- Anne Rice’s “Talamasca: The Secret Order” TV series, based on her Gothic fiction, was canceled by AMC after one season but found new life on Netflix.
- “The Haunting of Hill House” on Netflix, created by Mike Flanagan, is a critically acclaimed series that delves into family trauma and supernatural elements.
- “Evil” on CBS explores the gray areas of good and evil through its characters investigating supernatural activity, including demons and human darkness.
Anne Rice passed away in 2021, so it’s a shame she never got to see her Immortal Universe brought to the small screen. The prolific author specialized in Gothic fiction and is perhaps best known for “Interview with the Vampire,” which got turned into a TV series starting in 2022. “Mayfair Witches” arrived the following year, followed in 2025 by “Talamasca: The Secret Order,” offering up all things dark and macabre.
While the previous two series focus on vampires and witches, respectively, “Talamasca” was about those tasked with keeping those supernatural beings in order. Guy Anatole (Nicholas Denton) is a psychic who gets called to join the Talamasca, a clandestine organization that monitors the activities of all things that go bump in the night. Guy’s job is to monitor the vampire Jasper (William Fichtner) to see what he’s up to.
Sadly, “Talamasca: The Secret Order” was canceled by AMC after just one season, but it’s found new life on Netflix, with many people checking out the series there. With only six episodes to go through, you may find yourself chomping at the bit for more supernatural horror shows in the same vein and, dare we say, way better in quality than “Talamasca: The Secret Order.”
The Haunting of Hill House
With “Talamasca: The Secret Order” making its way to Netflix, you may wonder what other spooky shows are on the streamer. One of the most beloved and critically acclaimed series on the platform — which should be on your list — is “The Haunting of Hill House,” created by horror maestro Mike Flanagan.
The series follows five siblings within two different timelines — 1992 and the present day — as we see what happens to them when they were younger in the eponymous Hill House and how that continues to affect them as adults. It’s a classic ghost story where the ghosts are just one small part of the characters’ problems, as they all struggle with internal demons of guilt and regret. While there are ghosts, they function more as manifestations for these real-world terrors in a profound story about how family can sometimes scar you worse than any monster.
Like “Talamasca,” “The Haunting of Hill House” deals with the supernatural. There’s even characters in both who possess psychic abilities. And like the ghosts themselves, psychic powers once again function as metaphors for the desire to belong and understand those around us. Even if you’ve already watched Flanagan’s show before, it doesn’t hurt to check it out again and catch hidden details you may have missed the first time around.
Paranoia runs rampant throughout “Talamasca: The Secret Order.” Guy Anatole is always at risk of being found out by the vampire he’s supposed to monitor, only to realize there’s more to the secret order that hired him than meets the eye — which should go without saying when dealing with secret orders. If you want to feel even more anxiety in your bones, <a href="https://www.looper.com/2155079/from-horror-tv-series-hidden-gem-streaming-prime-video/” rel=”nofollow noopener” target=”_blank”>”From” is the hidden gem on Amazon Prime Video you’ve been missing.
“From” is about a small town where anyone who enters becomes trapped, and then at night, they have to make sure they stay safe from creatures lurking in the nearby forest. In order to survive, everyone must follow a specific set of rules and rituals, and anyone who doesn’t is at the mercy of humanoid-like monsters.
There’s a liminal horror aspect to “From” that is very popular right now in projects like “Backrooms” and “It Ends.” If you try to leave the town, you loop right back in. The creatures only make up one small portion of the horror, and the audience is enticed to keep following episode after episode as new revelations about how this town operates come to light. “From” is a very effective mystery box show where, just when you think you have it figured out, a new wrench gets thrown into the gears.
Buffy the Vampire Slayer
“Talamasca: The Secret Order” is a pretty straightforward supernatural horror show, which is fine; sometimes you just want to see a horror story play the hits rather than break out of its routine. But if you watch a lot of horror shows and want to watch something that actively subverts all of those tropes, then “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” is the way to go.
Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) is a Slayer, meaning she has the power to fight all sorts of supernatural forces. The show typically maintains a “monster of the week” format that we sadly don’t get enough of in the streaming era, although every season has a big bad Buffy must face by the finale. All the while, she tries to hang out with her friends and lead a normal life, to no avail.
“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” takes its horror seriously. Many of the monster designs are downright freaky. But it also knows how to have fun, and Buffy often cracks jokes at the expense of any creature she goes up against. Ultimately, “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” changed TV, even if no one noticed initially. It proved that series didn’t have to be so neatly divided between “drama” and “comedy,” and it had characters making in-depth pop culture references during a time when comic books were still seen as something for nerds. “Buffy” expected its audience to have some level of media knowledge, so that it could deconstruct things you’d probably seen a hundred times before.
Many supernatural horror stories tend to portray their battles between good and evil in stark, black and white terms. But the acclaimed series “Evil” likes to operate in grayer territory. There are definitely demons and supernatural forces in “Evil,” but the show isn’t afraid to examine the darkness that exists in the human soul even when no diabolical entities are present.
The main characters are a forensic psychologist (Katja Herbers), a tech expert (Aasif Mandvi), and a priest (Mike Colter). They are tasked by the Catholic church to investigate purported supernatural activity and determine whether demonic forces are at work, which is often the case, or if something else is afoot. With those kinds of backgrounds, the threesome often butt heads, and the show also leaves some mysteries unexplained, forcing the viewer to decide what was really happening.
When you tune into a supernatural horror series, you expect to see some cool monsters, and “Evil” has some of the best in recent memory thanks to the practical effects and prosthetics by Oscar winner Joel Harlow. The creature designs are the stuff of nightmares, but what will really keep you up at night is the way the series shows just how depraved regular human beings can become.
Channel Zero
“Talamasca: The Secret Order” and “Channel Zero” are similar in that both are adaptations of existing material, but that’s where the comparison ends. “Talamasca” is, of course, based on the works of Anne Rice, but “Channel Zero” is a very 21st century anthology series in which each season adapts a different creepypasta into a full-length narrative.
Creepypastas entered the lexicon when people began posting horror stories online, often from anonymous accounts that gave the tales a semblance of legitimacy or realism. What began as a relatively niche horror community has exploded in popularity in recent years, to where major studios are now picking up the rights to various creepypastas to adapt into feature-length films. If anything, “Channel Zero” was simply ahead of its time.
It would actually be fascinating to watch “Talamasca” and “Channel Zero” in close proximity to each other, since they represent very different eras of horror. “Talamasca” is concerned with psychics, vampires, and entities we’ve seen plenty of times before. “Channel Zero” draws fear from more modern sensibilities, like creepy kids’ TV shows no one else remembers. Horror has come a long way in the last few decades, and with so many supernatural horror shows out there, there’s bound to be something that sparks a primal fear within your psyche.
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Read the original article on Looper.
