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These 10 new TV shows debuting this fall could be your new favorites.
USA TODAY

Violet Mcgraw and Henry Thomas on "The Haunting of Hill House."(Photo: Steve Dietl / Netflix)

Something scary is happening on TV.

Sabrina the Teenage Witch is back, but now she's dealing with Satan instead of mean teachers. "The Purge" has come to prime time. Even "The Twilight Zone" will be gracing your TV screens again.

We're in the midst of a mini-boom in horror on TV's fueled greater diversity in storytelling. Horror is streaming, on cable, on premium cable. Horror even has Shudder, its own dedicated streaming service.

October saw the first of two buzzy horror shows on Netflix, "The Haunting of Hill House" and "Chilling Adventures of Sabrina." Syfy's latest season of anthology "Channel Zero" premiered Oct. 26.

Horror is not exactly new to television, but it is certainly more acclaimed, more successful and more prolific than ever. Unlike its big-screen counterparts, horror shows are harder to pull off convincingly. Jump scares, a staple of many horror movies, are scary when done repeatedly over 10 hours. The communal experience is also lost when fans are isolated at home instead of feeling feared by moviegoers.

But horror TV is thriving, and it can do things that movies can not.

Trevor Macy, who has worked on horror, says "Hill House" producer Trevor Macy films including "Oculus" and "The Stranger."

more: 'Haunting of Hill House' gets the ultimate horror praise: A glowing tweet from Stephen King

"There is a lot more creative storytelling going on in television than there is in film, and I think that's true for horror just as much as it's true for anything else," he says.

Like high-profile hits "The Walking Dead" or "Stranger Things," many series borrow horror tropes but stay in more action-adventure lanes. Shows that wear the horror label with a badge of honor, moving from unsettling to downright terrifying are rare, but they're climbing out of the shadows.

"Hill House," "Zero" and AMC's recent "The Terror" are all excellent examples of how to make your horror better.

Maria Sten as Jillian on "Channel Zero: The Dream Door." (Photo: Syfy)

"Zero" takes its inspiration from another uniquely modern phenomenon: The Internet. Sourcing each season's story from the Creepypasta forum, where the Slender Man's myth began, "Zero" taps into anxieties both universal and specific. Its new season, "The Dream Door" (daily through Oct. 31, 11 EDT / PDT), focuses on marital anxiety.

more: 5 spooky Halloween spirit from 'Hill House' to 'Sabrina'

The source material for "Hill House" is more old-school: Shirley Jackson's classic 1959 novel. The Netflix series, which reimagines the story of a famously haunted house in a modern setting, makes great use of the "slow burn" TV format, lulling its audience into a sense of complacency before things get scary. Last spring's "The Terror" brilliantly used this format, embellishing the story of a crew of 19th-century sailors who went for Northwest Passage, never to return. "The Terror" is one of the scariest series of the year, and its its Victorian characters collapse with true, primal fear.

Ciaran Hinds as John Franklin on "The Terror." (Photo: Aidan Monaghan / AMC)

None of these series have enjoyed the success of recent films like "Halloween" and "A Quiet Place," but they're massive improvements on mainstream failures like Fox's "Scream Queens." And though wildly unven, "Queens" creator Ryan Murphy's "American Horror Story" remains a hit for FX in its eighth season.

So why is horror terrifying us more than ever in 2018? Well, 2018 is kind of scary, too.

"We live in a scary time," says "Zero" producer Nick Antosca. "When things are great and our culture is in a great place, when they look at their daily lives, when they look at the news or they feel under threat, horror to the cathartic place to go. "

So, bring on the scares. (The good ones, at least.)

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