Editorials
The Best Standalone Horror TV Episodes!
Modern television audiences have embraced horror in a way that was unheard of decades ago, with series’ from Dexter to American Horror Story to The Vampire Diaries populating our screens. Their long-form stories catch our attention and pull us in because we want to see how it all ends. Sometimes, though, horror fans don’t want to invest six seasons’ worth of time to a series; they just want a solid hour of well-made horror.
Here is a list of single episodes of television that can be watched free of the rest of the series, and just enjoyed as an hour of horror. Minor character information aside, each of them plays like a mini-movie with unique and compelling concepts that make the time worth investing.
The list runs from most well-known to most obscure…
SERIES- The Walking Dead
Episode- “Clear” (Season 3, Episode 12)
Many things have been said about the series, both positive and negative, but most viewers agree that there are a handful of episodes that are undeniably effective. “The Grove” and “Here’s Not Here” are often cited, along with this episode. Though the back story between Rick and Morgan is from a previous episode, the interactions and the tragedy of Morgan’s plight are obvious no matter how little the viewer knows about the characters. The balancing act between hope and despair, a longtime theme of the series, is brilliantly on display in “Clear.”
SERIES- Hannibal
Episode- “Amuse-Bouche” (Season 1, Episode 2)
After the stunning hour that was the pilot, Hannibal didn’t rest on its accomplishments. The first episode of the series to embrace the “case of the week” element that weaved through season one, “Amuse-Bouche” is a procedural episode so dark and grotesque that Law & Order: SVU wouldn’t touch it. It also has beautiful cinematography, fantastic performances, and a score that will put your teeth on edge.
SERIES- Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Episode- “Hush” (Season 4, Episode 2)
A lot has been said about this series and this episode in particular. An episode that is almost entirely without spoken dialogue, this one would be noteworthy for its gimmick alone. However, the gimmick is just part of the appeal; the terrifying villains, The Gentlemen, are truly iconic monsters. Silent, floating cadavers dressed in fancy suits with straight-jacketed minions attack Buffy and friends, looking to collect human hearts. The slow, deliberate movements of The Gentlemen (one of whom is played by horror mainstay Doug Jones) are wholly unnerving.
SERIES- The X-Files
Episodes- “Home” (Season 4, Episode 2) & “Daemonicus” (Season 9, Episode 3)
“Home” is a notorious hour of television, one that fought a hard battle to reach television screens and which was never rebroadcast on Fox. The graphic discussion of incest, the disturbing make-up, and the especially upsetting home invasion sequence all combined to make “Home” not only one of the scariest episodes of The X-Files, but one of the most notorious episodes of television ever.
Since that episode of The X-Files is so well-known that horror fans might already know about it, there is another episode that might surprise and shock, from much later in the series. Another story with a disturbing home invasion sequence, “Daemonicus” is an episode from the Doggett/Reyes era, written and directed by Frank Spotnitz. The guest appearance by James Remar is creepy and sticks with you.
SERIES- Masters of Horror
Episodes- “Imprint” (Season 1, Episode 13) & “John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns” (Season One, Episode 8)
It takes an extreme piece of horror for producer Mick Garris and the Showtime network to decide that an episode of a series is too graphic and disturbing for American pay cable. Takashi Miike is the man to make that extreme piece of horror. “Imprint” was intended to be the thirteenth episode of the first season, but Miike’s episode was so extreme that it was pulled from the airing order, and only appeared in the complete season DVD release.
Another episode of Masters of Horror which was less controversial but equally compelling, “John Carpenter’s Cigarette Burns” is a return to filmmaking for the director after a four-year break from features. “Cigarette Burns” was a supernatural spin on the plot of 8MM with disturbing visuals and excellent performances from Udo Kier and a pre-The Walking Dead Norman Reedus – Carpenter enjoyed the experience so much that he returned for another episode in season two.
