Why you should be watching this horror series: The Following

Horror and thriller tv series are a mixed bag, aren’t they? Some are just hard to follow, or not really scary, while others are exactly right – so, how can you weed out the good from the bad? The Horror Lounge is happy to help our horror-loving guests by suggesting a few great, genuinely scary series that you might have missed out on.

This is going to be a continuing series of articles, so if you are looking to up your horror series game, keep watching our site for future recommendations. For our first selection, we will be talking about The Following, which originally aired on Fox. You can currently watch it on Tubi or commercial-free on Netflix.

When The Following series made its debut on Fox in 2013, I was immediately on board. From the very first scene, this series demonstrated that it was going to be lean and mean, with very little fat to bog things down.

Notorious serial killer Joe Carroll (James Purefoy) is in prison, after being busted by FBI agent Ryan Hardy (Kevin Bacon), who fell in love with Joe’s wife Claire in the process of investigating him. But the charismatic Carroll has built himself a top secret cult of followers, who are willing to do anything for him. Joe constructs a plan that takes a lot of patience, planting his followers in place over a span of nine years.

During this time, Joe’s followers, including Emma, Jacob and Paul, settle into fake lives. Emma is the live-in nanny for Joe’s son Joey, who lives with Claire. Jacob and Paul live next door to Sarah, who was Joe’s final victim, saved by Ryan before she could bleed out. Sarah believes the two men to be gay, and they have become her trusted friends – which is unfortunate for her.

As Joe’s plans begin to fall into place, his followers begin committing shocking acts of violence involving references to his favorite author, Edgar Allan Poe.

When the violence happens, it is hardcore and brutal, and soon Ryan, Claire, and her little boy Joey are in the line of fire. This is one of those series where you just don’t trust anyone outside of the main characters. And the gore is pretty impressive too, particularly for a network television series.

The cast is strong, and the story is great…which is no surprise, since the series was created by Kevin Williamson, who wrote Scream, The Faculty, I Know What You Did Last Summer, Cursed, Sick and Teaching Mrs. Tingle. He originally wrote the story outline as a sequel to Scream (it would have been Scream 3), but tweaked it enough to make it a standalone series instead.

The Following is intense and fast-paced, despite the use of many flashback sequences that give us the history of Joe, Ryan, and Claire. It helps that the sequences are all short and quick, always bringing us back to the current action before we can relax. Often flashbacks can make the story drag, but not in this case.

As with many series, the first season is the strongest, but I was entertained and kept at the edge of my seat for all three seasons of The Following.