7 Terrifying Episodes Hidden In Unscary TV Shows

4. The Mombasa Cartel - The Blacklist

For a police procedural, The Blacklist can deliver the darksome goods. The core premise of a list of anonymous master criminals offers a wide spectrum of very human Monsters of the Week, and the cast, anchored by James Spader in his sinister and stylish element, is unafraid to commit to the scares.

Slotting in at first in the Creepy Criminal Sweepstakes, narrowly edging out Tom Noonan’s superb Stewmaker, are the shuddersome Kincaids of The Mombasa Cartel.

Any sensible person queueing up a police procedural episode called The Mombasa Cartel would expect the baddies to be a cartel, perhaps from Mombasa! Here, the titular human traffickers are practically pushed offscreen by their Alaskan suppliers.

“Spooky family in the sticks” has been done to death in American horror. It’s our equivalent of the smiling hippie cults into weird sex and/or fire that evidently appear whenever you turn off a main road in Europe. As the poet hath wrote, however, ain’t what you do, it’s the way that you do it. The Kincaids, played by Phyllis Somerville, a never-better Carel Struycken and – spoiler incoming – apparent philanthropist Peter Fonda, meld mommy issues, taxidermy and '50s pop into TV scares better than anything since X-Files’ classic Home. The twists are also expertly done, leveraging the dangers of the Alaska setting, one character’s looming addiction and another’s wham-bam shock at the end to deliver 45 minutes of raw-nerve tension. If you’re looking for bite-size grindhouse horror on Netflix as the nights draw in, enjoy.