SERIES- Millennium
Episode- “Covenant: (Season 1, Episode 16)
Hot off the success of The X-Files, Chris Carter created one of the darkest and most emotionally devastating crime series’ of all time with Millennium. Following an intuitively skilled criminal profiler played by Lance Henriksen, the series looked into the dark heart of humanity and dealt with the aftermath of violence. Nearly any episode from the first season makes for an excellent standalone experience, but the heartbreaking revelations in “Covenant” are a perfect example of the unflinching look at tragedy that the show did best.
SERIES- The River
Episode- “Los Ciegos” (Season 1, Episode 3)
A fascinating experiment in found footage horror television from the creator of Paranormal Activity, The River ran for eight episodes on ABC but never received a further episode order. Many of the episodes were tightly locked into the narrative about a son’s search through the mystical Amazon for his jungle reality star father, but the third episode, “Los Ciegos” (from The X-Files writer Glen Morgan), is fairly self-contained and packs some effective moments into its run time.
SERIES- Nightmares and Dreamscapes: From the Stories of Stephen King
Episode- “Battleground” (Season 1, Episode 1)
Before he was known for his TV work on Damages and Goliath, William Hurt was a movie star who did this single, brilliantly weird episode of the Stephen King anthology series Nightmares and Dreamscapes. It was inspired by The Outer Limits episode “The Invaders” and directed by Brian Henson, Muppets producer and son of Jim Henson. There is not a single line of dialogue in the entire episode, and the action of the story is somehow both intense and absurd. While every episode of the series is a standalone story from King, “Battleground” is by far the most memorable.
SERIES- Fear Itself
Episodes- “Eater” (Season 1, Episode 5) & “Skin and Bones” (Season 1, Episode 8)
After creating Masters of Horror, producer Mick Garris brought a similar concept to network television with Fear Itself, an anthology series directed by some of horror’s most famous directors. The first episode listed here is “Eater,” from director Stuart Gordon. It follows a young police officer, played by Mad Men’s Elisabeth Moss, as the sole survivor of a police station slaughter by a supernatural slasher. The cannibalistic elements of the episode were shocking for network television at the time.
More shocking than “Eater” is “Skin and Bones,” an episode about the Wendigo myth directed by Larry Fessenden. Starring the previously mentioned Doug Jones as an emaciated wilderness survivor whose actions to remain alive have changed him in unusual ways, the episode is a taut chamber piece with moments of cannibalism even more disturbing than “Eater” because of their emotional immediacy and frankness. A tour de force performance from Jones makes this episode a no-brainer.
SERIES- The Greatest American Hero
Episode- “The Beast in the Black” (Season 2, Episode 6)
It may seem strange to have a comedic super-hero show from the early 1980s on this list, but there was a single episode of The Greatest American Hero that scarred many unprepared young viewers: “The Beast in the Black.” When the main hero’s friend is possessed by the spirit of an evil woman, the hero must face a monster from another dimension hidden in a portal inside a brick wall in a creepy old house. Though the episode is dated, the impact of the scares still works now, and the full episode can be seen up above.
Due to a complex series of anthropological mishaps, the Wayans Brothers are a huge deal in Brazil. Around these parts, White Chicks is considered a national treasure by a lot of people, so it stands to reason that Brazilian audiences would continue to accompany the Wayans’ comedic output long after North America had stopped taking them seriously as comedic titans.
This is the only reason why I originally watched Michael Tiddes and Marlon Wayans’ 2013 horror spoof A Haunted House – appropriately known as “Paranormal Inactivity” in South America – despite having abandoned this kind of movie shortly after the excellent Scary Movie 3. However, to my complete and utter amazement, I found myself mostly enjoying this unhinged parody of Found Footage films almost as much as the iconic spoofs that spear-headed the genre during the 2000s. And with Paramount having recently announced a reboot of the Scary Movie franchise, I think this is the perfect time to revisit the divisive humor of A Haunted House and maybe figure out why this kind of film hasn’t been popular in a long time.
Before we had memes and internet personalities to make fun of movie tropes for free on the internet, parody movies had been entertaining audiences with meta-humor since the very dawn of cinema. And since the genre attracted large audiences without the need for a serious budget, it made sense for studios to encourage parodies of their own productions – which is precisely what happened with Miramax when they commissioned a parody of the Scream franchise, the original Scary Movie.
The unprecedented success of the spoof (especially overseas) led to a series of sequels, spin-offs and rip-offs that came along throughout the 2000s. While some of these were still quite funny (I have a soft spot for 2008’s Superhero Movie), they ended up flooding the market much like the Guitar Hero games that plagued video game stores during that same timeframe.
You could really confuse someone by editing this scene into Paranormal Activity.
Of course, that didn’t stop Tiddes and Marlon Wayans from wanting to make another spoof meant to lampoon a sub-genre that had been mostly overlooked by the Scary Movie series – namely the second wave of Found Footage films inspired by Paranormal Activity. Wayans actually had an easier time than usual funding the picture due to the project’s Found Footage presentation, with the format allowing for a lower budget without compromising box office appeal.
In the finished film, we’re presented with supposedly real footage recovered from the home of Malcom Johnson (Wayans). The recordings themselves depict a series of unexplainable events that begin to plague his home when Kisha Davis (Essence Atkins) decides to move in, with the couple slowly realizing that the difficulties of a shared life are no match for demonic shenanigans.
In practice, this means that viewers are subjected to a series of familiar scares subverted by wacky hijinks, with the flick featuring everything from a humorous recreation of the iconic fan-camera from Paranormal Activity 3 to bizarre dance numbers replacing Katy’s late-night trances from Oren Peli’s original movie.
Your enjoyment of these antics will obviously depend on how accepting you are of Wayans’ patented brand of crass comedy. From advanced potty humor to some exaggerated racial commentary – including a clever moment where Malcom actually attempts to move out of the titular haunted house because he’s not white enough to deal with the haunting – it’s not all that surprising that the flick wound up with a 10% rating on Rotten Tomatoes despite making a killing at the box office.
However, while this isn’t my preferred kind of humor, I think the inherent limitations of Found Footage ended up curtailing the usual excesses present in this kind of parody, with the filmmakers being forced to focus on character-based comedy and a smaller scale story. This is why I mostly appreciate the love-hate rapport between Kisha and Malcom even if it wouldn’t translate to a healthy relationship in real life.
Of course, the jokes themselves can also be pretty entertaining on their own, with cartoony gags like the ghost getting high with the protagonists (complete with smoke-filled invisible lungs) and a series of silly The Exorcist homages towards the end of the movie. The major issue here is that these legitimately funny and genre-specific jokes are often accompanied by repetitive attempts at low-brow humor that you could find in any other cheap comedy.
Not a good idea.
Not only are some of these painfully drawn out “jokes” incredibly unfunny, but they can also be remarkably offensive in some cases. There are some pretty insensitive allusions to sexual assault here, as well as a collection of secondary characters defined by negative racial stereotypes (even though I chuckled heartily when the Latina maid was revealed to have been faking her poor English the entire time).
Cinephiles often claim that increasingly sloppy writing led to audiences giving up on spoof movies, but the fact is that many of the more beloved examples of the genre contain some of the same issues as later films like A Haunted House – it’s just that we as an audience have (mostly) grown up and are now demanding more from our comedy. However, this isn’t the case everywhere, as – much like the Elves from Lord of the Rings – spoof movies never really died, they simply diminished.
A Haunted House made so much money that they immediately started working on a second one that released the following year (to even worse reviews), and the same team would later collaborate once again on yet another spoof, 50 Shades of Black. This kind of film clearly still exists and still makes a lot of money (especially here in Brazil), they just don’t have the same cultural impact that they used to in a pre-social-media-humor world.
At the end of the day, A Haunted House is no comedic masterpiece, failing to live up to the laugh-out-loud thrills of films like Scary Movie 3, but it’s also not the trainwreck that most critics made it out to be back in 2013. Comedy is extremely subjective, and while the raunchy humor behind this flick definitely isn’t for everyone, I still think that this satirical romp is mostly harmless fun that might entertain Found Footage fans that don’t take themselves too seriously.
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