Monsters, vampires and witches increasingly populate TV series along with gore

As Halloween approaches, network TV schedules are getting spookier than ever. What’s with all the scary shows?

Thank “The Walking Dead” for being such a monster hit. On Oct. 13, the AMC series returned for a fourth season to 16.1 million U.S. viewers and stands as the top-rated entertainment telecast of the season among 18- to 49-year-olds-ahead of such hits as “The Big Bang Theory” and “NCIS.” It is easily basic cable’s most-watched series of all time and has a major impact on Canadian Sunday schedules.

Since, as radio wit Fred Allen once quipped, imitation is the sincerest form of television, several horror genre shows are lurching onto screens.

FX’s “American Horror Story,” starring Emmy- and Golden Globe Award-winner Jessica Lange, is in its third season with its current “Coven” story arc. The Vancouver-based Lifetime series “Witches of East End” launched just last month with Julia Ormond as the lead.

Toronto is home to two upcoming horror series: “The Strain,” an FX vampire drama from filmmaker Guillermo del Toro (“Hellboy”), and “Bitten,” a series about a female werewolf starring Laura Vandervoort (“Smallville”).

That series, based on Canadian author Kelley Armstrong’s “Otherworld” novels, finds werewolves mingling with unsuspecting humans. It premieres in the new year on Space.

Predating even “The Walking Dead” is HBO’s “True Blood.” That explicit drama unleashed vampires, werewolves and witches at audiences. A seventh and final season has been ordered for next summer. “The Vampire Diaries” is in its fifth season and this fall has spawned a spin-off, “The Originals,” a fantasy-romance centred on a bloodsucking New Orleans brood. In addition, the fourth season of the popular Showcase series “Lost Girl,” featuring all manner of beasties, begins Nov. 10.

TV hasn’t seen this many monsters, vampires and witches in almost 50 years. Back then, however, the genre was played for laughs. “Bewitched,” “The Munsters” and “The Addams Family” were basically all family sitcoms with Halloween twists. North American audiences, having just suffered through the Kennedy assassination, had seen enough horror on TV by the time these shows premiered.

Much more frightening were a couple of anthology series which date back even further into the “duck and cover” age of nuclear testing: “The Twilight Zone” and “The Outer Limits.” Along with “Alfred Hitchcock Presents,” they rattled viewers with a blend of realism and fiction as they crossed over into a dimension — as creator/narrator Rod Serling used to say in his “Twilight Zone” introductions — “not only of sight and sound, but of mind.”

As a cable drama, “The Walking Dead” is far more explicit and gorier than anything Serling could show on network TV back in the early ’60s. “The Strain” is supposed to push boundaries even more, with grotesque monster/vampires as well as other plagues unleashed on the public. FX entertainment president John Landgraf promises it will go further than “True Blood.”

“What ‘The Shield’ did for cop shows,” he says, “this will do for vampire shows.”

Old-school broadcast networks have not completely surrendered the horror turf to cable networks. NBC and Fox have pushed back by testing the limits of violence and graphic content on broadcast on shows such as “The Following” and “Hannibal.”

This brings us to “Dracula,” which premieres Friday at 10 p.m. on NBC and Global. The series stars Jonathan Rhys Meyers (“The Tudors”) as a McDreamy vampire in this tale set in London in 1896.

Paired with NBC’s season 3 premiere of “Grimm,” “Dracula” finds this new count disguised as an American inventor trying to come up with an elixir that will allow him to appear in daylight. There are gory scenes of torture over the first five episodes that seem cable scary.

NBC entertainment president Jennifer Salke admitted to reporters at the most recent Television Critics Association press tour that NBC has had to ramp up the gore to compete with cable. She feels it’s important, “in a world where these cable shows are beloved and infringing on real estate that was once network real estate,” to send a message to the creative community that they are still open for “big, risky, event kind of vision.” Especially at 10 p.m., where Salke says NBC is more willing to support a series that was “a little bit out there on the gangplank as far as content.”

NBC chairman Robert Greenblatt also sees Fridays as a night where networks can take more of a risk with genre shows. Last year right before Halloween they tested “Mockingbird Lane” there. Fridays have also been home to “Grimm.”

The Peacock network will continue to try to scare up viewers with a remake of “Rosemary’s Baby” as well as a new version of Stephen King’s “The Tommyknockers.” King’s “Under the Dome” was the No. 1 scripted series this summer on CBS.

How far will fourth-place NBC go with this horror revival? Says Greenblatt, “I’ll take any vampire fan I can get.”

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Bill Brioux is a freelance TV columnist based in Brampton, Ont.