Horror

Titles doing the frightening so the first scene does not have to.

134 shows · 162 sequences

The ones that kept changing

All 5 in Horror · every genre →

American Horror Story

2011–FXHorror

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

Charmed

1998–2006The WBHorror

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

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

1997–2003The WB / UPNHorror

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

Angel

1999–2004The WBHorror

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

Wednesday

2022–NetflixHorror

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

2020s

Wednesday

2022–NetflixHorror

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

From

2022–MGM+Horror

'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

Interview with the Vampire

2022–AMCHorror

Anne Rice adapted as a long interview, with an opening that lasts twenty-two seconds and does not waste one of them.

Season 1

The Walking Dead: Daryl Dixon

2023–AMCHorror

The franchise moved to France, with a title sequence built out of religious iconography rather than decay.

Season 1

Mayfair Witches

2023–AMCHorror

Anne Rice's New Orleans witches, in the same continuity AMC built for the vampires.

Season 1

The Walking Dead: Dead City

2023–AMCHorror

Maggie and Negan in a cut-off Manhattan, in the first of the spin-offs to give its pairing the whole hour.

Season 1

All of Us Are Dead

2022–NetflixHorror

School notebooks, corridors and lab equipment, cut fast enough that the outbreak reads as timetabled.

Season 1

The Haunting of Bly Manor

2020NetflixHorror

The Turn of the Screw as the second Haunting, with the same company of actors in different parts.

Season 1

The Walking Dead: The Ones Who Live

2024AMCHorror

Rick and Michonne given the ending the parent series never got round to.

Season 1

American Horror Stories

2021–FXHorror

The American Horror Story spin-off, one self-contained hour at a time instead of one story a season.

Season 1

The Watcher

2022–NetflixHorror

A house filmed from outside, at the distance a neighbour would stand — which is the entire threat.

Season 1

Cabinet of Curiosities

2022NetflixHorror

A physical cabinet opened drawer by drawer, each one holding the object that episode is about — an anthology that indexes itself.

Season 1

Lovecraft Country

2020HBOHorror

Twelve seconds — a card, a horn stab, and straight into an episode that will not be the same genre as the last one.

Season 1

Grotesquerie

2024FXHorror

Ryan Murphy's detective series about a series of killings that read as tableaux.

Season 1

Agatha All Along

2024Disney+Horror

The WandaVision villain given a witches' road to walk down, and a theme that was a joke song first.

Season 1

Locke & Key

2020–2022NetflixHorror

Keys turning in locks that open onto rooms which should not exist, drawn from the comic's own conceit.

Season 1

Dracula

2020BBC OneHorror

Moffat and Gatiss after Sherlock, with three feature-length episodes and a different idea in each.

Season 1

Sweet Home

2020–2024NetflixHorror

The apartment block as a cross-section, with something wrong in every unit — the show's premise drawn as a floor plan.

Season 1

Ratched

2020NetflixHorror

Mid-century clinical design turned lurid — surgical steel, pastel tile and hypodermics arranged with the care of a fashion shoot.

Season 1

Zom 100: Bucket List of the Dead

2023Nippon TVHorror

A man freed from an exploitative job by the zombie apocalypse, which he treats as good news.

Season 1

Dead Boy Detectives

2024NetflixHorror

Two dead schoolboys who refuse to move on and open a detective agency instead, out of the Sandman comics.

Season 1

Gyeongseong Creature

2023–2024NetflixHorror

Occupied Seoul in 1945, and what the occupiers are keeping in the hospital basement.

Season 1

Archive 81

2022NetflixHorror

Degraded videotape and splice marks — the found footage the show is built from, doing its own titles.

Season 1

Pretty Little Liars: Original Sin

2022–2024HBO MaxHorror

The Pretty Little Liars premise remade as a slasher, with a title sequence that finally commits to the genre.

Season 1

Hellbound

2021–NetflixHorror

Twenty-five seconds of smoke and scripture, over before the dread has anywhere to settle.

