60 Genuinely Scary TV Episodes

gThere's a long history of television shows playing dress up for Halloween. But it doesn't always have to be an October episode or a straight up horror show to make for properly scary TV. Somtimes that helps, to be sure, but it's not a hard and fast rule.

With that in mind, we rounded up a stack of stories from throughout TV history to assemble a list of the spookiest, weirdest, and yes, downright terrifying hours (and half-hours) to ever hit the airwaves, from The Twilight Zone and The Outer Limits to Supernaturaland American Horror Story. 

Check 'em out...

The Twilight Zone "After Hours"

Season 1, Episode 34 (Original Airdate: 6/10/1960)

Do you think mannequins are scary? No? Watch this Rod Serling masterpiece and you will. There is a bit of a farcical tone to this classic episode, but the way it takes the mundane and makes it unsettling is truly a remarkable thing to watch. As the main character Marsha slowly is convinced the mannequins in a department store have come to life, her sense of desperation is powerful as she slowly unhinges from reality. When she is locked in the store with the mannequins, things get terrifying quickly. Watch this episode and then hit Macy’s. - Marc

Thriller "Pigeons from Hell"

Season 1, Episode 36 (Original Airdate: 6/6/1961) 

How many Robert E. Howard stories were adapted to another media in the early '60s? Not as many as there should have been. Stephen King once called "Pigeons From Hell" one the of 20th Century’s greatest horror stories, and in 1961, Thrillerand Boris Karloff (yes, Boris Karloff) adapted the creator of Conan’s greatest horror story for television. The lack of music, the perfect usage of shadows and silence make this gem a must see for horrorphiles.

The episode’s greatest scare happens early in the episode when one of the brothers takes an ax to the skull but shockingly, still walks. "Pigeons from Hell" is not a swarm story like Frogsor Night of the Lepus, it’s a series of psychological horrors wrapped in a cinematic suspenseful masterpiece When they show the dead brother walking around, they only show his face, the rest of his ruined head hidden in shadows. The viewer’s imagination conjures worse images than any makeup artist could. Who knew that television horror came this potent in 1961? - Marc

The Twilight Zone "To Serve Man"

Season 3, Episode 24 (Original Airdate: 3/2/1962)

Rarely is a pun scary. But the hilarity of this Twilight Zone classic’s play on words is the horror of them. When aliens come to Earth to offer an end to the Cold War and all famine with miraculous M.A.P. (mutually assured protection) force fields and cure-all vaccines, we think our ship has come in. And it has since huge swaths of humanity go to the aliens’ home world for vacation after they pass a polygraph saying that their indecipherable book of aide is intended “to serve man.” Thus when the protagonist of the half hour gets on a spaceship to see what the fuss is all about, he was just a minute too late when his assistant cries from the rope line that they have finally translated the aliens’ book: “’To Serve Man:’It’s a cook book!” Alas, it’s too late for our hero as he is stuck on a spaceship with aliens telling him to eat his rations—all the better to fatten him up for his dinner date on another world. - David

Buy the Complete Twilight Zone Series on Amazon

The Twilight Zone "The Dummy"

Season 3, Episode 33 (Original Airdate: 5/4/1962) 

The Twilight Zone, while pretty sci-fi heavy, did have its huge share of monsters. The third season's thirty-third (!) episode featured one of the best monsters on the show: a dummy named Willie, who is actually alive and tormenting its human owner, Jerry. Of course no one believes Jerry when he claims the dummy is alive since he has a drinking problem. Jerry tried to replace Willie with another dummy named Goofy Goggles, but the evil dummy slowly manipulates Jerry into destroying Goofy and becoming HIS dummy. By the end of the episode, Willie has become the man and Jerry is the dummy. It's one of those terrifying episodes that you don't forget. The Twilight Zone definitely dished out many of them. - John

The Twilight Zone "Nightmare at 20,000 Feet" 

Season 5, Episode 3 (Original Airdate: 10/11/1963) 

Yes, It’s been done to death, it’s become part of the culture, it’s a gimme, it’s been parodied on The Simpsons, but it’s earned its reputation. For all the scripts Richard Matheson wrote for The Twilight Zone, few can top his story of a man (William Shatner at his sweatiest) who’s fear of flying can sometimes go a little haywire. Sure we’ve all seen it a dozen times, but if you go in cold, that first vague glimpse of the gremlin hopping around on the plane’s wing in the middle of a violent thunderstorm, illuminated by flashes of lightning is still so beautifully done and so shocking it’s easy to understand why it’s become the classic it has. - Jim

The Outer Limits "O.B.I.T." 

