John Kenneth Muir in his book Terror Television found that most of the American output of horror television programs were more aligned to science fiction with programs like The Outer Limits, fantasy with The Twilight Zone, and crime melodramas with Thriller with only Rod Serling's Night Gallery in the early 1970s being solely horror.
[2] Early horror television work did not have the budget for expensive make-up effects or multiple-camera set-ups which led to stories with more psychological plots and character-driven narratives than traditional monsters.
[3] Writer Nigel Kneale also expanded into television in the United Kingdom with his series The Quatermass Experiment, a hybrid of science fiction and horror, for the BBC.
Local stations used horror hosts such as John Zacherle and Ottola Nesmith to introduce movies from a series of 52 films called Shock.
[3] In the United Kingdom, Mystery and Imagination ran from 1966 to 1970 and featured hour-long adaptions of classic horror stories such as Dracula and Frankenstein.
[3] Supernatural themed soap operas also began appearing with Dark Shadows while the Canadian made Strange Paradise tried to emulate the shows format.
[7] Other series in the 1990s and early 2000s focused on secret societies and groups investigating the supernatural with Poltergeist: The Legacy, Sleepwalkers, The Others and FreakyLinks.