Poltergeist: The Legacy
1996–1999ShowtimeSci-Fi ChannelHorror
A secret society investigating the supernatural from a San Francisco island house.
Poltergeist: The Legacy opens with a main title sequence of 67 seconds.
At 67 seconds, it opens well above the 50-second median for horror sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on Showtime in 1996, when Mystery Science Theater 3000, Twin Peaks and The Outer Limits (1995) were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
67sA live upload of the intro, found after the one recorded here went dead.
More horror opening titles from the 1990s
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.
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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.
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1 sequenceAre You Afraid of the Dark?
A campfire, a handful of powder thrown into it, and a children's anthology that frightened a generation on a Saturday teatime.
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1 sequenceThe League of Gentlemen
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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
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- and 5 more
1 sequenceMillennium
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