Season 1, Episode 7 (Original Airdate: 11/4/1963) 

What if there was a surveillance device that could, with just a few simple keystrokes, bring up live sound images of anyone, anywhere, at any time? What would happen to people if they knew at any particular random moment they might well be under close scrutiny by unseen forces? Well, this is put to the test here as just such a machine is installed in a remote research lab to keep tabs on those smart-alecky scientists. Let’s just say things don’t go real well.

God bless The Outer Limits for always opting to take the dark way out. Now, when this first aired in 1963, audiences found it a little unnerving and disturbing, maybe. But there were no aliens in this one, and the very idea of a machine like that is so ridiculous and outlandish that, well,  let’s see what Andy and Goober and Barney are up to. But given what’s happened to the world over the past 50 years, taking a look at our present circumstances, the episode suddenly seems prescient, and much more deeply frightening. - Jim

Buy The Outer Limits Complete Series on Amazon

The Twilight Zone "Masks"

Season 5, Episode 25 (Original Airdate: 3/20/1964)

The makeup alone makes this episode a must see. A dying millionaire puts a proviso in his will that his greedy relatives must wear hideous Mardi Gras masks until he dies. The masks the unpleasant relations are forced to wear are the opposite of their personalities. As the night progresses, the masks become unbearable, and when the millionaire dies, the shocked relatives…well, you can guess. This episode is perfect in its simplicity, a simple tale of beauty and death, as Serling reveals the true face of terror. - Marc

The Daisy Presidential Election TV Ad, 1964

Dark Shadows, "Episode 366" 

Season 1967 (Original Airdate: 11/20/1967)

Although I was certainly aware of Dan Curtis’ vampiric soap opera and knew the overall gist (my cousins even had the Barnabas Collins board game), I was not a religious viewer. To me it was no different from The Guiding Light except, y’know, for all the vampires and witches. But there was one episode deep in the series run that got me.

Barnabas is losing his powrs, see, and no longer has the control over the family he once did. So much so in fact that they’ve started plotting against him, one sister even going so far as to place a voodoo curse on him. So anyway, Barnabas is up in his study late one night, pacing and fretting. Behind him through the tall windows we see a strange shadow swinging back and forth. Cut to outside the window, where we see something hulking, still in silhouette, swinging on a heavy chain. Cut back to the study where Barnabas continues weighing his options. Then all of a sudden a damned GORILLA smashes through the window and starts throttling him. I sure wasn’t expecting that! - Jim

Night Gallery (1969-1973): The title sequence. 

I always really, really wanted to like Night Gallery, given how hooked I’d been on The Twilight Zone and Outer Limits. To be honest, though, most of the stories seemed a little flabby and floppy and not terribly scary. Maybe it was the switchover to color. Maybe it was the fact that Rod Serling didn’t really have anything to do with the show, they just slapped his name at the front and let him host. Who knows?

But what did scare me, and what kept me coming back every week to be scared (if only for two minutes or so) was the opening sequence. All those distorted, misshapen faces emerging from the blackness one after the other, each sliding offscreen before being replaced by another, just as horrifying. Yes, the shows themselves always thwarted the build-up the opening sequence promised, that’s okay. It kept me coming back for more like a garish sideshow banner, and eventually I even learned to stop watching after the credits sequence ended. - Jim

Buy Night Gallery Season 1 on Amazon

Night Gallery: “The House”

Season 1, Episode 3 (Original Airdate: 12/30/1970)

