Horror
Titles doing the frightening so the first scene does not have to.
Horror accounts for 131 of the 2,618 shows here, with 160 opening title sequences from 1959 to the present.
More of them began in the 2010s than in any other decade — 48, against 37 in the 2020s.
Six rebuilt their titles mid-run, American Horror Story most of all with eleven sequences.
Netflix carries more of them than anyone else, with 23.
131 shows · 160 sequences
The ones that kept changing
All 6 in Horror · every genre →
11 sequences
American Horror Story
An anthology, so there is no returning sequence to protect: Kyle Cooper builds a new one from scratch every season and the only thing carried across is the lettering. The sixth season is absent below because it went further still and threw the titles out altogether.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 8 more
8 sequences
Charmed
Love Spit Love's cover of 'How Soon Is Now?' over the Book of Shadows and three sisters, re-cut every season. It goes further than that, though: the credits were rebuilt whenever the cast of an episode changed, so a season carries several versions rather than one — eight of them in the second year alone.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 5 more
7 sequences
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
An organ sting, a shot of the moon, and then Nerf Herder's surf-punk theme over black-and-white monster-movie footage that bursts into colour. The design never changed in seven years; the fifty seconds behind it were re-cut every one of them.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 4 more
5 sequences
Angel
The spinoff takes the parent show's structure and drops the jokes: Darling Violetta's 'Sanctuary' instead of surf-punk, city at night instead of monster movies. Like Buffy, the design holds for five years while the names in front of it keep moving.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 2 more
2 sequences
Shadowhunters
Runes burning into skin, and a New York rendered as a warded city.
- Season 1
- Season 3
2 sequences
Wednesday
Gothic paper-cut animation and a harpsichord, doing in seventy-nine seconds what the Addams Family finger-snap did in eight.
- Season 1
- Season 2
Most looked up in horror
Pick a decade above for all 131
2 sequencesWednesday
Gothic paper-cut animation and a harpsichord, doing in seventy-nine seconds what the Addams Family finger-snap did in eight.
- Season 1
- Season 2
1 sequence
From
'Que Sera, Sera' over a town nobody can leave — a cheerful standard used as a threat, which is the oldest trick in horror and still works.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Walking Dead
Rust, decay and abandoned objects, cut to a string figure that never resolves — a sequence about entropy rather than the dead.
- Season 1
11 sequencesAmerican Horror Story
An anthology, so there is no returning sequence to protect: Kyle Cooper builds a new one from scratch every season and the only thing carried across is the lettering. The sixth season is absent below because it went further still and threw the titles out altogether.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 8 more
1 sequence
Interview with the Vampire
Anne Rice adapted as a long interview, with an opening that lasts twenty-two seconds and does not waste one of them.
- Season 1
1 sequence
Supernatural
Fifteen years without an opening title sequence, and fifteen distinct title cards instead — a few seconds of the show's name, restyled from scratch every season to match what that year was about. The shortest main titles on this site, and the ones that changed the most.
- Seasons 1–15
7 sequencesBuffy the Vampire Slayer
An organ sting, a shot of the moon, and then Nerf Herder's surf-punk theme over black-and-white monster-movie footage that bursts into colour. The design never changed in seven years; the fifty seconds behind it were re-cut every one of them.
- Season 1
- Season 2
- Season 3
- and 4 more
1 sequence
The Vampire Diaries
A short title card: the name in gold serif lettering rising over a fogbound road at night, then alone on black.
- Season 1
1 sequence
The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon
The franchise moved to France, with a title sequence built out of religious iconography rather than decay.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Terror
The Franklin expedition frozen into the ice, with something on it that is not the cold.
- Season 1
1 sequenceCastle Rock
A Maine town assembled out of forty years of Stephen King, with a main title that keeps rebuilding the same house.
- Season 1
1 sequenceMayfair Witches
Anne Rice's New Orleans witches, in the same continuity AMC built for the vampires.
- Season 1
1 sequenceTrue Blood
Digital Kitchen again, and their nastiest work: swamp water, roadkill, a revival tent, a child in a Klan hood, all cut to Jace Everett's 'Bad Things'. It promises a show about the South rather than a show about vampires.
- Seasons 1–7
1 sequenceThe Walking Dead: Dead City
Maggie and Negan in a cut-off Manhattan, in the first of the spin-offs to give its pairing the whole hour.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Strain
Guillermo del Toro's vampire plague, opened by a sequence of things going wrong at cellular scale.
- Season 1
1 sequenceAll of Us Are Dead
School notebooks, corridors and lab equipment, cut fast enough that the outbreak reads as timetabled.
- Season 1
1 sequenceGrimm
A Portland detective who can see the creatures the fairy tales were written about, opened in eleven seconds.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Haunting of Bly Manor
The Turn of the Screw as the second Haunting, with the same company of actors in different parts.
- Season 1
1 sequenceFear the Walking Dead
Seventeen seconds and a card — the spinoff declining the parent show's decaying montage entirely.
- Seasons 1–3
1 sequenceThe Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live
Rick and Michonne given the ending the parent series never got round to.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Originals
The Vampire Diaries spinoff, moving the family to New Orleans and giving them a title sequence the parent show never had.
- Season 2
1 sequenceAmerican Horror Stories
The American Horror Story spin-off, one self-contained hour at a time instead of one story a season.
- Season 1
1 sequenceChilling Adventures of Sabrina
The Archie witch as horror rather than sitcom, from the Riverdale producers.
- Season 1
1 sequenceThe Watcher
A house filmed from outside, at the distance a neighbour would stand — which is the entire threat.
- Season 1