The Darkest Shows You'll Find On Netflix

The first season of Stranger Things took the world by storm when it hit Netflix in 2016. The moody atmosphere, nostalgic '80s vibe, and rockstar performances (bandwagon shoutout to Winona Ryder, who disappears in that role. She's a ghost in that role, man), resonated with fans so well, the show was immediately picked up for a second season, followed by a third season.

And we get it, you've heard the hype over and over again — but this is one of those rare, once-in-a-decade shows that deserves every bit of watercooler praise. If you haven't dropped an evening on Stranger Things yet, give it a shot. If you have seen it, then it only gets better with a second viewing, if for nothing else than a rousing game of spot-the-reference.

There's an idea out there that if it's mainstream, it can't really be true horror. And then there's American Horror Story, which totally and thoroughly disproves this forever. Yeah, it's been getting tons of media hype over the past few years, and has won loads of awards, including multiple Primetime Emmys and Golden Globes. But you know what? That's because it totally earned all the accolades and attention by being the creepiest and best horror show on television since, well, maybe ever. If you haven't watched it yet, take it from us: until you do, you really ain't seen nothing yet.

The sci-fi/horror anthology Black Mirror is the spiritual successor to The Twilight Zone, only with modern stories, sensibilities, and effects. Originally debuting on England's Channel 4, it moved to Netflix for the third season. If you haven't had time to binge watch this series, you're missing out on one of the best and most acclaimed shows on TV, with an amazing cast that includes the likes of Jon Hamm, Hayley Atwell, Domhnall Gleeson, Rupert Everett, and Rafe Spall. There's nothing like it on television.

Either you dig anime or you don't. That's cool. It's the way of things. But for every metalhead who's found himself grooving to a Nas track, and for every Hell's Angel who secretly wiped away a tear at the end of Love Actually, there's always someone who scoffed at Dragonball Z, then tripped into an anime show that they came away loving.

That show is usually Attack on Titan. The story of the last human survivors living inside a walled city to protect themselves from enormous, human-eating giants, Attack on Titan is a smorgasbord of rich visuals, explosive action (swords and jetpacks!), and some super-seriously dark themes. The downside? The episodes are so short (20 minutes), you find yourself clicking to the next one without thinking about it, and eventually you realize you've wasted a whole day, you're starving, and somewhere in the house there's a baby crying. Did you even have a baby before you started watching the show? Those freaking cliffhangers!

No, no, not the tepid American remake. The original French horror series The Returned, also known as Les Revenants, is the one to watch. But this doesn't have anything to do with Leonardo DiCaprio being eaten by a bear. It's actually much worse than that, as a number of dead people mysteriously return to life with no idea how or why. And then things start getting really creepy. Check it out, but don't worry about the subtitles; focusing on reading might be the only way to keep calm once the real terror begins.

Executive produced by horror master Eli Roth and based on the hit novel of the same name by Brian McGreevy, Hemlock Grove is an original Netflix series that delves into one small town's dark secrets. Turns out it's almost harder to keep those secrets buried than it is to keep the bodies buried, as both the revelations and the corpses begin to pile up. Oh, and there are werewolves. Yeah. Imagine True Detective crossed with H.P. Lovecraft and you'll start to get an idea of the show's tone.

Biblical fact: Gillian Anderson can do no wrong. Between The X-Files, Hannibal, and American Gods, the woman is a force of nature, and one we wouldn't mind getting to know personally. And with that kind of line-up, you'd be forgiven for missing her in The Fall, yet another notch on Anderson's slim, gold-plated, Emmy-buckled belt. Are we hero worshiping? We're hero worshiping. Sorry about that.

The fact is, while Gillian Anderson is great in The Fall, it's Jamie Dornan who brings the show home as serial killer Paul Spector. If you're itching for another lightning-paced, hard-hitting crime thriller to fill the hours waiting for another (good) season of True Detective, look no further than The Fall.

David Fincher and serial killers go together like glitter and unicorns, and with Mindhunter he delves deeper than ever before into those murky depths and the tortured psyches that populate them. Created by Joe Penhall and based on a true crime book by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker, this Netflix exclusive charts the early days of the FBI's forays into the psychological profiling of serial killers (or "sequence killers," as they they were referred to at the time), and the origins of the behavioral science unit that pioneered these methods.

Mindhunter's most chilling moments come about during dramatizations of real interviews conducted with prominent serial killers of the time, with dialogue adapted directly from actual recordings. The highlight among these is Cameron Britton's Edmund Kemper, who instills such a potent sense of creepy, articulate horror in his portrayal that you'll probably find yourself afraid to Google the real guy afterward. It's unsettling, fascinating stuff made all the more repulsive by the manner in which it resists embellishment and sensationalism, and the moody, obsessive, impeccably crafted stylings of David Fincher (who directed four episodes and executive-produced the show) can be felt throughout. It takes a minute to find its feet, but stick with it. If you like your darkness and gloom served cold, calculated, and painstakingly fact-checked, this is the show for you.

