The Walking Dead
Rust, decay and abandoned objects, cut to a string figure that never resolves — a sequence about entropy rather than the dead.
The Walking Dead opens with a main title sequence of 35 seconds.
At 35 seconds, it opens well under the 50-second median for horror sequences in this catalogue.
It arrived on AMC in 2010, when Mad Men, Breaking Bad and Rubicon were also on the network.
The opening titles
Season 1
35sThe first season's version.
More horror opening titles from the 2010s
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
1 sequence
The 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 sequenceThe Strain
Guillermo del Toro's vampire plague, opened by a sequence of things going wrong at cellular scale.
- 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 sequenceFear the Walking Dead
Seventeen seconds and a card — the spinoff declining the parent show's decaying montage entirely.
- Seasons 1–3