A young woman has a recurring dream that she is driving to an unknown house. After she successfully goes through dream therapy, she thinks the dream is behind her, until she stumbles onto the house in the waking world, and the ghost inside. Like all Rod Serling stories, the end twist is amazing, but it is the simplicity of repeating a progression of events that makes this story so chilling. By changing one element of a repeated scene, this episode takes the simple premise of arriving at a house and makes it horrific. - Marc

Night Gallery: “Different Ones”

Season 2, Episode 14 (Original Airdate: 12/29/1971)

"The Different Ones" featured a hideously deformed young man is exiled to an alien leper colony. The makeup effects of this episode will be burned into your brain as the young man struggles to find his place amongst his own kind. This is cerebral horror at its finest as Serling and company explore the horror of rejection. - Marc

Kolchak: The Night Stalker "Chopper"

Season 1, Episode 15 (Original Airdate: 1/31/1975) 

When those who watched it at the time think back to Kolchak: The Night Stalker, they rarely focus on the one with Cathy Lee Crosby as a youth-sucking demon or the one with the evil Indian spirit haunting a hospital. but everyone rememnber’s chopper. As per usual when the aging members of a ‘50s biker gang start dying one by one, all neatly decapitated, the cops put it down as nothing but a routine biker turf war or some such. Our intrepid investigative reporter with a straw boater and a nose for monsters only gets involved when one terrified witness claims the killer is himself a headless biker with a samurai sword. Yes there’s more than a little Legend of Sleepy Hollow at play in the script, and the makeup effects might seem a little slapdash and shoddy by modern standards, but still the reveal of that leather-jacketed headless biker speeding around the corner with sword raised is still a doozy. - Jim

Fun Fact: The episode was written by Back to the Futureteam of Robert Zemeckis and Bob Gale!

[related article: Looking Back at Kolchak The Night Stalker]

Trilogy of Terror "Amelia"

(Original Airdate: 3/4/1975)

The Trilogy of Terror featured three horror tales each starring the great Karen Black. The tales were penned by William F. Nolan and the legendary Richard Matheson and they are all worthy of horror praise. But it was Amelia that stands out amongst the glorious yarns featuring Ms. Black. In this brilliant piece of short fiction, Black plays a woman who uses a Zuni fetish doll to wreck vengeance upon her enemies. Just watch this little murderous doll in action, you’ll be checking under your bed for a month. The doll was creepy as hell and Black’s performance made this sick little bit of wonderful one of the '70s bright points when it comes to dark fiction. - Marc

[related article: Looking Back at Trilogy of Terror]

Barney Miller: “Werewolf”

Season 3, Episode 6 (Original Airdate: October 28, 1976)

The detectives at New York City’s downtown 12th Precinct were probably the closest thing TV has ever seen to a real cop’s day to day reality and the series wasn’t known for frightening flights of fantasy. But on this very rare tip of the cap to Halloween, the veils are lifted for just one moment. Kenneth Tigar, as the damned but not dumb Stefan Koepeknie, does it all with his face and his attitude. The show was shot like a play and there are no special effects, but when Koepeknie tells the officers that he made a mistake, he has to get out and go to bed so he’s up bright and early for wrrrrrrrrrrrrrrk, Tigar is both truly frightening and wholly hilarious. He hits on both marks and it is amazing.

Watching Jack Soo, as Det. Sgt. Nick Yemana, and Ron Glass as Det. Ron Harris, react to the wolfman's itching and scratching is equally spine-tingling and yet brilliantly funny. It goes to show how close the beats of horror and comedy could be. - Tony

M*A*S*H: "Dreams"

Season 8, Episode 22 (Original Air Date: 2/18/1980) 

When one thinks of MASH, one does not necessarily think of pure horror. Yes, the classic series dealt honestly with the horrors of war, but it did so with an undercurrent of humor and humanism. Not so in “Dreams.” When the members of the 4077 are deprived of sleep because of an onslaught of incoming wounded, their brief naps are filled with surrealistic horrors that will chill the souls even the most jaded freight fan. The episode stands as a contrast to the rest of the series and some of the images will haunt a viewer long after the credits roll. When I first saw this episode, I was seven years old, I have not been able to watch it since. - Marc

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