Firmly planted somewhere between Breaking Bad's blood-soaked quirk and Bloodline's brooding sense of inevitable doom, Ozark is one big seedy ball of stress and gloom. Best known for his role on beloved sitcom Arrested Development, Jason Bateman plays family man, financial adviser, and reluctant money launderer Marty Byrde, who moves from Chicago to backwoods Missouri with his wife, Wendy (Laura Linney), and their family when his dealings with a Mexican drug cartel go about like those things usually go — badly. Bateman is a long way from Michael Bluth here, and he's fantastic as the hapless sap who's increasingly out of his depth. He even produced the show and directed four episodes and is probably in desperate need of a hug right about now.

There's some wit sprinkled throughout and the characters and their relationships are always compelling, but Ozark is a brutal watch at times, and the supremely graphic depictions of violence are particularly jarring. But then you wouldn't be reading this if that wasn't right up your sick, twisted alley, would you?

It's hard to explain exactly how an animated comedy about anthropomorphic animals living and working side-by-side with humans in a satirical acid-flashback version of L.A. could be so deeply sad and genuinely thought-provoking. You really just have to experience it for yourself.

Bojack (Will Arnett) is a washed-up alcoholic and former 1990s sitcom star who, after years of debauchery and irrelevance, tries to reclaim a place in contemporary popular culture. His rival is a Labrador (Paul F. Thompkins), his agent is a Persian cat (Amy Sedaris), and his roommate is a slacker human (Aaron Paul). The show is laugh-out-loud funny and delightfully weird, of course, but what truly sets it apart from the herd is this grim, introspective, and occasionally nihilistic edge that genuinely sneaks up on you. What at first appears to be a sharp and wacky send-up of celebrity culture and society at large ends up becoming one of the most raw, honest examinations of depression on television. This thing goes to some genuinely heavy places and it's not afraid to risk its main characters' likeability. Give it a few episodes to get going and see for yourself. For a horse, Bojack is actually achingly human.

Your mileage may vary with this one. Based on the bestselling YA book by Jay Asher, 13 Reasons Why was something of a sensation when it dropped on Netflix in the early half of 2017, though not always for the right reasons. The series charts the story of Clay Jensen (Dylan Minnette) who inherits a box of cassette tapes from classmate Hannah Baker (Katherine Langford) after she commits suicide. The tapes detail the reasons she did what she did, casting blame and threatening to destroy relationships in the process.

The show has been called dangerous by some, and condemned for romanticizing teen suicide. Netflix has even added additional content warnings to the show in response to the backlash. It's difficult to predict where any viewer might land on the issue. An irresponsible glorification or an honest, unflinching look at an important and difficult topic? It's undeniably well-made, emotionally raw, stylistically ambitious, and addictive as all get out. Just be sure to tread carefully.

Make way for the king! The sets are a little shaky, the effects are a little rubbery, and the stagey histrionics of the performances are probably an acquired taste now. But even decades after it first aired, The Twilight Zone has lost none of its resonance as a potent examination of the fear of the unknown, and the troubling ideas cooked up by Rod Serling and pals have only grown more disturbingly relevant as time has marched on. All these years later, The Twilight Zone is still in a class of its own in the world of weird.

Newer and shinier sci-fi anthology shows like Black Mirror and Electric Dreams might offer more intense thrills, more immediately recognizable technologies and modern production values, but The Twilight Zone perseveres and reigns supreme and continues to unsettle because of the sincere punch of Serling's moralizing, always grounding his fantastical stories in honest examinations of the human condition and reflecting the worst impulses innate in ourselves. This is a show that lives and breathes in any modern piece of sci-fi or horror that aspires to greatness, and there are impressively few duds across its 156 episodes. So open your mind, man, start humming that theme song, and take the plunge already.

We know, Groundhog Day has been done. And done. And done again, sort of like an endless time loop that you can never get out of. But this take on the Groundhog Day formula — called Russian Doll — is a little different, and it's also really dark and funny.

In this version of the old formula, Bill Murray is not actually Bill Murray, but Natasha Lyonne, who you might remember from that one women's prison show that used to be good a really long time ago but then became unwatchable. Lyonne plays Nadia Vulvokov, whose time loop begins at her 36th birthday party. Instead of going to sleep at the end of the day and then waking up yesterday morning, she dies at the end of each time loop, and then gets tossed right back into her 36th birthday party. And the story diverges from the Murrayesque version of Groundhog Day even more when Nadia meets someone else stuck in a similar time loop, and the two of them set out to figure out what the heck is going on, only it's Netflix so they totally would never say "what the heck."