Season 1

Chapelwaite

2021–EpixHorror

Jerusalem's Lot filmed as a nineteenth-century gothic, from the King short story the vampire novel grew out of.

Season 1

Helstrom

2020HuluHorror

The last of Marvel's television output before the Disney+ era swallowed it, and the only one that is a horror series.

Season 1

The Third Day

2020HBO / Sky AtlanticHorror

An island off the Essex coast with its own rules, told in two halves and a live broadcast between them.

Season 1

Parasyte: The Grey

2024NetflixHorror

The Iwaaki manga relocated to Korea, running alongside the Japanese continuity rather than remaking it.

Season 1

Before

2024Apple TV+Horror

Billy Crystal as a child psychiatrist and a boy who knows things he should not.

Season 1

October Faction

2020NetflixHorror

Two monster hunters whose teenage children do not know what the family business is.

Season 1

Dead Ringers

2023Prime VideoHorror

The Cronenberg film remade with Rachel Weisz as both twins.

Season 1

The Cursed

2020tvNHorror

A girl who can kill by curse and the reporter who decides to use her.

Season 1

The Fall of the House of Usher

2023NetflixHorror

Corporate portraiture rotting in place — a pharmaceutical dynasty photographed like old money and left to decay in frame.

Season 1

It: Welcome to Derry

2025HBOHorror

The King adaptation's prequel series, set in the 1960s cycle.

Season 1

Midnight Mass

2021NetflixHorror

Crockett Island in grey water and grey weather, with a church at the centre of it and nothing yet visibly wrong.

Season 1

The Outsider

2020HBOHorror

Twenty seconds of smeared, doubled imagery — a face that will not resolve into one face, which is the entire mystery stated up front.

Season 1

Yellowjackets

2021–ShowtimeHorror

Home-video and yearbook imagery cut with things that should not be in a yearbook, and a new needle-drop each season.

Season 2

2010s

The Walking Dead

2010–2022AMCHorror

Rust, decay and abandoned objects, cut to a string figure that never resolves — a sequence about entropy rather than the dead.

Season 1

American Horror Story

2011–FXHorror

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

The Terror

2018–2019AMCHorror

The Franklin expedition frozen into the ice, with something on it that is not the cold.

Season 1

Castle Rock

2018–2019HuluHorror

A Maine town assembled out of forty years of Stephen King, with a main title that keeps rebuilding the same house.

Season 1

The Strain

2014–2017FXHorror

Guillermo del Toro's vampire plague, opened by a sequence of things going wrong at cellular scale.

Season 1

Grimm

2011–2017NBCHorror

A Portland detective who can see the creatures the fairy tales were written about, opened in eleven seconds.

Season 1

Fear the Walking Dead

2015–2023AMCHorror

Seventeen seconds and a card — the spinoff declining the parent show's decaying montage entirely.

Seasons 1–3

The Originals

2013–2018The CWHorror

The Vampire Diaries spinoff, moving the family to New Orleans and giving them a title sequence the parent show never had.

Season 2

Chilling Adventures of Sabrina

2018–2020NetflixHorror

The Archie witch as horror rather than sitcom, from the Riverdale producers.

Season 1

Penny Dreadful

2014–2016ShowtimeHorror

Victorian specimen jars, insects and anatomical plates, filmed with the patience of a museum catalogue and none of its detachment.

Season 1

Servant

2019–2023Apple TV+Horror

A doll's house filmed as an actual house — a brownstone rendered in miniature, with something wrong in one of the rooms.

Season 1

Bates Motel

2013–2017A&EHorror

Norman Bates before Psycho, in eleven seconds of a neon sign that everyone already knows the ending of.

Season 1

Legacies

2018–2022The CWHorror

The third series in the Vampire Diaries line, set at a boarding school for the supernatural.

Season 1

Tokyo Ghoul

2014–2018Tokyo MXHorror

A student turned half-ghoul, opened by "Unravel" — one of the few anime openings better known than the series.

Season 1

Kingdom

2019–2021NetflixHorror

Joseon-era ink painting turning plague-ridden — court robes and mountains overrun by figures that do not move like the living.

