Widow’s Bay scratched an itch a lot of us didn’t even know we had. A strange little town hiding all kinds of secrets, with each episode focusing on a different horror subgenre, and one big mystery slowly pulling everything together? Fantastic. And somehow, it also found time to be genuinely funny. One minute you’re watching Patricia (Kate O’Flynn) dance around like an absolute maniac. Then you catch a glimpse of the mirror and realize everyone around her is frozen in place with gaping, unnaturally widened mouths. The entire mood changes in an instant.
Widow’s Bay obviously proved just how well horror and comedy can work together when they’re done right. But it’s far from the first series to mix big laughs with genuine scares. If anything, it just gave the genre a fresh coat of paint. So, if you already burned through the season and are already craving more, here are five shows that do the horror comedy thing just as well, if not better.
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1
‘Chucky’ (2021–2024)
Chucky looking really old standing in a room looking into the camera in Season 3Image via SYFY
Don Mancini took a killer doll franchise that had already survived seven movies and somehow found a way to make it feel new again. The series begins when teenager Jake (Zackary Arthur) picks up a vintage Good Guy doll at a suburban yard sale, and soon after, people around the doll start turning up dead in gruesome ways. But this time, Chucky isn’t just running around killing people. He also takes Jake under his wing and tries to manipulate him into becoming a killer, too.
Of course, Chucky has always been one of horror’s funniest villains, and the show fully embraces that side of the character. Pretty much every scene with him is comedy gold. He’s constantly delivering unhinged one-liners like, “Hey kid, I’m gonna go kill your sister. Wanna come?” And each season gets even more ridiculous than the last. At one point, Chucky starts losing his immortality and slowly turns into a grumpy old doll with his hair falling out. In that very same season, he also ends up inside the White House terrorizing the First Family. It sounds completely insane on paper, but the show somehow pulls it off. In fact, that very season earned a perfect 100% critic score on Rotten Tomatoes!
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2
‘What We Do in the Shadows’ (2019–2024)
Harvey Guillen in What We Do in the Shadows Season 6 photoshootImage via FX
Based on the Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi film of the same name, this mockumentary follows four vampire roommates living on Staten Island. There’s Nandor (Kayvan Novak), a once fearsome warlord who can’t figure out modern technology; Laszlo (Matt Berry) and Nadja (Natasia Demetriou), a centuries-old married couple who constantly fight and bicker; and Colin (Mark Proksch), an energy vampire who feeds off people through endless rambling, pointless office chatter, bad jokes, or starting petty arguments. Guillermo (Harvey Guillén) is Nandor’s human familiar who’s been promised he’ll become a vampire one day. Until then, he’s stuck cleaning up the endless messes the vampires leave behind.
The horror is baked into the premise since these are, after all, undead bloodsuckers. But the show mines almost all of its comedy from how mundane immortality actually is. One of the best episodes has Laszlo running away from Jim the Vampire (Mark Hamill), an old adversary who’s been tracking Laszlo down over a century-old unpaid rent debt. Laszlo hides under the alias Jackie Daytona, a small town bartender whose entire disguise is a toothpick in his mouth, and it somehow fools everyone. In another episode, Nandor joins a bizarre vampiric cult to help vampires transition back to being human with activities like hula-hooping and tax-filing lessons.
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Collider Exclusive · Horror Survival Quiz Which Horror Villain Do You Have the Best Chance of Surviving? Jason Voorhees · Michael Myers · Freddy Krueger · Pennywise · Chucky
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Five killers. Five completely different ways to die — if you’re not smart enough, fast enough, or self-aware enough to avoid it. Only one of them is the villain your particular set of instincts gives you a fighting chance against. Eight questions will figure out which one.
🏕️Jason
🔪Michael
💤Freddy
🎈Pennywise
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🪆Chucky
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01
Something feels wrong. You can’t explain it — you just know. What do you do? First instincts are the difference between the survivor and the first act casualty.
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02
Where are you most likely to find yourself when things go wrong? Setting is everything in horror. Where you are determines which rules apply.
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03
What is your most reliable survival asset? Every survivor has a quality the villain didn’t account for. What’s yours?
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04
What kind of fear is hardest for you to fight through? Knowing your weakness is the first step to not dying because of it.
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05
You’re with a group when things start going wrong. What’s your role? Horror movies are brutally clear about who survives group situations and who doesn’t.
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06
What’s the horror movie mistake you’re most likely to make? Honest self-assessment is a survival skill. Denial is not.
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07
What’s your best weapon against something that can’t be stopped by conventional means? Every horror villain has a weakness. The survivors are always the ones who find it.
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08
It’s the final scene. You’re the last one standing. How did you make it? The final survivor always has a reason. What’s yours?
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Your Survival Odds Have Been Calculated Your Best Chance Is Against…
Your instincts, your strengths, and your particular way of thinking under pressure point to one villain you actually have a fighting chance against. Everyone else — good luck.
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Camp Crystal Lake · Friday the 13th
Jason Voorhees
Jason is relentless, but he is also predictable — and that is the gap you would exploit.
He moves in straight lines toward his target. He doesn’t strategise, doesn’t adapt, doesn’t outsmart. He simply pursues.
Your ability to keep moving, use the environment, and resist the panic that freezes most victims gives you a genuine edge.
The Crystal Lake survivors were always the ones who stopped running in circles and started thinking about terrain, water, and distance.
You think like that. Which means Jason, for all his indestructibility, would face someone who simply refused to be where he expected.
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Haddonfield, Illinois · Halloween
Michael Myers
Michael watches before he moves. He is patient, methodical, and almost impossible to detect — until it’s too late for anyone who isn’t paying close enough attention.
But you are paying attention. You notice the shape in the window, the car parked slightly wrong, the silence where there should be sound.
Michael’s power lies in the invisibility of ordinary suburbia — the fact that nothing ever looks wrong until it already is.
Your spatial awareness and instinct to map every room, every exit, and every shadow before you need them is precisely the quality Laurie Strode had.
You are not a victim waiting to happen. You are someone who already suspects something is wrong — and acts on it.
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Elm Street · A Nightmare on Elm Street
Freddy Krueger
Freddy wins by getting inside your head — using your own fears, your own memories, your own subconscious as weapons against you. That strategy requires a target who can be destabilised.
You are harder to destabilise than most. You’ve faced uncomfortable truths about yourself and you haven’t looked away.
The survivors on Elm Street were always the ones who understood what was happening and chose to face it rather than flee from it.
Freddy’s greatest weakness is that his power evaporates in the presence of someone who refuses to give him the fear he feeds on.
Your psychological resilience — the ability to stay grounded when reality itself becomes unreliable — is exactly the quality that keeps you alive here.
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Derry, Maine · It
Pennywise
Pennywise is ancient, shapeshifting, and feeds on terror — but it has one critical vulnerability: it cannot function against someone who genuinely stops being afraid of it.
The Losers Club didn’t survive because they were braver than everyone else. They survived because they faced their fears together, and faced them honestly.
You ask the questions others avoid. You look directly at what frightens you rather than turning away.
That directness — the refusal to let fear fester in the dark — is Pennywise’s worst nightmare.
It chose the wrong target when it chose you. You are exactly the kind of person whose fear tastes like nothing at all.
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Chicago · Child’s Play
Chucky
Chucky’s greatest advantage is that nobody takes him seriously until it’s already too late. He exploits the gap between how something looks and what it actually is.
You don’t have that gap. You take threats seriously regardless of how they present — and you never make the mistake of underestimating something because of its size or appearance.
Chucky relies on surprise, on the delay between recognition and response. You close that delay faster than almost anyone.
Your instinct to treat every unfamiliar thing with appropriate scepticism — rather than dismissing it because it seems absurd — is the exact quality that keeps you breathing.
Against Chucky, not laughing is already winning. You are very good at not laughing.
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3
‘The Curse’ (2023)
Nathan Fielder and Emma Stone in ‘The Curse’ on ShowtimeImage via Showtime
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Nathan Fielder and Benny Safdie‘s Showtime series follows Whitney (Emma Stone) and Asher Siegel (Fielder), a newlywed couple trying to launch an HGTV show about the eco-friendly, mirror-walled homes they’re building in Española, New Mexico. While filming a segment meant to make Asher look charitable, he hands a $100 bill to a young girl selling soda in a parking lot, then snatches it back the second the cameras stop rolling. The girl looks him dead in the eye and bluntly says, “I curse you.” From there, everything in Asher and Whitney’s lives starts going wrong.
It’s got all the social cringe comedy Fielder is famous for, but it also builds a genuinely compelling mystery, because the show never gives you a straight answer on whether the curse is real or if it’s all just an unlucky string of coincidences. That is, until the final episode. It’s one of the best finales of any show in recent memory, and it delivers that same gut-punch comedy-to-horror shift that Widow’s Bay fans loved, except it lands even harder here because the series spends nine episodes building up to it.
4
‘Twin Peaks’ (1990–1991)
FBI Special Agent Dale Cooper (Kyle MacLachlan) is possessed by Bob (Frank Silva) as he screams in his ear in an eerie red room in ‘Twin Peaks’ Season 2, Episode 21 “Beyond Life and Death”.Image via ABC
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Before any of the shows on this list existed, David Lynch and Mark Frost were already mixing horror and absurdist comedy in ways nobody on network television had tried. The show starts as a murder mystery focused on the death of homecoming queen Laura Palmer (Sheryl Lee). But from there, it quickly spirals into something much stranger involving demonic entities, alternate timelines, and extradimensional realities.
The series constantly swings between genuine dread and flat-out silliness, sometimes in the same scene. The Log Lady (Catherine E. Coulson) introduces herself by insisting her log witnessed the murder, and it’s played completely straight. Laura’s funeral turns into slapstick when the machine lowering her coffin malfunctions and sends it bouncing up and down above the grave, and it still doesn’t undercut the tragedy at all. This show was the exact blueprint for what worked so well in Widow’s Bay.
5
‘Shining Vale’ (2022–2023)
Image via Starz
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The opening title cards of Shining Vale point out that women are twice as likely as men to suffer from depression, that women are twice as likely to be possessed by a demon, and that the symptoms for both conditions are the same. That idea becomes the core of the series going forward. Courteney Cox stars as Pat Phelps, a once bestselling author stuck in a serious slump who moves her family into a haunted suburban house. Almost immediately, she starts seeing the ghost of Rosemary (Mira Sorvino), a 1950s housewife who murdered her own family in that same home, and who may or may not be trying to take over Pat’s body.
In Widow’s Bay, all the townspeople except for Mayor Loftis (Matthew Rhys) believe that the town is filled with supernatural occurrences. In Shining Vale, Pat is the only one who believes anything paranormal is happening, and she’s the one trying to convince others. Everyone around her assumes she’s just depressed. And for the horror fans, the show is packed with clever nods to classics like The Exorcist, Rosemary’s Baby, The Shining, Sinister, and more.
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