Spooky season is all well and good. Seeing the kids dressed up is a hoot, we all love watching that building that used to be a Staples get turned into a Spirit Halloween for six weeks before transforming back into an empty room where raccoons make love for the rest of the year, and there’s nothing wrong with enjoying a good horror series, especially with so many new ones arriving each fall.
But we’re getting older, and time is a commodity we can’t afford to waste watching some wide-eyed college student with a flashlight tiptoe through a murder dungeon at a snail’s pace like she’s getting paid by the hour. We need our spookiness fast and effective. Here’s a spread of drive-thru options for the discerning horror fan on the go.
Dracula
Three episodes. That’s the whole thing. It takes three episodes to tell the reimagined version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula in the Netflix/BBC adaptation written by Steven Moffat and Mark Gatiss. Like the duo’s Sherlock series, the episodes are all feature length, but they got down smooth, provided you’re a weirdo.
2020’s Dracula goes big right out of the gate, half clinging to the source material in a way that you don’t see all that often, while ditching the neverending descriptions of how paprika tastes pretty good in favor of richer characters and classic Moffat/Gatiss “I’m-smarter-than-you” monologues from the Count. The makeup is horrific, like it should be, and the series beats Last Voyage of the Demeter to the punch by a couple of years, turning the sea voyage into its own bottle episode with outstanding results.
Chucky
You know, people give a lot of guff to late-stage capitalism for the way that it’s going to kill us all, but it does some good things, too. If it weren’t for interstudio anatomically-correct-doll-measuring contest over the rights to the Child’s Play franchise, we might never have gotten Chucky, the USA/Syfy revival of Charles Lee Ray’s family of collectible toy slaughter enthusiasts.
Chucky really shines when it abandons the borderline-SEO narratives about a Stranger Things-adjacent group of friends and their Euphoria-adjacent problems. Once you get down to the Jennifer Tilley and doll disfigurement of it all, the three-season series is camp excellence.
Hannibal
If you haven’t watched Hannibal by now, maybe it isn’t for you. It’s a bold series, highly stylized with the sort of troublingly precise artistic ultraviolence that usually sees you getting kicked out of a paint-’n’-sip night, not running your own network TV show.
10 years after it premiered, this adaptation of the work of Thomas Harris remains unique. It’s like if someone poured body chocolate on CSI. The set dressing, cinematography, soundtrack, and prop work put into every dinner scene will delight the foodie in you, then make the foodie in you shake its head, wonder what’s wrong with it, and drink wine and stare at itself in the mirror for a minute, unsure how to feel, before starting another episode of Hannibal.
Ash vs Evil Dead
It’s a well-established truism in the world of design that a thing is not perfect when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. The setup for Ash vs Evil Dead is so simple, so elegant, so head-bangingly stupid, it may just be the ideal to which all other horror television must aspire. The show features all the Bruce Campbell you could reasonably ask for, a supporting cast of fantastic characters, a perfectly balanced ecosystem of story and gorey, and a soundtrack that’ll have you space truckin’ through the gates of Hell.
Three seasons, 10 episodes per season, 30 minutes per episode. All told, you’re looking at 15 hours to watch the whole thing ⏤ less if you bounce around the time that the network canned the original showrunner in season two and everything got a little less “colon monster attack”-y.
Don’t Watch This
There are, in total, 25 minutes of Don’t Watch This in existence. The 2018 Netflix horror anthology released five experimental episodes, averaging five minutes apiece, to uniformly terrible reviews. It was a different time, back when platforms were racing to get to the top of the dogpile of short-form content in the hopes of securing the cash cow that’s made Quibi the success story it is today.
You could watch the whole series in less time than it takes to finish one episode of any other show on this list. Or, as a bonus option for the viewer on a severe time crunch, you could spend even less time if you do like it says on the tin and Don’t Watch This.