Television series

Les Revenants

Name: Les Revenants
Genre: Drama, Fantasy, Horror
Released: 2012
Cast: Alix Poisson, Ana Girardot, Anne Consigny, Clotilde Hesme, Constance Dollé

A hushed alpine town where the dead simply walk back into their old lives — not as monsters, but as husbands, daughters, schoolboys, quietly hungry for coffee and a bed. Les Revenants trades jump scares for dread that seeps in slowly, carried by Mogwai's aching score and faces that never quite trust their own relief. It's horror as elegy: patient, sorrowful, deliberately unresolved.

TVMaze rating

3.8

Should you watch it?

Watch it if you like slow-burning mysteries where the eerie stays quiet and grief matters more than the scares, and you're happy to sit with unanswered questions while a score by Mogwai does much of the talking.

Skip it if you need neat answers or brisk plotting, since this takes its time and leaves much of its logic open, with a bleak mood that lingers for long stretches.

What it asks of you: Sixteen hour-long episodes across two seasons, so it wants a long, patient commitment and steady attention, with quiet scenes that carry as much weight as the bigger moments.

Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.

If you liked this

The Leftovers2014

Damon Lindelof's masterpiece asks the same question — what happens to the people left behind when the impossible occurs — but stretches it across a wounded America, with the same refusal to explain itself and the same aching sincerity.

But It's even more oblique about its mysteries, and some viewers find the tonal whiplash between despair and dark comedy hard to sit with.

In the Flesh2013

British and criminally under-watched, it does the exact thing Les Revenants does — the dead coming home to families who've already grieved them — but through zombies, with more fury about what communities do to outsiders.

But Only two short seasons before cancellation, so you'll fall for it and then be left wanting more that never arrived.

Top of the Lake2013

Jane Campion's small-town mystery has the same waterlogged dread, the same sense that a community is haunted by what it won't say aloud, and performances just as unshowy and devastating.

But No supernatural element at all — this is grounded crime drama, so the eerie stillness comes from people, not ghosts.

Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Les Revenants

The wildcard

Something you would not have found on your own.

I Walked with a Zombie1943

Same premise decades ahead of its time: the dead returning not to terrorise but to expose the living's secrets, proving this mood is far older than prestige TV.

Jacques Tourneur's B-movie masterpiece already knew, seventy years early, that the walking dead are scarier as tragedy than as threat — a nurse in the Caribbean discovers a family haunted less by zombies than by buried shame and guilt.

But It's a 69-minute black-and-white studio picture with a modest budget — no atmosphere-by-committee, no Mogwai score, just shadows and suggestion.

Broadchurch2013

A death cracks open a tight seaside town's secrets, episode by episode, with the same unhurried, mournful pace and interest in how grief warps a whole community rather than one family.

But It's a straight procedural underneath the melancholy — no metaphysics, no returning dead, just very good, very sad detective work.

Fortitude2015

An isolated arctic town, ancient secrets under the ice, dread that builds for episodes before anything supernatural even confirms itself — it shares Les Revenants' patience and its taste for landscape as character.

But It swings harder into pulpy horror-thriller territory in later seasons, losing some of the quiet, literary restraint it starts with.

Twin Peaks1990

The show that taught television a small town could hide something uncanny beneath its ordinariness — Les Revenants owes it a real debt in mood, even if not in plot.

But Lynch's surrealism and dream logic are a different animal entirely — funnier, weirder, and far less interested in answers.

The Missing2014

A child vanishes, years pass, hope curdles into obsession — it shares Les Revenants' fascination with how the unresolved rot a family from the inside, told with the same French-set melancholy.

But It's pure grief-thriller, no ghosts, and the timeline jumps can be disorienting before you settle into its rhythm.

Marianne2019

Another French small-town horror-drama with real teeth, about a writer whose fiction bleeds into reality — same regional gloom, same unhurried dread, a rare true genre cousin.

But It's nastier and more conventionally scary — jump scares and a genuine demonic antagonist where Les Revenants prefers ambiguity.

Forbrydelsen2007

The Scandi original that popularised this exact register — a death, a grieving town, detectives who feel the cold as much as the audience does, all shot in that same grey, patient light.

But It's a whodunit at heart, methodical and procedural, with none of the ghosts or ambiguity that make Les Revenants so strange.

Mushi-Shi2005

Different culture, different medium, same instinct — folklore and grief treated with hushed reverence instead of horror-movie noise.

A Japanese anime about a wandering healer who tends to people plagued by ancient, half-supernatural spirits — episodic, unhurried, gorgeously quiet, it gets at the exact feeling of the uncanny living alongside the ordinary.

But No overarching mystery to chase, subtitled, and its meditative pace asks for real patience rather than momentum.

Warm Bodies2013

The same central ache — the dead longing to rejoin the living — played for warmth and comedy, showing how elastic the idea really is.

Take the exact premise — the dead wanting back into the lives and love they lost — and run it through a teenage romance instead of a mournful drama; it's funny, sweet, and a genuinely clever inversion of zombie logic.

But It's a YA rom-com with a PG-13 shrug where Les Revenants has dread — go in wanting charm, not chills.