The 13 Best Sci-Fi Horror Shows to Binge-Watch: From Classics to Hidden Gems

The sci-fi horror genre delivers an exciting mix of curious elements to get your imagination running and adrenaline rushing wild, but only if it’s done right. When poorly executed, you end up with forgettable sci-fi horror shows that you just can’t wait to switch the channel. The following series definitely belong in the first category and are definitely bingeworthy, highlighting the best sci-fi horrors shows out now.

Archive 81

The year is 2019, and archivist by the name of Dan Turner spends his days collecting audiotapes and videotapes from just about every street merchant he comes across. He treats every recording as a pleasant surprise and works to restore the tapes in the Museum’s office of the Moving Image. Archive 81 does very little to conceal the fact that there’s a connection between Dan’s obsession with recorded history and the tragic deaths of some family members many years before. The storytelling uses the split timeline format, where the narrative begins at the end and moves forward by going backward. It’s sometimes confusing but never incomprehensible.

Black Mirror

The first five seasons of Black Mirror are mostly about the dangers of modern technology – a theme already exploited to exhaustion by a lot of sci-fi horror films. Every episode always feels grim, and the ending holds no punches, even if it will probably make the audience viscerally ill. Only when the series gets to its sixth season do you come across some horrors, but the entire series is twisty, often prophetic, and genuinely clever. It’s sprinkled with moments of epiphany and powerful emotions, although you shouldn’t count on it to deliver peaceful closure.

From

If literal horror with an intense supernatural theme is your cup of tea, look no further than From. Set in a mysterious town where certain laws of physics simply don’t apply, you get a group of reluctant residents besieged by bloodthirsty monsters every single night. The town welcomes everybody, but no one can leave for some inexplicable reason. You can’t help but notice the general atmosphere of desperation as the resident hopes for a salvation and a future that may never come for them.

American Horror Story

Much like the vast majority of anthology series in existence, American Horror Story has had its share of both great and terrible seasons. However, it comes with a complete range of sci-fi horror tropes you certainly enjoy binge-watching, from ghosts and witches to war criminals and the apocalypse.

Penny Dreadful

Many sci-fi horror shows take the simple route and use gruesome imagery as a delivery system for terrors. Penny Dreadful is a different breed, for it makes the most of uneasy surrealism to build the horror. The series features known fictional figures like Dracula and Frankenstein in the story, but not only for the sake of recognizability. Penny Dreadful exploits those figures’ greatest strengths to showcase their true horrific traits and bring you legit nightmares.

Hannibal

At least until this moment, everybody agrees that Mads Mikkelsen is the best Hannibal Lecter on TV. His performance as the cannibal boogeyman probably marks the time when you involuntarily give up the image of Anthony Hopkins as the same character on the big screen. Mikkelsen’s Hannibal likes to invite his friends, colleagues, and acquaintances for dinner; he never served a vegetarian menu. In his own charmingly mysterious way, he reminds all his guests that they never have to worry about where the meat came from.

The Last of Us

When the PlayStation 3 game “The Last of Us” was released in 2013, players and critics alike couldn’t get over how brilliant the game looked. For the first time, they actually felt like they’re in control of an interactive, animated TV show. When the screen adaptation came to surface in 2023 as a live-action series, it was just as enjoyable as the source material. The zombie drama delivered a mesmerizing mixture of heart and horror, easily becoming one of the best rated sci-fi horror shows in the modern era.

The X-Files

Let’s just say Fox Mulder is an idealist who believes that every mysterious, unexplainable, and significant event on Earth has everything to do with the “shadow government” influenced by extraterrestrial entities. It’s a good thing that he went everywhere with the company of Dana Scully, a skeptic/scientist with the power of logic to keep Mulder’s conspiratorial side under control. Together, they’re investigating unlikely phenomenons kept in the “X-Files” cabinet.

Love, Death & Robots

An anthology series comprising animated shorts; each is only about 12 minutes in duration. If you have the time to binge-watch the series in one evening, be prepared to get hit by a burst of satisfyingly wicked and excessively graphic sci-fi horror bullets. The self-consciously NSFW “Love, Death & Robots” is everything but mainstream, geared towards an audience yearning for something completely different.

The Walking Dead

In case you’re a hardcore fan of zombies, The Walking Dead has more than enough episodes to quench your thirst for an entire week or two. The series begins with a small group of people looking for a safe place to stay away from the undead. The small group then grows larger and explores even bigger places in what seems like the end of the world. And before you know it, suddenly you’re watching a series about people rather than about zombies.

The Twilight Zone

Even before The X-Files even existed, there already was The Twilight Zone. Just by reading about the series or a discussion about an episode will give you the itch to watch (or rewatch) the entire 156 episodes of the original run. Every single premise still feels fresh, despite being shot in black & white, and all the twist endings never cease to give good fun.

Evil

This is where you get a glimpse of an exploration into the intertwining existence of humans in the physical world and supernatural forces all around them. Like the main characters in “Evil,” sometimes it’s difficult to pinpoint whether any strange experience results from an amplification of our own imagination or truly the works of evil.

Masters of Horror

Some of the most talented filmmakers work together to produce horror stories based on materials written by the best authors in the genre. Master of Horror is thankfully (also unfortunately) not an end-game sci-fi horror series. Many episodes end up as undisputed classics and near masterpieces, while others feel like run-of-the-mill narratives. It’s highly underrated and probably the hidden gem you’ve been looking for all these times.

We think that truly great sci-fi horror shows remain, unfortunately, rarities today. You would imagine that after decades of development, the modern interpretation of the genre could at least be as bingeworthy as The Twilight Zone and The X-Files. But it turns out that powerful CGI and state-of-the-art studios are not always synonymous with quality TV shows. That being said, not all hopes are lost; among an ocean of poorly executed scripts and outright bad writing, you still can enjoy quite an assortment of great sci-fi horror shows, both classic and modern, as listed above.

Do you have any other bingeworthy series to add to the list? What is the hallmark of a great sci-fi TV show? We’d love to hear from you.

Other Things You Might Want to Know

How many seasons are there in Masters of Horror?

There are only two seasons, aired from October 2005 to February 2007, on Showtime. The series has 26 episodes in total.

Will there be more seasons of American Horror Story?

Back in January 2020, FX renewed American Horror Stories to run the series until “at least” 13 seasons. If the new episodes go well, it’s not impossible that you will get even more seasons to follow.

Are “The Walking Dead” and “Fear the Walking Dead” based on the same source material?

The Walking Dead is based on a comic book series of the same name, whereas “Fear the Walking Dead” is a spin-off. The first several seasons of the latter actually serve as a prequel to the former.

Check out other articles by month: