Alien: Earth brought the dreaded xenomorph – and a host of other grotesque, extraterrestrial creepies – to the last place we wanted to see them. It, along with 2024’s solid Alien: Romulus, returned the franchise to its roots of scary things in small spaces while largely ignoring the greater lore of the prequel films. Earth doesn’t demand new viewers to know about black goo, Engineers, or whether to count Prometheus as a Christmas movie.
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Alien isn’t the first horror franchise to find new life on television. Chucky brought back Child’s Play and expertly combined all of its various plot threads and characters. The Purge expanded the film series’ lore by showing what happens between annual nights of crime. And Ash vs. Evil Dead gave fans three more seasons of Bruce Campbell fighting Deadites while covered in bathtubs worth of blood. A few other popular horror franchises have might similarly benefit from the TV treatment. Here are five we’d like to see.
5) The Conjuring
The Conjuring series has been going since its initial, eponymous entry in 2013, and it has since exploded into a multi-franchise continuity that includes Annabelle, The Nun, and half a dozen sequels. 2025’s The Conjuring: Last Rites ends the series proper, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the whole universe has to end. The world is full of hauntings both famous and obscure that could provide ample material for a TV show, which could follow either a long-form or episodic format. Each season could be about a single case, or the should could follow an anthology or monster-of-the-week pattern.
By splitting off from the Warrens, a series could happen outside the movies’ 1970s-to-1980s setting. Reports of supernatural shenanigans respect neither temporal nor national borders, so this project has no limits to its setting.
4) [REC]
Could a fully found-footage TV series work? If the annual release of V/H/S movies is any indication, maybe. While the [REC] series had already abandoned the diegetic-camera format by its third entry, the first two movies are exemplars of the subgenre, and it would make sense to keep it for a series – especially since found footage is far less prevalent now than when Rec 2 came out.
We wouldn’t want to see another mysterious outbreak shutting down an apartment building like in the original movies, but the same dark and claustrophobic vibes would work equally well in a new setting. And the franchise’s Demon Worms could turn up anywhere, honestly.
3) Predator
Predator, like Alien, is in the middle of a recent resurgence thanks to solid entries like 2022’s Prey and 2025’s Killer of Killers. Predator has an advantage, however, in that it’s more flexible with its settings.
Prey and Killer of Killers both show the Yautja’s repeated visits to Earth. They’ve been coming here for centuries, at least as early as 841, and the pool of time periods and countries is vast. And that’s just on this planet; a Predator series could take the hunters to other solar systems to take on weird, alien beasts or even intelligent extraterrestrials with their own weapons and tactics.
An anthology format would work best to make the most of the possibilities built in to Predator, but a longer-form story about a single hunting trip – possibly in the future, when we have lasers – would be cool, too.
2) Saw
Take away the games and gore, and the Saw series is, at its heart, a mystery-thriller. Longtime fans know going in that some twists are going to happen: a secret culprit may be revealed, the timeline isn’t what we thought it was, that guy wasn’t really dead, and so on. Saw fans love to develop and discuss theories, which is the sort of engagement that long-form television was made for.
A Saw series need not even involve the core characters of the movies. Later entries like Spiral and Jigsaw show that John Kramer’s works and philosophy have broken containment, so a standalone story would work just fine. We’d hope for something similar to Saw II, with a group of characters in a location facing a series of traps while trying to figure out who’s behind it all. Saw is at its best when it’s most contained. The original, in which the two protagonists spend the whole movie trapped in a bathroom, is still one of the most beloved entries.
1) The Thing
John Carpenter’s 1982 classic The Thing is one of the few sci-fi horrors that can stand up with the likes of Alien and Predator. It’s all the more confusing, then, that other than a 2002 video game and a 2011 prequel, a franchise has more or less failed to develop.
It’s not for lack of trying, actually. In 2002, the Sci-Fi Channel planned a miniseries, Return of the Thing, with showrunner Frank Darabont (writer and director of 2007’s The Mist), but the network called it off before filming could happen. That story would have sent the shapeshifting alien to a desert community in New Mexico, which is, perhaps, just a single order of magnitude less isolated than Antarctica.
While sending the Thing to a more densely populated area certainly raises the stakes, it might also rob the story of the elements that make the original (and, to an extent, the prequel) work so well. The appeal and drama come from being trapped with people you know well and not being sure which of them to trust.
That’s not to say we’d set a Thing series at the South Pole again, but we’d still want the events to take place in a “bottle.” If people can just call the authorities and tell them that the Thing is running around, where’s the tension? Have a sample of the Thing break containment in a secure laboratory, Alien: Romulus-style, and then we’re talking. And if you do it right, viewers will spend as much time debating who’s human and not between episodes as they still do about the original.
Which horror series would get you tuning in each week? Be sure to let us know in the comments.
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