As the night goes on, the Mad Men star becomes convinced that there’s more to the Eater than mere cannibalism, coming to believe that her fellow male cops are being impacted by the killing machine. Moss plays a young cop at a station that happens to be housing a vicious serial killer who has been known to eat his victims, slowly and painfully. The best episode was the fifth, “Eater,” directed by the legendary Stuart Gordon ( Re-Animator) and starring Elisabeth Moss, Russell Hornsby, and Pablo Schreiber. It was a massive bomb, pulled from the network before its final five episodes were even allowed to air, but it did have a few standout chapters, including “Skin & Bones” by Larry Fessenden and “The Sacrifice” with a young Jesse Plemons. In summer 2008, NBC launched its own version of Masters of Horror with the short-lived Fear Itself, created by Mick Garris. There may be moodier episodes of this show that one could argue should be here instead, but this is a representative of the overall fearlessness of The Fall of the House of Usher to provide images you can’t forget. Flanagan and his team cleverly twist Poe’s short stories to fit their narrative of the literal destruction of a powerful family, and the most unforgettably vicious chapter comes just past the halfway point of the season in their riff on “The Tell-Tale Heart.” By this point in the show, there have been multiple brutal deaths, but the reveal of what Victorine did to Al is one of the most WTF moments in the history of television, followed by the undeniable horror of what she then does in front of her father. More than any Flanagan project, The Fall of the House of Usher is an unforgivingly brutal sequence of comeuppances for its characters, using some of the new master of horror’s greatest tricks to dispatch them. Paramount+ The Fall of the House of Usher, “The Tell-Tale Heart”Īny number of the eight episodes in the 2023 season of Mike Flanagan’s adaptation of the work of Edgar Allen Poe could qualify for a feature like this one. It’s as innovative a half-hour of television as any show had the guts to air in the last decade. Murai and cinematographer Christian Springer were influenced by The Shining in the design of the episode and Glover’s whiteface make-up was compared to Michael Jackson, although there is a lot more going on here beyond parody. Darius (Lakeith Stanfield) goes to a mansion to pick up a free piano with a U-Haul, and gets sucked into the realm of a man named Teddy Perkins, played by Glover under so much heavy make-up that Stanfield reportedly didn’t even realize it was him and he isn’t credited in the episode itself. The great director Hiro Murai collaborated with Glover on one of the most unsettling half-hours of TV in the 2010s, an experience that unfolded without commercial breaks. In general, Donald Glover’s masterful FX show would be classified as a comedy - but then there’s the sixth episode of season two, which is something else altogether. Some of the production values are dated, but Scorsese delivers enough great shots to justify a revisit. It’s bad enough when it’s just in a mirror, but it’s eventually in glasses and even eyes. The Oscar winner helms the tale of a horror writer, played by Sam Waterston, who starts to see a disfigured man in every reflection. Steven Spielberg’s brilliant anthology series didn’t often go straight horror but they sure went for it in this incredible episode from a story by Spielberg and directed by, believe it or not, Martin Scorsese. With that in mind, here are the scariest ones to make our cut - the 50 best TV episodes to watch when you’re looking for a truly chilling scare. Trimming this list down to fifty was difficult: There are truly terrifying episodes of Dexter, The Outer Limits, Fringe, and others that just barely missed the cut, and you could put together an entire separate list from the very best of Rod Serling’s groundbreaking masterpiece. The truth is that horror has been a reliable part of the TV landscape for generations, and it’s a remarkably diverse genre. When people think about TV horror, they probably think of the zombies of The Walking Dead or an old episode of an anthology series like The Twilight Zone or Tales From the Crypt that haunted their dreams - or, more recently, Netflix’s very scary Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities. With Halloween right around the corner, it’s the perfect time for a marathon of television frights. This post was originally published in 2017 and has been updated to include even more terrifying television. Photo-Illustration: Vulture Photos Courtesy of the Networks
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