7 Terrifying Episodes Hidden In Unscary TV Shows

6. Are You Now Or Have You Ever Been - Angel

Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its followers pioneered the genre of horror without horror. Both the Buffyverse and its inheritors in Charmed and Supernatural have managed a righteous scare or two – shoutout to Doug Jones and his freaky fairy-tale Gentlemen – but the focus has always been on character beats, well-written banter and plenty of interpersonal drama. Nothing wrong with that, as millions of fans and a genuinely startling corpus of fanfic can attest.

It was Angel, however, the slept-on Buffy spinoff, that gave us the idiom’s best straight horror story. Are You Now or Have You Ever Been is '50s horror worthy of Twilight Zone, with flawless period aesthetic, claustrophobic chills and an inescapable moral core. Every element cranks the tension, from the tight confines of the hotel setting to the immaculate sound design to its unflinching look at the worst of humanity: prejudice, hypocrisy and take-him-not-me moral cowardice.

David Boreanaz deserves a special shoutout. Often accused, not without reason, of dullness and flat affect, Boreanaz flips the script here, no longer the Tortured Hero™ but a disinterested immortal bearing witness to humans playing out their petty, predictable sins one more soul-destroying time. His final act, which could be taken as classic horror punishment for moral transgression, feels more like sheer apathy, with Our nominal Hero simply not caring enough to save the flawed and broken humans around him. Horror at its best is either moralist or nihilist. Are You Now or Have You Ever Been? contrives to be both.