If you find yourself reaching the end of your watch of Mike Flanagan’s new Carrie series on Prime Video, you may find yourself in need of something to continue to scratch that itch for great horror television. After all, there are still several days left to go in October before Halloween rolls around, which means this is not time to slow down on the spooky season material.
Here are six horror shows to watch if you loved Prime Video’s Carrie.
The Haunting of Hill House
For starters, if you loved Mike Flanagan’s take on Stephen King’s iconic novel, consider returning to where it all began for the creator as a TV showrunner, with his take on Shirley Jackson’s iconic novel, The Haunting of Hill House. Released in 2018 on Netflix, this series was a massive hit and put Flanagan on the path to success that he has been on ever since.
Like Carrie, Haunting of Hill House is more than willing to take substantial creative liberties with the source material in expanding it. In fact, Hill House goes far further than Carrie, turning the fairly contained tale of a haunted house from Jackson’s novel into a (funnily enough) Stephen King-esque tale of multigenerational trauma and terror. Whether you’ve never watched a moment of it or have seen the season several times over, October is the perfect time to queue this Flanagan classic back up.
Crystal Lake
The other recently released prestige streaming series that is working off a classic horror inspiration, much like Flanagan’s Carrie, is the Peacock and A24 Friday the 13th prequel series, Crystal Lake. Whereas Carrie was a retelling of the same story as King’s 1974 novel or Brian De Palma’s 1976 film, Crystal Lake aims to be a prequel to the original 1980 Friday the 13th film, rather than a retelling of the story.
It primarily focuses on the ever-wonderful Linda Cardellini as Pamela Voorhees, Jason’s mother, who was infamously the killer at Camp Crystal Lake in the original Friday the 13th film before getting killed herself, which then inspired her son Jason to take after her. To say the series takes some interesting creative swings is an understatement, but it has its fair share of quintessential Friday the 13th-esque moments and is worth a look.
Cabinet of Curiosities
Released on Netflix in 2022, this horror anthology series spearheaded by Academy Award-winner and maestro of all things monstrous Guillermo del Toro seems to have been largely forgotten, and that’s a tremendous shame. Cabinet of Curiosities featured numerous acclaimed filmmakers (such as David Prior, Jennifer Kent, Catherine Hardwicke, and even Panos Cosmatos) making hour-long gothic horror works.
As with any anthology, the quality overall could be a bit mixed, but the highs were more than worth the price of enduring the lows. It was overall an incredibly solid collection of horror projects from a selection of great filmmakers, all of which were curated by del Toro himself. Highly recommend checking this out if you’ve never seen it before; a perfect October watch.
Hannibal
If you love Flanagan’s recontextualization of Carrie as both a story and a character, perhaps you’d love Bryan Fuller’s recontextualization of Hannibal as both a story and a character? Unlike every other entry on this list up until now, Hannibal was on actual TV (not streaming), but don’t let that fool you: it is unbelievably gnarly and twisted.
The show is a blast and a testament to Fuller’s off-kilter talents. It was so good that for an entire generation of viewers, Mads Mikkelsen is now the pre-imminent performer they think of when they hear the name "Hannibal Lecter," and that alone is a herculean achievement given the Silence of the Lambs of it all.
The Twilight Zone
Reject modernity, embrace tradition. Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone remains perhaps the single greatest science-fiction horror TV project ever produced, and Flangan’s Carrie is actually in direct conversation with it, in many ways. Each episode of Carrie opens with a fully narrated cold-open of a different telekinesis-related event and evokes Serling’s own opening of Twilight Zone episodes numerous times over.
There are five seasons of Twilight Zone for you to enjoy, and it really is an embarrassment of riches. There are so many fantastic episodes, catering to any and all horror subgenres. So cue one up at random tonight, and soak in the brilliance of it all.
Midnight Mass
Finally, if you found yourself enjoying Flanagan’s brand of emotionally-charged horror in Carrie, then I really cannot recommend Midnight Mass to you enough.
Released on Netflix in 2021, this Flanagan series unfortunately didn’t get the kind of commercial love it deserved and has flown mostly under the radar ever since. For what it’s worth, though, it is far and away Flanagan’s most towering work to-date (still) and one of the most astonishing seasons of television of the past decade.
Do yourself a favor: don’t look up anything about the show, just jump in, and be swept away by terror on an unprecedented scale.
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