Television series
Mis muertos tristes
- Fantasy
- Supernatural horror
- Very dark
- Strange
Ema is a doctor who's spent sixty years refusing to feel anything for the dead she can see and hear. Her niece Julie feels everything, especially desire, and that's the problem. This is slow-burn, body-and-grief horror about repression cracking open — moody, sexually frank, and more interested in guilt than jump scares.
Should you watch it?
Watch it if you want slow-burn ghost stories where the scares come from grief, guilt and a family that will not stop talking to its dead, more than from jump-scare shocks.
Skip it if you bristle at explicit sexual content, since the niece's storyline leans into it hard and the disturbing material gets raw.
What it asks of you: Four episodes of about fifty minutes each, paced slowly, with dread that builds quietly in kitchens and corridors rather than arriving in bursts.
Not sure? Find tonight's pick in a minute.
If you liked this
Les Revenants2012
French series where the dead quietly return to an Alpine town, and everyone has to decide whether love outlasts death or just complicates it. Same hushed dread, same refusal to explain everything.
But Deliberately paced and unresolved by design — if you need answers by the finale, this will frustrate you.
Midnight Mass2021
Flanagan's masterpiece about faith, grief, and something ancient arriving in a small community wearing a benevolent face. The horror is theological as much as supernatural, and it earns every long monologue.
But Talky and unhurried — several episodes are basically extended dinner-table sermons before anything happens.
Veronica2017
A Spanish teenager opens a door she shouldn't with a Ouija board, and the fallout is grief, guardianship, and adolescent desire curdling into possession. Genuinely unsettling and beautifully shot.
But Based-on-true-events marketing aside, it's a fairly conventional possession film once it gets going.
Not sure tonight? Get a pick in a minute, starting from Mis muertos tristes
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
The Innocents1961
Same engine sixty-five years earlier: a woman who's spent her life suppressing feeling forced to confront a haunting that's inseparable from sexual repression.
A governess in a crumbling estate becomes convinced her charges are possessed by the dead — and that the haunting is entangled with repressed desire. Black-and-white, immaculate, quietly terrifying.
But Glacially slow by modern standards and leaves everything supernatural deliberately unresolved.
More like this (8)
Tigers Are Not Afraid2017
Mexican fairy-tale horror where orphaned children are literally haunted by the dead left behind by cartel violence. Ghosts here are grief made visible, not just scares.
But It's tender and devastating rather than frightening — go in wanting a fable, not a horror ride.
Servant2019
A grieving family, an unsettling nanny, and a presence that may or may not be supernatural — this show lives entirely in ambiguity and slow-building dread inside one claustrophobic house.
But It circles rather than resolves for long stretches, and the ending divides people badly.
The Haunting of Hill House2018
Ghosts as inherited trauma across a family, told with real formal daring — one episode is a single unbroken shot through decades of grief. Devastating and gorgeously constructed.
But Very melodramatic in places, and the sibling dynamics can feel overwritten if you're not already invested.
Curon2020
An Italian teen supernatural drama about a submerged town, doppelgängers, and secrets that won't stay drowned — moodier and stranger than its YA trappings suggest.
But The teen-drama scaffolding is more conventional than the eerie premise promises.
18992022
A multilingual mystery-horror series about passengers on a ship confronting things from their pasts that shouldn't exist. Ambitious, strange, and visually striking.
But Cancelled after one season on a cliffhanger, so you're committing to an unfinished puzzle.
Marianne2019
A French horror-thriller about a novelist haunted by a childhood demon that's escaped her fiction into reality — pulpy, gory, and unexpectedly moving about creative guilt.
But Uneven pacing and a small budget show occasionally in the effects.
Mushi-Shi2005
A doctor-like figure who mediates between ordinary people and invisible presences that infect a place — the structural premise of Ema's whole show, just rendered as gentle anime rather than horror.
A wandering healer investigates 'mushi' — ancient life-forms that bleed into human bodies and towns, causing strange afflictions. Meditative, gorgeous, episodic anime unlike anything else on this list.
But Extremely slow and contemplative, with almost no traditional scares or ongoing plot.
Jennifer's Body2009
Julie's fusion of the supernatural and the sexual, taken to its trashiest, most gleeful extreme — desire as literal possession, played completely straight-faced as camp.
A possessed teenager's sexuality becomes literally lethal in this gleefully trashy horror-comedy, cult classic now for its take on desire, monstrosity, and female friendship.
But Campy and jokey where Mis Muertos Tristes is somber — this is the same idea played for laughs and blood, not dread.