Season 2

NOS4A2

2019–2020AMCHorror

Christmas ornaments and a vintage car rendered as threat — a sequence that makes tinsel frightening.

Season 1

Scream Queens

2015–2016FoxHorror

Ryan Murphy's sorority slasher, with a title sequence longer than most of the deaths.

Season 1

Ash vs Evil Dead

2015–2018StarzHorror

A ten-second title card, which for a series this loud is the only restrained decision in it.

Season 1

Girl from Nowhere

2018–2021GMM 25 / NetflixHorror

A girl who transfers into a different school every episode and exposes what it is hiding.

Season 1

Shadowhunters

2016–2019FreeformHorror

Runes burning into skin, and a New York rendered as a warded city.

Season 1

Evil

2019–2024CBS / Paramount+Horror

Religious iconography and clinical diagrams intercut, so that possession and psychiatry are presented with equal weight — which is the show's entire method.

Season 1

Sleepy Hollow

2013–2017FoxHorror

Ichabod Crane woken in the present day, with the Horseman following him.

Season 1

Creepshow

2019–ShudderHorror

The Romero and King film continued as an anthology, with the comic-book panels doing the same work in the titles.

Season 1

Hemlock Grove

2013–2015NetflixHorror

A Pennsylvania steel town with a werewolf and a biotech company in it, and one of Netflix's first three originals.

Season 1

Van Helsing

2016–2021SyfyHorror

A descendant of the vampire hunter waking into an America the vampires already hold.

Season 1

Black Summer

2019–2021NetflixHorror

The Z Nation prequel, played without any of the parent series' jokes and shot in long unbroken takes.

Seasons 1–2

Constantine

2014–2015NBCHorror

The Hellblazer comic adapted, cancelled after thirteen episodes and continued in animation.

Season 1

Wynonna Earp

2016–2021SyfyHorror

Twenty-one seconds of western iconography and a revolver, for a show about Wyatt Earp's great-great-granddaughter.

Season 1

Marianne

2019NetflixHorror

A horror novelist who discovers the witch she invented has been real the whole time, and eleven seconds to say it.

Season 1

The Purge

2018–2019USA NetworkHorror

The film franchise given two seasons of television, opened in sixteen seconds.

Season 1

Blood Drive

2017SyfyHorror

A grindhouse pastiche about cars that run on human blood, cancelled after one season.

Season 1

Salem

2014–2017WGN AmericaHorror

The witch trials with actual witches, and the series that turned a superstation into a scripted network.

Season 1

The Order

2019–2020NetflixHorror

A university secret society of magicians and the werewolves who police them, which is two shows at once and knows it.

Season 1

Swamp Thing

2019DC UniverseHorror

Cancelled after one episode aired and finished anyway, which is why all ten exist.

Season 1

In the Flesh

2013–2014BBC ThreeHorror

Cured zombies sent home to the villages that killed them, opened in twelve seconds.

Season 1

The Exorcist

2016–2018FoxHorror

A sequel to the film rather than a remake, which it does not admit until the end of the first season.

Season 1

The Returned

2012–2015Canal+Horror

The dead walking back into an Alpine town as though nothing happened, opened by Mogwai over a collapsing dam.

Season 1

Witches of East End

2013–2014LifetimeHorror

A mother who has kept from her two daughters that all three of them are witches.

Season 1

Helix

2014–2015SyfyHorror

A CDC team at an Arctic research base, opened in ten seconds because the show never slows down either.

Season 1

Wolfblood

2012–2017CBBCHorror

Teenagers who are not werewolves but something older, in a children's series that took the mythology seriously.

Season 1

V Wars

2019NetflixHorror

A thawing glacier releasing a pathogen that turns some of the infected into vampires, from the Jonathan Maberry comics.

Season 1

Bitten

2014–2016SpaceHorror

The only female werewolf in existence, from the Kelley Armstrong novels, made in Canada.

Season 2

Requiem

2018BBC OneHorror

A cellist in a Welsh village that remembers a disappearance she does not.

