When the witches come out and the vampires start looking for something to drink, it can only mean one thing: the Halloween season has arrived! This is the time to get under the covers and watch spooky movies and read some creepy comics. And while creators like Mike Flanagan bring the scares with shows like Midnight Mass, sometimes we want something a little different.
Every now and then, it is nice to see the characters from shows that aren't known for horror finding themselves in the midst of a good Giallo film. It can be fun to find a sitcom that gets downright scary when the pumpkins come out or a drama about newspaper reporters that brings in the undead for a very special October surprise.
10 Quantum Leap Got Scary And Confirmed A Theory
Quantum Leap followed the adventures of Sam Beckett, a scientist who stepped into the Quantum Accelerator and found himself leaping through time, being forced to put right that which once went wrong. Pretty early into the series, Sam and his best friend Al begin to theorize that Sam's journey isn't being controlled by science, but by God. That theory essentially became fact in the Season 3 episode, “The Boogieman.”
In this episode, Sam finds himself in a creepy house on Halloween as people keep getting killed and a wild goat keeps showing up. Soon enough, Sam figures out what is happening. Sure enough, it turns out that Satan himself is trying to end the hero's adventures.
9 Dawson's Creek Spent Some Time In The Genre That Made It's Creator Famous
Dawson's Creek was a cultural phenomenon in the 1990s. The series about a wanna-be movie maker named Dawson and his pals was created by Kevin Williamson, the same person who wrote Scream and most of the sequels. In the Season 1 episode “The Scare,” the show pays homage to Williamson's movie work.
In the episode, Dawson is busy playing pranks on his pals for Friday the 13th before they all get together for a seance at Dawson's house. The seance goes haywire when the angry boyfriend of a girl Pacey just met shows up and terrorizes the gang.
8 Boy Meets World Created A Perfect Slasher Movie In 22 Minutes
For a generation, Boy Meets World was a seminal series, and episodes like “And Then There Was Shawn” from Season 5 are the reason. In this episode, Cory and the usual gang all end up in detention when someone starts killing off students at the high school. The killer has a great look, and the episode plays into the early years of the slasher genre perfectly by toying with who the killer could be and setting up a theme for the murderer. In this case, they leave behind a poem with each victim. To top things off, the episode even has a cameo by then-scream-queen Jennifer Love Hewitt.
7 Community Took A Bite Out Of Zombies
Looking back at Community now, it's hard to believe how influential the sitcom was. Along with being created by Rick and Morty co-creator Dan Harmon, Community starred Donald Glover and had 35 of its 110 episodes directed by the Russo Brothers, best known for directing two Captain America movies as well as Avengers Infinity War and Endgame.
But as influential as Community has become, the show also paid respect to what came before it, like the Season 2 episode “Epidemiology,” which owes its existence to George Romero and the zombie genre. In this episode, the Greendale Seven find themselves trapped in the school's library as all the students become zombies thanks to some bad taco meat.
6 Family Matters Created Its Own Chucky
When it comes to inoffensive comedy, Family Matters is at the top of the list. The series, which started off being about a family before Steve Urkel became a pop culture smash hit, was about as family-friendly as things could get, but in the Season 8 episode “Stevil,” things got pretty wild.
The episode, set on Halloween, sees Urkel's ventriloquist dummy that looks just like him come to life. The dummy, who calls itself Stevil, starts killing off the Winslow family members before taking on Urkel himself. Overall, the episode isn't very scary, but Stevil is undeniably creepy.
5 Little House On The Prairie Introduced A Lot Of Gen X Kids To Horror
While Little House on the Prairie is known for being pretty inoffensive, the truth is that the long-running series wasn't afraid to get really creepy. The Season 7 two-parter "Sylvia" is basically a Giallo movie made for American TV.
In "Sylvia," Albert Ingalls finds himself crushing on the new girl at school, Sylvia Webb, but what Albert learns is that Sylvia lives in a never-ending nightmare as she is constantly stalked by a masked man who continues to attack her. Albert does all he can to help Sylvia but to no avail.
4 The Waltons Got The Jump On The Amityville Horror
People who think of Little House on the Prairie as being bland have probably never watched The Waltons. But even The Waltons got in on the scary fun with its Season 7 episode, “The Changeling.” In this episode, which owes a lot to The Exorcist, Elizabeth Walton is about to turn 13 when she suddenly finds herself being the target of a poltergeist.
What really makes this episode stand out is that none of the ghost activity is ever explained. In the world of The Waltons, ghosts are real, and they will mess with teenage girls as they enter puberty. The answer is just to wait the ghost out as it spends an hour of TV time doing some pretty creepy stuff with a doll.
3 Punky Brewster Battled A Demonic Spider
Punky Brewster was a short-lived sitcom in the 1980s about a precocious little girl and the old man who adopted her. Recently, the show was revived for Peacock, focusing on the grown-up life of Punky. Whether or not the adult Punky will return to the magical Native American cave she and her friends found when she was a child remains to be seen.
In the two-part storyline "The Perils of Punky," Punky and her pals found themselves lost inside a cave in the woods when some wild stuff started happening. The story feels like a Stephen King novel, with the young kids facing off against a number of weird events before Punky finally destroys a demonic giant spider with the help of the ghost of a Native American.
2 Lou Grant Reported On A Seance
A spin-off of the iconic sitcom The Mary Tyler Moore Show, Lou Grant decided not to be a comedy and instead played out as a drama. The series followed Lou and his colleagues at the Los Angeles Tribune as they reported on the events of the world. But in the Season 5 episode “Ghosts,” one of Lou's reporters faces something impossible.
The episode follows reporter Billie Newman as he takes part in a seance in a haunted house where a recent murder has been committed. The episode itself gives scientific reasons for all the ghost activity while leaving room for the possibility of the paranormal, making it stand out from most of the horror-related shows.
1 Starsky And Hutch Fought Satanists
One of the iconic buddy-cop duos in pop culture, Starsky and Hutch helped pave the path for Lethal Weapon's Murtaugh and Riggs and the whole genre that came with it. While these two Los Angeles detectives usually spent their days handling the usual cop-show cases with their witty comments and idiosyncrasies, things got wild in the Season 3 episode, “Satan’s Witches.”
In the episode, Starsky and Hutch are taking some much-needed R&R at a cabin when they find out that their neighbors just happen to be Satanists who are going to sacrifice an innocent woman to the Dark Lord.