What To Watch
16 Suspenseful Thriller Shows Perfect For Halloween
These scary series offer multiepisode frights for those with nerves of steel.
By Ananda Dillon
Oct. 23, 2025
Best Suspenseful Thriller Shows - Netflix Tudum
Scary movies are fun, full of fast-paced horrors and heart-pounding action, but those who appreciate suspenseful multiepisode series are the truly brave ones. After all, extending the anxiety of a mystery, questioning every character, and facing the jump scares and sustained ambiguity over many hours takes a reservoir of courage. It requires fortitude to watch one thrilling episode and then, with your heart still in your throat, press “Next.”
Halloween may be one day of the year, but it’s also a season — a state of mind, even. Which means that celebrating Halloween for weeks on end is perfectly acceptable, and what better way to keep the eerie ambiance alive than by watching a twisty series that draws out the scares? But you don’t have to wait for Halloween season; anytime’s a good one to indulge in these nail-biting, suspenseful thriller shows.
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Archive 81
Found footage, cursed buildings, secret societies, and even Lovecraftian horror converge in this creepy dual-timeline series. Dan Turner (Mamoudou Athie) is a videotape restorer hired to repair some badly damaged VHS tapes. Stuck in a compound in the Catskills and cut off from the rest of the world, he gets lost in the footage he’s salvaging of a young woman, Melody Pendras (Dina Shihabi), documenting her doctoral research in 1994. Melody interviews the residents of the Visser in New York City for an oral history of the apartment building, which was built on the ashes of a mansion that burnt down in the ’20s. In his research, Dan learns that Melody is among those who disappeared from the Visser in the same fire that damaged the tapes. But the more he watches, the more strange things start to occur, and he discovers he has a personal connection to Melody tied to his own traumatic childhood.
Chambers
The relentless surprises in this goose-bumps-inducing series make it entirely unpredictable. Sasha (Sivan Alyra Rose) is a 17-year-old girl who unexpectedly has a heart attack and is fortunate to receive the heart of a local girl her age who died. The parents (Uma Thurman and Tony Goldwyn) of the donor, Becky (Lilliya Scarlett Reid), reach out to Sasha, eager to have a relationship with the person who has their daughter’s heart. They offer her a scholarship to a better school, a car to use, and invite her into their lives. But the longer she has Becky’s heart, the more Sasha experiences inexplicable visions and behaviors that connect her to Becky, and at the center of it all is the possibility that Becky didn’t die the way everyone believes.
Dark
There’s no easy way to sum up the time-traveling plot twists that drive this German series — you may even need to take notes to keep the clues straight. In 2019, four families in a small German town are interconnected through their pasts and secrets, many of which come to light when one of the children, Mikkel Nielsen (Daan Lennard Liebrenz), disappears in a cave near the local nuclear power plant. The same day, the body of a different boy around Mikkel’s age suddenly appears. The mystery stirs the child’s father, a police officer, to find answers to what seem to be connected cases. The families of the other youths who were at the cave that day, including Jonas (Louis Hofmann), a teenager whose father recently committed suicide, start down paths that lead them to a far larger mystery — one that connects them to 1986 and 1953.
Devil in Ohio
Hospital psychiatrist Dr. Suzanne Mathis (Emily Deschanel) thinks she’s doing the right thing by taking in Mae (Madeleine Arthur), a young woman found on the road in their rural Ohio town. While helping Mae acclimate as they wait for a foster home to open up, Suzanne learns that Mae escaped from a cult in the county next to theirs. More distressing, Mae starts to exhibit odd behaviors, indicative of her upbringing in that cult, as well as the revelation that the cult isn’t just going to let Mae get away from them.
Echoes
Michelle Monaghan is Leni and Gina McCleary, twin sisters with a huge secret: They swap lives every year on their birthday, switching homes, husbands, and even trading off raising Leni’s daughter, Mattie (Gable Swanlund). During a year when Leni is living Gina’s life in Los Angeles, she gets a call from her husband, Jack (Matt Bomer), who tells her that Leni — really Gina — has gone missing. Leni rushes home to find her sister before all their secrets unravel, but she doesn’t know Gina has been keeping a few secrets of her own.
Guillermo del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities
The tension in this anthology series arises from the anticipation of a new story in every episode. Master of horror and suspense Guillermo del Toro (Frankenstein) produces and introduces each chilling chronicle. In one, Nick (Tim Blake Nelson) purchases the rights to a dead man’s storage locker and finds far more than he expected hidden in its depths. In another, a grave robber (David Hewlett) in pre-WWII Massachusetts faces formidable rodents. And then there’s the one with a young artist (Ben Barnes of Shadow and Bone) who meets Richard Pickman (Crispin Glover) in art school and remains haunted years later by his disturbing paintings. At least one of the eight episodes is sure to get your heart racing.
Marianne
Scary books are only scary until you close them, right? Author Emma Larsimon (Victoire Du Bois) thought she’d closed the book on the characters she’d written about for more than a decade in her hit horror series about a heroine named Lizzie Larck and her supernatural foe, Marianne. Emma longs to put horror behind her and write something new, but when an old friend from her hometown visits and claims her mother is possessed by Marianne, Emma must return to the place where she first dreamed up the evil character. Is it possible that the nightmares Emma puts on paper could manifest in the real world?
