Oct 15, 2020
The Best Spooky Series British TV Has To Offer
Turn your TV binge night into a British Fright Night!
Halloween may be a distinctly American holiday, but the Brits certainly know how to offer a good scare in some of their best spooky TV series.
When the leaves skitter and you can hear broomsticks on the wind and you’re in the mood for something frightening, consider binging these programs.
1. Penny Dreadful
In Penny Dreadful, the things that go bump in the night are all Deeply. Disturbing. Things.
In the first seasons, the unmatched Eva Green (I’ve been a fan ever since Casino Royale) stars as Vanessa Ives, whose dark history is surpassed only by her dark future, complete with vampire encounters, falling in love with one of literature’s darkest characters, and demonic possession. The series takes its name from Victorian-era “penny dreadfuls,” which told awful and graphic horror stories and were sold cheap to readers who couldn’t get enough of them.
The TV show lives up to its penny dreadful legacy and keeps the monstrous characters coming: Victor Frankenstein and his monster; Dorian Gray; Count Dracula; and Dr. Jekyll, to name just a few. It’s action-packed and well-acted (Timothy Dalton, Josh Hartnett, and Billie Piper are some of the higher-profile names in the cast) and it will most certainly give you nightmares.
If you watch all three series of the program and still want more, a spin-off series titled Penny Dreadful: City of Angels ran in 2020.
2. Whitechapel
I’ll be completely honest with you: I sought out the series Whitechapel because I think Rupert Penry-Jones is one of the most beautiful people I’ve ever seen.
What a surprise and a pleasure to learn that this offbeat series was a compelling watch for its ensemble cast and its creepy storylines. Penry-Jones stars as Joseph Chandler, a DI determined to make his mark on the force and to rise through the ranks. Before he can be promoted, however, his bosses send him to supervise a high-profile murder case in the Whitechapel district of London; eventually it transpires that a modern-day copycat of Jack the Ripper is operating in the area.
Joe, who struggles with his own demons (primarily of the OCD variety), does not succeed in solving the case with more traditional methods of detection, and, surprisingly, pursues another angle by adding a famed “Ripperologist” to his investigative team. By looking for historical parallels between the crimes, Joe hopes to catch the copycat before he can replicate all of the Ripper’s horrible deeds.
The show, produced by ITV and distributed by BBC Worldwide, ran for four seasons and was also popular on the BBC America channel. The cinematography is dark and disturbing in the extreme. It’s a perfect watch for the chillier and increasingly darker nights of autumn, when you just want to curl up in a blanket with your pumpkin spice cocoa and watch something that scares the living daylights out of you.
Each season focused on different historical crimes, and the show’s twisty-turny plots more than matched its strong characterizations (veteran Brit character actors Phil Davis and Steve Pemberton do a nice job here as well) and creepy vibe.
3. Orphan Black
And now for something completely different.
Orphan Black is a Canadian program that takes its frightening premise from the near future, when an aggressive cloning program begins to unravel when one of the clones meets another, only to nearly instantly see her plummet to her death underneath a train.
Tatiana Maslany is the hardest working actor in showbiz in this program, as she plays multiple clone characters with vastly different personalities. The horror of the program comes as the clones all try to discover why they were made, by whom, and how they can escape being participants in an experiment that they never consented to be in. Over the course of the show’s five seasons, questions were only answered in time to be followed by more questions, as is only fitting in a program about complex topics like evolution, genetics, and cloning.
4. The Living and the Dead
This supernatural horror miniseries is six hours long and will give you goosebumps for most of those six hours.
The year is 1894, and Nathan Appleby (Colin Morgan) has returned to his family farm with his new wife. The farm itself and the area boasts its fair share of horrible histories, and one supernatural calamity after another befalls the young couple, including ghosts instructing villagers to murder others and Nathan’s own deepening insanity.
This gothic program is a great watch when you’re looking for an uneasy, unsettled scared feeling, as opposed to a gore-fest or wildly gratuitous sex or violence.
5. In the Flesh
Back to the present time, if the present time included sufferers of PDS — also known as Partially Deceased Syndrome.
That’s right, you knew there had to be one program about zombies on this list.
And what a program it is — unsettling, frightening, a little too close to how society seems to be “functioning” currently, and yet asking deeply human questions.
When 18-year-old Kieren Walker committed suicide, the last thing he expected was that he would live again, as a zombie, and that as a zombie he would commit unspeakable crimes. However, like many other PDS sufferers, he is treated with new medications and treatment designed to return his living memories to him, with the aim of re-introducing him to society. It’s not easy, and when he returns to his hometown of Roarton, it is to a town divided in how they believe these “rotters” should be received back among the living.
6. Being Human
Because sometimes you want to be a little bit scared, but you also want to enjoy a good roommate dramedy. Enter Being Human.
Set in Bristol, this program features as its main characters a vampire, a werewolf, and a ghost (played by Aidan Turner, Russell Tovey, and Lenora Crichlow, respectively). The three are brought together when friends Mitchell and George decide to share a flat, and the flat they decide upon is still occupied by Annie the ghost, whose spirit restlessly wants to know how she really died.
All three of them decide they want to follow their own path (but do it together), and want to “be human” more than they want to engage in activities more in line with their monstrous colleagues. There are undeniably scary bits — the vampire group that wants Mitchell to rejoin them are particularly nasty — but there are also many funny bits and some wonderful friendship chemistry between the three flatmates. Watch everything else on this list and be scared, and then finish up with this program so you can mostly be scared, but can remember the funny and lighthearted bits so you can get to sleep without nightmares.
Please note: There was also a North American remake of this show, titled Being Human, and friends tell me it’s a good show, but I haven’t gotten around to watching it yet — mainly because there’s still some British TV I haven’t seen and I need to do that first.
Now get your frights on and watch some of these spooky, supernatural, and horrifying — and horrifyingly good — scary British TV shows!