Russian Doll is full of hilarious death-jokes as the two eternally doomed characters try in vain to avoid getting killed for the billionth time, but it's also smart and human — Esquire called it "the first great show of 2019."

Say goodbye to the cutesy Sabrina we know from the '90s and early 2000s. The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina is part Riverdale and part American Horror Story. 1990s Sabrina was basically just a teenage girl who cast the sorts of spells that any 1990s teenage girl stereotype would cast if she suddenly found herself with magical powers — you know, like magically sizing herself down to fit into a too-small dress and changing the weather so she doesn't have to miss her flight to Jamaica. This Sabrina has much bigger problems. She has to choose between having a normal life and joining the Church of the Night, which is literally a terrifying, uber-powerful, devil-worshiping religious cult. If she chooses the devil-worshiping religious cult, she will have to give up her free will. But you know, superpowers, so it's a conundrum.

According to USA Today, Sabrina is designed for binge-watching. There are lots of cliffhangers, which will make you do the whole "Just one more episode ... wait, is it really four in the morning?" thing that bingeable shows always make you do, but at the same time there are some self-contained episodes, which isn't common in 10-episode series. And fair warning for the sensitive: This is a show about a teenage witch, but Common Sense Media doesn't recommend it for kids under 15. And it's a show about people who worship Satan, so be prepared for some, you know, Satanism. You have been warned.

The producers of Netflix's The Witcher weren't exactly cagey about how dark and weird their story is — they opened the series with a scene in which the title character fights a giant spider. That's not exactly super original, or anything (Harry Potter, The Lord of the Rings, a million different lame horror movies about giant spiders), but it did put the viewers' expectations in the right place. Geralt, our hero, is a monster hunter, a white haired, sexy monster hunter with a smolderingly deep voice who only sometimes has weird black veins all over his face. According to The Verge, the show is based on a series of novels by Polish author Andrzej Sapkowski that also spawned a bunch of popular video games, so it had a ready-made fan base right out of the gate and has attracted a horde of additional fans, most of whom are broken and betrayed former Game of Thrones fans looking for a series that might do something other than waste eight whole years of their lives.

Anyway, The Witcher has dark humor, lots of bloody, gag-worthy violence, and plenty of, you know, scenery. Gerald not only fights monsters but also bigots, because the people 'round these parts don't want his kind in their pubs. In fact, as the show progresses, it becomes clear that the monsters aren't really as evil as some of the people are, which is a trope, granted, but one that works in this format.

Right around the time America went into lockdown, its bored, isolated citizens discovered Animal Crossing and Tiger King. Some people also baked bread, but for the most part, no one wrote a great American novel or did anything useful because Animal Crossing and Tiger King. Animal Crossing isn't a Netflix show, but we can talk about the dark and totally addictive documentary that riveted the world for like less than a day because that's how long it takes to binge-watch all eight episodes when you're in lockdown.

Tiger King is so bizarre and unbelievable that some people were confused as to whether it was actually a mockumentary, because, let's face it, it runs a bit closer to Spinal Tap than The Fog of War. The show follows the train-wreckishly charismatic Joe Exotic, his collection of big cats, his polygamist spouses, and the part where he tries to hire someone to kill Carole Baskin, an animal rights activist who's got something against poor Joe and his entire tiger kingdom or whatever it is. 

Weirdly, Joe Exotic — who was actually convicted of the murder-for-hire plot and is now serving 22 years in prison, per Slate — gets played up as a sort of anti-hero while Baskin gets drawn as the villain. And yet, this became one of the most binged shows of 2020 because everyone loves a train wreck, and when it's a polygamist, tiger-owning would-be murderer, well, pass the popcorn.

So first there was 13 Reasons Why, which made suicide seem cool (bad Netflix, bad) and now there's You, which puts us rather uncomfortably inside the head of a stalker. Except, You manages to avoid the same traps as 13 Reasons Why – there's nothing cool about what stalker Joe is doing, and his behavior is genuinely terrifying for those of us looking in on his psychopathic inner world.

The object of Joe's obsession is a girl named Beck, and of course Joe can't just admire her from afar. Nope, he has to show up as a creepy reflection in the window just inches from her oblivious face and hang around behind her while she's in the library, mostly so showrunners have some good still images to use in banner ads, but anyway. At one point, Joe compares himself to the leading man in a romantic comedy, after he breaks into Beck's house and starts rifling through all her stuff.

Joe isn't all bad, though. And the fact that he's almost — almost — likeable makes this all even grosser and harder to stomach. Also problematic is Beck's choice of friends and acquaintances: She surrounds herself with a lot of deplorable people, which makes for riveting, if emotionally confusing, television. Happily, You never crosses the line between "stalking is bad" to "stalking is romantic." You can't really say the same about a lot of other romantic comedies. (We're looking at you, Love Actually).