New Horror TV Shows to Stream This Halloween: ‘Teacup,’ ‘Uzumaki’ and More

This selection of shows from October’s annual parade of horror series will take you on a tour of places where the world appears to be out of control: a South Korea going through a religious frenzy, a Georgia farm under attack, a bucolic English village visited by aliens, a Japanese seaside town haunted by spirals. Just keep telling yourself it’s fiction.

‘Hellbound’

Based on an online cartoon, this Korean series on Netflix has a comic-book hook, repeated a time or two per episode: A trio of towering, golem-like figures materialize, heralded by cracks of thunder, and roast a human who has been identified as a sinner. This usually involves a lot of smashing and tossing about of people and vehicles. These scenes are kinetically satisfying — it is a Korean production, after all — and there’s something counter-intuitively adorable about the silent, hulking reapers. Directed by Yeon Sang-ho of the “Train to Busan” zombie films, “Hellbound,” whose second season premiered last week, is a solidly constructed supernatural thriller, with well-choreographed action that often features a tight-lipped lawyer (Kim Hyun-joo) who gets more use out of her police baton than her legal training.

The bam-pow does not dominate the show, however. The screenwriter Choi Gyu-seok, adapting Yeon’s 2002 webtoon, focuses less on explaining the supernatural happenings than on portraying a society’s reactions to a terrifying rip in reality. Those responses are bad and badder, running from coercive religious fanaticism to cathartic, mordant anarchy — parallels to current trends around the world are almost certainly intentional — while a few contrarians fight for rationality and free will.

The drama of ideas is talky and pitched between comic book and Philosophy 101, but there is enough inventiveness and feeling in the storytelling to keep you attuned to the show’s evocation of a world quickly going mad.

‘The Midwich Cuckoos: Village of the Damned’

When this mini-series premiered in Britain two years ago, it had the same title as the John Wyndham novel on which it is loosely based, “The Midwich Cuckoos.” For its American release, Acorn TV and Sundance Now (both will have the third of seven episodes on Thursday) tacked on the name of the cult-favorite 1960 film adaptation, “Village of the Damned.” The series is a solid, watchable piece of work, though it might have been better if they hadn’t reminded us of the chilling, compact, highly satisfying movie.

The story, if you are unfamiliar, begins with everyone in a British village blacking out; shortly after, every woman of childbearing age finds herself pregnant. The resulting children, as you might guess, are a scary bunch, with powers of mind control that represent an extinction-level threat. “The Midwich Cuckoos” handles the science-fiction aspects capably, and like the film, it has its share of quietly creepy moments. Filling out the expanded running time with a lot of agonizing about motherhood and parenting, though, feels a little precious when the story is about aliens getting Earth women pregnant. Focus!