Five of the best modern horror series ranked (including Swarm)

4. Swarm

Swarm premiered on Amazon Prime just last month, and it kind of crept in under the radar for me. As soon as I started to hear social media begin to whisper about it, I pulled up the first episode and was immediately hooked.

Let’s start with what is absolutely the very best thing about this horror series: the acting performance of Domique Fishback as the mentally damaged and very murderous Dre. If we look at Dre non-objectively, what we see is someone who is basically a serial killer. And serial killers are generally NOT sympathetic.

But, Fishback manages to show so much hurt and vulnerability just in her facial expressions that she somehow manages to tug at our heartstrings. She horrifies us…but, somehow she also makes us want to hug her.

Swarm jumps into horror series territory in the very first episode, but first it lets us develop feelings for Dre, who really has nobody except for her sister Marissa. She and Marissa are both ardent fans of pop superstar Ni’jah, and the first sign that Dre is really a bit unbalanced is when she gets a credit card simply to purchase two top-tier tickets to a Ni’jah concert. Wanting to surprise Marissa by taking her to the show, she is understandably hurt when Marissa chooses to instead go on a trip with her boyfriend, whom Dre insists is cheating on her.

When Marissa commits suicide, Dre spirals (for lack of a better term), and kills several people in quick succession. The murders (particularly the first one) are brutal and shocking, and Dre’s mental state only goes downward from there.

Swarm is a very good horror series, populated with interesting, often fun characters, and each episode has a different feel to it from the others. Honestly, the only reason it didn’t rank higher with me is because I felt like the final episode was a bit of a let down. It started out really strong, with Dre forming an unexpectedly rich relationship with an intelligent young woman named Rashida. But the final fifteen minutes or so of the story felt very rushed, and I actually didn’t even realize it was the last episode of the series at first.