The Walking Dead

This is Frank Darabont's take on a world gone quiet except for the dead walking through it. Andrew Lincoln leads a group of survivors trying to get through each day without being caught by a walker, but the show spends just as much time on the people left standing. Communities form, each with their own laws, and those laws do not always agree.

The scares here are not all jump ones. Yes, there are walkers, and yes, they turn up when you least want them to. But the nastier fear is the human kind, the sort where you cannot tell if the group offering shelter is friend or threat until it is too late. I would put it in the middle of the scale, more dread than horror, but it lingers.

It is a good one for a long stretch of dark evenings rather than a single sitting. Eleven seasons is a proper commitment, so put the kettle on and settle in for the long haul rather than expecting to finish it by midnight.

It is worth knowing this was the first television series in its franchise, and with 177 episodes on AMC, it clearly found an audience willing to stay for all of them.