Copyright Screen Rant
While plenty of thriller shows are unsettling and strange, only truly weird thrillers like Twin Peaks can claim to be as scary as any horror show. With Halloween fast approaching, there has never been a better time to check in on the darker side of genre TV. Fortunately, streaming services are packed with both classic and new horror shows. However, despite all of Netflix’s underrated horror offerings, sometimes, a downright scary series doesn’t quite hit the spot. Supernatural horror shows can be great, and many viewers are more than happy to spend Halloween in the company of vampires, ghosts, and zombies once they remain on the right side of the TV screen. For those who want something a little more grounded but just as unsettling, there is always the unsettling thriller. Those shows that come close to straight-up supernatural shenanigans, but still keep one foot in the world of observable reality. Some of the shows listed here feature paranormal elements while others don’t, but all of them are thrillers first and foremost. 10 Wayward The most recent hit on this list, Netflix’s 2025 series Wayward is the weirdest thriller of the year so far. Mae Martin’s show stars Martin as Alex, a cop who recently moved to the town of Tall Pines with his wife. Set in 2003, Wayward follows Alex’s attempts to settle down in Tall Pines while investigating a mysterious behavioral correction center. If you guessed that something spooky was going on in this behavioral correction center, you’d be right, but the exact contours of this spookiness are utterly impossible for viewers to predict. In fact, many fans of the show might not even be able to tell you what’s going on after watching Wayward’s trippy, ambiguous ending, which proves how surreal things get. 9 Yellowjackets Drawing some very loose inspiration from the real-life Miracle of the Andes, Yellowjackets is a Showtime series that follows a group of teenage soccer players after their plane crashes in the wilderness, and they are forced to eke out a harsh existence far from civilization. At least, that is one of the show’s two intersecting storylines. Yellowjackets also jumps ahead in time to check in on the crash’s survivors a quarter of a century later, when each of their lives has been defined by their shared trauma in very different ways. While Yellowjackets season 3 might finally provide some answers, the chilling ambiguity of the show’s early seasons is a big part of what makes this such an effective thriller. 8 Swarm Although Atlanta might be Donald Glover’s most famous small-screen offering, the musician and actor’s 2023 thriller Swarm deserves almost as much praise as that iconic series. Co-created by Janine Nabers, Swarm focuses on Dominique Fishback’s Dre, an obsessive fan whose fascination with a pop star loosens her grip on reality as the show progresses. It is never entirely clear what is real and what is imagined in this chilling miniseries, but what is clear is that Swarm’s incisive, biting satire of stan culture hits hard. Dre’s story is a tragic cautionary tale, but viewers get no easy answers when the show reaches its surreal, trippy meta-conclusion. 7 The Following While Swarm takes on toxic stan culture, The Following focuses on a far worse type of cult. This serial killer thriller sees Kevin Bacon’s hardened antihero hunt down James Purefoy’s twisted, smug killer, but there’s a twist. The killer has an entire cult at his beck and call, and the show’s lead has no idea who is in on the antagonist’s plans. Written by Scream scribe Kevin Williamson, The Following takes Williamson’s abandoned pitch for Scream 3 and twists it into a standalone story of obsession, delusion, and devotion. Like a retelling of Se7en for the Internet age, The Following brings online paranoia into the serial killer thriller, and the result is a uniquely weird, unsettling watch. 6 Sharp Objects Adapted from Gone Girl author Gillian Flynn’s debut novel of the same name, 2018’s dark miniseries Sharp Objects is significantly slower, stranger, and creepier than its source material. This is no insult to Flynn’s original mystery, a propulsive book that grips the reader from page one. However, by taking a hypnotic approach, Sharp Objects makes the novel's story much stranger. The unsettling tale of an alcoholic journalist returning to her hometown to investigate a string of killings, Sharp Objects blurs together the past and the present, as well as blending nightmares and delusions with reality and flashbacks. The result is an ominous slice of Southern Gothic where nothing is as it seems until the bombshell finale. 5 Dexter Since Dexter’s recent spinoffs made the show’s titular serial killer less mysterious than ever, it can be hard to remember just how menacing the original show was when it first arrived on screen. Everything from Dexter’s persistent Dark Passenger to his twisted relationship with his sister made the series unsettling and uncomfortable, despite its campier flourishes. The unease was only amped up by the show’s infamously creepy villains, from Dexter’s iconic Trinity Killer to the murderer’s odious first victim from the series. All told, although its edge has been dulled by endless imitation in the years since the show debuted, Dexter remains a uniquely dark and grisly piece of TV thriller history. 4 True Detective True Detective’s later seasons never quite recaptured the unique appeal of its first outing, a show that managed to remain entirely plausible as a police procedural while untold Lovecraftian horrors lurked just beneath its surface. On the face of it, True Detective was a sharp, pacy thriller about two mismatched cops returning to a cold case after decades. However, the show’s time-twisting storytelling and its vague, ambiguous nods to Carcosa and the King in Yellow hinted at a dark, eldritch underworld that viewers barely even peeked at throughout its run. True Detective’s ending provided a satisfying conclusion to the central mystery, but left viewers in no doubt that the story was far from over. 3 Hannibal Since The Silence of the Lambs is one of the most acclaimed psychological thrillers ever made, it is no surprise that viewers were tentative when its TV prequel, Hannibal, was announced. It was tough to see how any show could live up to the movie, let alone surpass it. However, Hannibal achieved exactly that with a tour de force three-season run that proved as terrifying as it was thrilling. The complex game of cat and mouse between Hugh Dancy’s Will Graham and Mads Mikkelsen’s disarmingly charming Hannibal Lecter was always unpredictable, deeply unsettling, and, despite the show’s status as a spinoff, utterly original. 2 The Outsider Since Stephen King’s The Outsider is a rare 10/10 thriller novel, it should come as no surprise that its TV adaptation proved so effective upon its 2020 release. However, the book’s balance of vague supernatural threats and concrete police investigation was a hard one to capture onscreen. Without giving away too much, the central threat of The Outsider could easily have become unintentionally laughable when realized onscreen. Instead, this HBO miniseries is arguably even creepier than its source material thanks to some subtle storytelling choices. 1 Twin Peaks
