. The story unfolds through flashbacks shaped by his words, reframing the original narrative into what Louis wants to believe is the truth. This shifting perspective keeps the audience guessing and sustains the tension essential to long-form horror storytelling.

The Last of Us took the world by storm when it debuted on HBO Max in 2023. This post-apocalyptic story follows Joel (Pedro Pascal) as he transports Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across the country in hopes of finding a cure for the infection that’s wiped out much of humanity. The “wolf and cub” dynamic evolves in the second season, subverting horror tropes to fully explore themes of heroism, survival, and revenge.

While the show is a faithful adaptation of the video game, the screenwriters take time to flesh out secondary characters in ways that deepen the story’s emotional core. From Bill and Frank’s beautifully tragic love story (played by Nick Offerman and Murray Bartlett) to the ruthless conviction of revolutionary leaders like Kathleen (Melanie Lynskey) and Isaac (Jeffrey Wright), The Last of Us uses every side story to reflect its central question: What does it mean to survive when survival costs your humanity?

By expanding character depth and perspective, screenwriters can transform familiar genre beats into a story that feels both intimate and epic.

Mike Flanagan’s Netflix series The Haunting of Hill House expertly delivers layered horror through a non-linear story that centers on a family living under the shadow of a decades-long haunting. The series blends scares that make you look away, gut-wrenching moments that make you cry, and shocks that make you jump in surprise.

Modern horror is difficult to write because audiences already understand genre tropes. Flanagan overcomes this by rooting the horror in the trauma that haunts the characters, carefully fleshing them out so viewers emotionally invest in their fates. The audience fears for the characters they care about, which makes the slow, inevitable descent of each family member all the more terrifying.

Horror works best when it’s anchored in emotional stakes. Writers should let monsters reflect the characters’ inner fears and trauma, creating payoffs that resonate more deeply than traditional jump scares.

Midnight Mass is another Mike Flanagan masterpiece, driven by the series’ thematic core. Yet it’s how Flanagan builds tension through community and isolation that shapes the horror of this Netflix series.

The story follows the arrival of a priest who reignites religious fervor in a dying town through miracles and mysteries with lasting consequences. Set on a small, isolated island, Midnight Mass confines its characters both physically and socially. Every interaction carries weight, creating an invisible web of consequences that traps them just as surely as the supernatural threat.

Writers can use setting and relationships as dual engines of suspense. Small, interconnected communities naturally heighten tension because each character’s actions ripple through the group. When isolation and interpersonal dynamics intersect, horror becomes intimate, inescapable, and emotionally gripping, proving that sometimes the scariest monsters are human.

Black Mirror is a contemporary reworking of The Twilight Zone that taps into the collective fears of the modern world, focusing on the intended and unintended consequences of technology.

Each episode tells a self-contained story, often dystopian, exploring how advances in tech intersect with human desire, obsession, and moral failings. The horror doesn’t stem from the gadgets themselves, but from the ethical and emotional fallout of how people misuse them. From the social currency of online approval to algorithm-driven dating, Black Mirror turns real-world anxieties into tightly focused, short-form stories that resonate deeply with audiences.

The X-Files is a seminal series that blends horror, science fiction, and procedural drama. Following FBI agents Fox Mulder (David Duchovny) and Dana Scully (Gillian Anderson), each episode investigates unexplained phenomena. The show balances “monster-of-the-week” episodes with a long-form mythology arc, creating a narrative rhythm that keeps audiences engaged over multiple seasons.

The series excels at tension through curiosity, led by Mulder’s obsessive belief, and skepticism, driven by Scully’s scientific rationalism, generating conflict that drives both character development and story stakes. The show often uses suggestion and atmosphere rather than overt gore, proving that suspense can be built through dialogue, pacing, and framing as effectively as any special effect.

Balancing standalone stories with overarching plots can give audiences both immediate payoffs and long-term intrigue, keeping series alive in pop culture long after the series finale. By establishing clear stakes in each story while threading emotional and thematic continuity across episodes, screenwriters can make horror, mystery, and sci-fi feel both immediate and epic.

Stranger Things combines 1980s nostalgia, supernatural horror, and coming-of-age drama to create a story that’s both thrilling and emotionally grounded. The series follows a group of kids in Hawkins, Indiana, as they confront the sinister experiments of the Hawkins National Laboratory and its consequences, culminating in the emergence of the series’ big bad, Vecna (Jamie Campbell Bower).

This Netflix original excels at balancing ensemble storytelling with personal stakes. Each character has distinct motivations and fears, and the group dynamics amplify tension and drama. By gradually revealing mysteries about the Upside Down, the series sustains suspense, while the mix of humor, friendship, and trauma keeps the audience invested in both the supernatural and human storylines.

Writers can heighten tension by giving each character a personal arc that intersects with the central mystery. When supernatural horror and human drama feed into each other, the stakes feel real, suspense lands harder, and the story resonates emotionally across multiple seasons.

Yellowjackets is a dark, psychological thriller that blends survival horror, coming-of-age drama, and mystery, following a high school girls’ soccer team stranded in the wilderness after a plane crash. The story unfolds across two timelines: the immediate struggle for survival in the 1990s and the long-term fallout in the present day, where the now-adult survivors are haunted by trauma, secrets, and lingering guilt.

The series excels at building tension through character-driven conflict. Each survivor is distinct, with their own fears, ambitions, and moral compromises, and their interactions create a web of suspense that keeps viewers guessing. By shifting between past and present, the show explores how trauma evolves, revealing how survival shapes personality, relationships, and even danger itself.

Writers can create rich, long-form horror by using dual timelines and deeply developed characters. Exploring how past events shape present behavior allows for suspense, mystery, and emotional investment that resonate across multiple seasons.

Across our list of the best horror TV shows, one lesson is clear: the most effective horror comes from the intersection of character, stakes, and setting. Whether it’s the claustrophobic isolation of Midnight Mass, the fractured timelines of Yellowjackets, or the ensemble dynamics of Stranger Things, modern horror television thrives when writers invest in human emotion as much as in supernatural threats or genre conventions.

By grounding scares in character, perspective, and thematic purpose, screenwriters can craft stories that terrify, engage, and linger in viewers’ minds, proving that great horror is as much about what we feel as what we see.