Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen did something most horror shows have trouble doing: Keep you afraid without exactly telling you what you should be afraid of. From the moment Rachel Harkin first steps into the Cunningham family cabin, days before her wedding, she feels wrong. Not jump-scare wrong, but way-down-in-your-chest wrong, the kind of wrong that takes up permanent residency, the kind of wrong you feel growing under your skin.
The show, created by Haley Z. Boston and executive produced by the Duffer Brothers, relies on paranoia and atmosphere rather than monsters or blood. By the time you reach the finale, you have been completely, slowly unraveled.
That’s the brilliance of a psychological horror: it shrouds you with the ordinary to unsettle you. A family meal. A wedding. A cabin in the woods. An overfriendly mother. The finest shows in this field take mundane locations and gradually place poison in them until you can no longer feel safe anywhere.
If you have just finished Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen and can’t work out where to turn to for more, here are five shows that scratch the same itch slowly, oppressively, and inescapably.
5 shows like Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen
The Haunting of Hill House
If Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen made you afraid of meeting your in-laws, The Haunting of Hill House will make you worry about your own kin. Based and helmed by Mike Flanagan, the show is about five grown-up siblings, the Crains, who must come together when something terrible happens to one of them. But the problem is, they were raised in possibly the most haunted mansion in the whole country, and none of them ever really left it.
The show constantly switches back and forth between the present and the past, slowly unveiling what happened to the family while at Hill House, and what toll it took on them as adults. One sibling is a horror novelist who can never admit any horror is real. One is a funeral home director. One is a recovering addict. It wasn’t simply the fear that haunted them at the house; it was the devastation. It ruined them all in different, personal ways. And that’s why the show works so well.
The ghosts in the house are merely an aspect of the horror; the genuine horror is grief and loss, and how those you love most can wreck you without even trying to.
Much like Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, The Haunting of Hill House takes its time. It develops. It earns its every scare through character. By the time the horror of the sixth episode rolls around, a 75-minute single-story chapter that opens with the titular house itself and doesn’t pause for a minute, you are so invested in these characters that the horror is heartbreaking. This show proved that psychological horror and emotional resonance don’t just coexist. They make each other better.
Servant
Servant is the type of show you tell to someone, and watch the magic drain from their eyes. An American couple living in Philadelphia has suffered the loss of a child. To help come to terms with this, the wife, Dorothy, played by Lauren Ambrose, asks a priest about grief therapy and gets an answer in the form of a realistic reborn doll. They hire a young nanny named Leanne to care for it. Then very, very bad things start to happen.
Servant, by M. Night Shyamalan, has one of the best qualities of Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen: it makes you sense that something is wrong before you can really start to articulate what. There’s not much variety in the setting. The whole story takes place largely in the Turners’ townhouse, and that sense of single-location suffocation hangs over the production from the time you turn it on.
There are sharp looks, heavy silences, and meals that shouldn’t be quite so grotesque. The horror here comes from grief itself, the charade of people doing things more and more bizarre to shield themselves against a pain they won’t face.
Stephen King has described it as “extremely creepy and totally involving.” Guillermo del Toro said it was precision-tooled, almost surgically executed. What they both were reacting to is something Servant does wonderfully throughout all four seasons. It preserves its enigma in such a way that at no point will you be sure if what you are watching is real or illusion, or something even more ancient and threatening.
If you like your horror to arrive in coffee-time episodes, and leave you sitting in a darkened room questioning what it was you just saw, then this is the show for you.
Hannibal
What most will believe is that they have seen this story before. They haven’t. Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal is not the same as the one you have seen. Mads Mikkelsen plays the role not as the over-the-top manipulative villain, but as something far more frightening, an elegant predator moving calmly, taking in those around him without a word and enjoying them without a glimmer of suspicion.
The series centers on what happens in the beginning between Lecter and FBI criminal profiler Will Graham, played by Hugh Dancy. Will has a rare and terrible gift: He can empathize with killers completely, mentally recreating their crimes. Lecter, who is secretly one of the most dangerous killers in America, becomes his psychiatrist. And it is one of the most psychologically acute horror stories ever televised.
What Hannibal has in common with Something Very Bad Is Going To Happen is a similar obsession with one kind of bottom-of-the-barrel nightmare: that your loved ones may be the scariest in the room. Rachel was never convinced of the Cunninghams’ sincerity. Will Graham was never aware of what Lecter was really doing to him until it was almost too late. Both shows have their characters caught in a space of some truly gruesome web of falsehood, and they keep closing it in. Hannibal does this with one of the most stunning displays of film noir in a horror setting.
Midnight Mass
Midnight Mass is a slow start. It follows Riley Flynn, an outcast young man who has just been released from prison after serving five years for vehicular homicide. At the same time as his homecoming, a young priest unfamiliar with the island community appears. Then strange, small miracles start to happen that have the devout members of the community convinced something holy is going on.
However, it is not holy.
Created by Mike Flanagan, who, it turns out, can’t stop making shows that keep pulling at you for weeks on end. Midnight Mass is an extremely methodical horror, an exploration of faith, guilt, addiction, and how far some will go when they are convinced God is behind them. The series allows itself time: the opening episodes focus almost entirely on events on Crockett Island, on what the people there believe in and feel guilty about. Once the horror hits, it hits hard.
Similar to Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen, the show creates a similar sense of foreboding by using a closed community and a growing feeling of wrongness to generate its dread. The cabin that the Cunninghams stay in and Crockett Island both function essentially as pressure cookers. And both shows are ultimately about characters who realize something is very wrong and are dismissed, gaslit, or not believed until it’s getting dangerously close to too late.
Archive 81
Archive 81 was cancelled way too early, and horror fans are still reeling. The eight-episode Netflix adaptation centers around Dan Turner, an archivist brought on to restore a collection of severely damaged video cassette recordings from an apartment fire in 1994. The tapes belonged to a graduate student, Melody Pendras, who was studying the building’s residents before the fire. As Dan views the cassettes, the line between the past and the present begins to blur. What might have seemed a simple restoration job turns out to be something utterly, cosmos-terrifying.
Much of the show can be thought of as some combination of found footage, cult horror, and dimension-hopping nightmare, and it works. It moves a bit like Something Very Bad Is Going to Happen: gradually at first, providing you with enough strangeness to keep you watching, until one morning you wake up and find yourself somewhere truly horrible. And both shows also invest in the characters. Dan and Melody are not plot devices, and you become invested in them, which makes the horror that surrounds them hit even harder.
Archive 81 is another series where you need to be fully engaged. The details are important. The tapes are important. The building is important. If you are someone who revels in the backstory of the Cunningham family, replete with conspiracies, magic, spells, and taboos, you will find Archive 81 working in the same register. It weaves its own mythology from the ground up, frame by frame, until you are fully immersed. The show ending on a cliffhanger and without a season two is heart-wrenching. But the one season that exists is exceptional.
Edited by Sahiba Tahleel