Season 1

The Fades

2011BBC ThreeHorror

The unburied dead accumulating in the air above a British town, and a teenager who can see them.

Season 1

Crazyhead

2016Channel 4Horror

Two women who can see demons, from the writer of Misfits, and cancelled after six episodes.

Season 1

From Dusk till Dawn: The Series

2014–2016El ReyHorror

Rodriguez remaking his own film at series length, on the channel he founded to show it.

Season 1

Hannibal

2013–2015NBCHorror

A figure forming out of blood in water, on network television at ten o'clock. Twenty-one seconds, and among the most beautiful things any broadcast network has aired.

Season 1

The Haunting of Hill House

2018–2020NetflixHorror

The house drawn as an architectural plate, rooms opening into rooms, with figures standing in doorways you are not meant to notice on a first pass.

Season 1

Scream

2015–2016MTVHorror

The film franchise remade as a weekly series, with a new mask of its own.

Season 1

Teen Wolf

2011–2017MTVHorror

Transformation rendered as anatomy — claws, teeth and eyes, in a sequence rebuilt several times across six seasons.

Season 6

2000s

Supernatural

2005–2020The WB / The CWHorror

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

The Vampire Diaries

2009–2017The CWHorror

Forty-eight seconds of Mystic Falls in fog, with the cast cards rebuilt every season around a body count that never stopped rising.

Season 1

True Blood

2008–2014HBOHorror

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

Ghost Whisperer

2005–2010CBSHorror

Jennifer Love Hewitt talking to the dead in a small Maryland town.

Season 1

Paranoia Agent

2004WOWOWHorror

Satoshi Kon's only television series, opened by the entire cast laughing in front of disasters.

Season 1

Carnivàle

2003–2005HBOHorror

Tarot cards dissolving into Depression-era photographs and newsreel, so the reading and the history become the same footage. Another Emmy winner, and still one of the strangest things a network put in front of a drama.

Seasons 1–2

Being Human

2008–2013BBC ThreeHorror

A vampire, a werewolf and a ghost sharing a Bristol rental, introduced with the flatness of a house-share advert.

Season 1

Masters of Horror

2005–2007ShowtimeHorror

An anthology giving a different established horror director an hour each week.

Season 1

Fear Itself

2008NBCHorror

Masters of Horror moved to a broadcast network and cut to fit it, which is most of what went wrong.

Season 1

Dead Set

2008E4Horror

A zombie outbreak that the Big Brother house does not notice, written by Charlie Brooker before Black Mirror.

Season 1

Point Pleasant

2005FoxHorror

The devil's daughter washed up in a New Jersey beach town, from the Buffy writers' room.

Season 1

Apparitions

2008BBC OneHorror

A Catholic priest working as an exorcist in modern London, and one of the most complained-about dramas the BBC has run.

Season 1

Miracles

2003ABCHorror

A church investigator of the unexplained, cancelled after six of its thirteen episodes aired.

Season 1

Urban Gothic

2000–2001Channel 5Horror

A British horror anthology made for late night on a channel three years old, and nastier than anything the BBC would have run.

Season 1

1990s

Buffy the Vampire Slayer

1997–2003The WB / UPNHorror

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

Angel

1999–2004The WBHorror

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

Are You Afraid of the Dark?

1990–2000Nickelodeon / YTVHorror

A campfire, a handful of powder thrown into it, and a children's anthology that frightened a generation on a Saturday teatime.

Season 1

The League of Gentlemen

1999–2017BBC TwoHorror

Royston Vasey, a local shop, and a radio series that arrived on television already knowing exactly what it looked like.

Season 1

Charmed

1998–2006The WBHorror

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

Millennium

1996–1999FoxHorror

Chris Carter's other series, opened with the same Mark Snow unease as The X-Files and none of its wit — thirty-four seconds that promise a much worse world.

Season 1

Goosebumps

1995–1998Fox Kids / YTVHorror

A briefcase blowing open in a wind that follows a dog down a street — thirty seconds of genuine dread aimed at nine-year-olds.