Midnight Mass
It would be easy to point to any of Mike Flanagan’s suspenseful and spooky series on Netflix as great watches for Halloween, but Midnight Mass has a traditional gothic horror feel perfect for the season. Riley Flynn (Zach Gilford) returns to the isolated island where he grew up after serving four years in prison for a drunk driving incident in which a woman died. At the same time, a new priest, Father Paul (Hamish Linklater), arrives to serve the devout Catholic community in the absence of their monsignor, who is on pilgrimage. After the priest’s arrival, strange things occur, including miraculous feats that reinvigorate the island's religious fervor. But there’s more to Father Paul than the islanders know, and his blessings may actually be a curse.
Monster: The Ed Gein Story
He inspired three of the most recognizable horror movie villains of modern cinema. Ed Gein, the Butcher of Plainfield, gets the Monster anthology treatment from Ryan Murphy and Ian Brennan in this series about the 1950s grave robber, serial killer, and body-parts crafter. Charlie Hunnam plays Gein, whose abusive and overly religious mother drives him to the depraved acts he commits as he attempts to honor her after her death. The full scope of his sordid legacy is laid out, showcasing the many ways Gein’s story bled into pop culture and possibly inspired other serial murderers.
Red Rose
This 2022 British horror series will make you want to limit the teens in your life’s exposure to cellphones — but not because of social media. Rochelle “Roch” Mason (Isis Hainsworth) is the outspoken leader among her friends at school. But when the summer starts and her friends get jobs (and possibly new boyfriends), she becomes lonely and acutely aware of her status as the lower-class child of a single parent. Then she receives an invite to download an app, and she decides to try it. Red Rose seems like a sort of AI friend at first, but soon it’s controlling aspects of Roch’s life and threatening her to get her to do things she doesn’t want to. And it’s not just her — all her friends are in danger from this strangely omniscient app.
The Haunting of Hill House
A classic haunted-house story, this series, loosely based on Shirley Jackson's novel, is the first of Mike Flanagan’s horror series on Netflix. In the early ’90s, Hugh and Olivia Crain (Henry Thomas and Carla Gugino) move their family of seven into Hill House, a dilapidated mansion they plan to restore and then sell. It isn’t long before they start experiencing increasingly threatening paranormal phenomena. It all culminates on one horrible night, and they flee the house. Twenty-six years later, the remaining family members are brought together over another tragedy, and each has to face the truth of what happened back then.
The Society
Teen drama meets the existential dread and baffling mystery of a series like Lost in this head-scratching drama. A bus full of students leaves West Ham, Connecticut, for a field trip and is forced to return early due to inclement weather and bad road conditions. When they arrive back in their small town, it’s abandoned, and a strange smell lingers. The students assume there must be an explanation, but when they realize they’re cut off from the world without phone or internet service and without a single clear road out of town, they realize something much stranger is happening. The teens must band together to survive while they figure out what happened to their families.
The Walking Dead
This iconic series, with 11 seasons and six spin-offs, revolutionized what suspenseful TV could be. Based on the comic book series by Robert Kirkman, the show follows Deputy Sheriff Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln), who awakes from a coma in a hospital to a zombie apocalypse that has ravaged the world. He sets out to find his wife and son, traveling through Georgia and encountering the titular slow movers around every corner. Yes, the zombies are terrifying, popping up when you least expect them. But the storylines involving evil people taking advantage of the apocalypse are the most disturbing parts of the show.
The Watcher
Loosely based on the true story of a family who were harassed out of their dream home in New Jersey by a stalker, this dramatization takes the mystery to an even stranger level. Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale are Nora and Dean Brannock, who find the perfect house and spend every cent of their savings to buy it. Almost immediately, they start receiving threatening letters from an ominous stalker who calls himself “The Watcher.” The Brannocks do all they can to find out who’s sending the letters, but the police offer little help. Soon, they’re leading paranoid lives, trusting no one — including each other.
Wayward
The suspense in this Canadian mystery thriller created by Mae Martin (Feel Good) comes from the odd goings-on in Tall Pines, Vermont, and the enigmatic Tall Pines Academy at the center of the strangeness. Martin plays Alex Dempsey, a young police officer who moves to the small town with his pregnant wife, Laura (Sarah Gadon), and is almost immediately suspicious of the academy and its eerie and often downright creepy leader, Evelyn Wade (Toni Collette). Two Canadian girls land at the Academy against their will and immediately endeavor to escape from the school’s cult like programming and harsh practices. As Alex investigates the town's mysteries, the two teens do their best to survive the Academy, and they all discover that Evelyn’s reach is extensive.
Yellowjackets
A plane carrying a girls’ soccer team from New Jersey crashes in the forests of Canada in the late ’90s. In the present day, a few of those girls, now grown and living very different lives from one another, unite over the death of one of their own and begin to feel the strain of keeping so many secrets all these years. As seen in the 1996 storyline, the Yellowjackets’ teammates survived as best they could, resorting to extreme measures and some strange rituals to get by. But not all of them made it, and those that did are deeply scarred.
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