Season 1

American Gothic (1995)

1995–1996CBSHorror

A South Carolina sheriff who is something worse than corrupt, created by Shaun Cassidy and produced by Sam Raimi.

Season 1

Forever Knight

1992–1996CBS / SyndicationHorror

A vampire working homicide nights in Toronto, introduced with narration explaining the arrangement every week.

Season 1

Poltergeist: The Legacy

1996–1999Showtime / Sci-Fi ChannelHorror

A secret society investigating the supernatural from a San Francisco island house.

Season 1

G vs E

1999–2000USA NetworkHorror

Two agents of the Corps recruiting the dead to fight people who have sold their souls, shot to look like a 1970s exploitation print.

Season 1

Brimstone

1998–1999FoxHorror

A damned detective sent back from hell to recapture a hundred and thirteen escaped souls, cancelled after thirteen episodes.

Season 1

Eerie, Indiana

1991–1993NBCHorror

A boy who works out that his new town is the centre of every strange thing in America.

Season 1

It (1990)

1990ABCHorror

Two nights on ABC, and the reason a generation of viewers will not stand near a storm drain.

Season 1

Kindred: The Embraced

1996FoxHorror

Vampire clans running San Francisco as organised crime, cancelled after eight episodes.

Season 1

The Shining (1997)

1997ABCHorror

King's own remake for television, made largely because he disliked what Kubrick had done with the book.

Season 1

1980s

Tales from the Crypt

1989–1996HBOHorror

A crawl through a derelict house towards a coffin, which opens — Danny Elfman's theme, and a host who was a puppet.

Season 1

Tales from the Darkside

1983–1988SyndicationHorror

George Romero's anthology, opened by pastoral countryside that turns to negative while a narrator explains why.

Season 1

Friday the 13th: The Series

1987–1990SyndicationHorror

An antiques shop recovering cursed objects, sharing nothing with the films but a title.

Season 1

Freddy's Nightmares

1988–1990SyndicationHorror

An anthology hosted by Freddy Krueger, made while the films were still coming out and stranger than any of them.

Season 1

Monsters

1988–1991SyndicationHorror

A half-hour anthology from the Tales from the Darkside producers, with a creature in every episode and a budget for none of them.

Season 1

The Hitchhiker

1983–1991HBOHorror

HBO's first original series: an anthology introduced by a man on a road who never explains himself.

Season 1

Hammer House of Horror

1980ITVHorror

Hammer's one television anthology, made after the films had stopped and shot on the same estate.

Season 1

Werewolf

1987–1988FoxHorror

One of the four series Fox launched its network with, and the first weekly werewolf on American television.

Season 1

Elvira's Movie Macabre

1981–1986SyndicationHorror

A horror host wrapped around public-domain films, and the character that outlasted every film she introduced.

Season 4

1970s

Kolchak: The Night Stalker

1974–1975ABCHorror

A reporter whistling in a car park, and a premise established in twenty-six seconds — the direct ancestor of The X-Files, as Chris Carter has said repeatedly.

Season 1

Tales of the Unexpected

1979–1988ITVHorror

A dancing silhouette, a spinning roulette wheel and Ron Grainer's theme — an anthology opening far more unsettling than most of the stories that follow it.

Season 1

Thriller (1973)

1973–1976ITVHorror

Brian Clemens' anthology of feature-length suspense plays, sold to America as a late-night staple.

Season 1

Circle of Fear

1972–1973NBCHorror

An anthology that began as Ghost Story with a host and a hotel, then dropped both and renamed itself halfway through.

Season 1

1960s

Night Gallery

1969–1973NBCHorror

Rod Serling walking through a gallery of paintings, each one introducing that week's story — a title sequence rebuilt around new artwork every episode.

Season 1

Dark Shadows

1966–1971ABCHorror

Waves against a cliff and a theremin-adjacent wail, broadcast live on weekday afternoons — a gothic soap that ran over twelve hundred episodes.

Season 1

1950s

One Step Beyond

1959–1961ABCHorror

An anthology that claimed every story was true, a year before The Twilight Zone said the opposite.

Season 1