CBS All Access, 3:00 a.m. ET
SERIES PREMIERE: Developed by Kevin Williamson of Dawson’s Creek and Scream fame, this new CBS All Access series transplants and freely adapts familiar fairy tales into modern-day New York. This first season, unfurled weekly, the inspirations are Little Red Riding Hood (take that, The Deuce!), The Three Little Pigs and Hansel and Gretel. Stars include Billy Magnussen, James Wolk, Spencer Grammer (in left at picture) and Kim Cattrall. The opening episode is moody but vague – the opening credits, however, are a perfect scene-setter, an eerie equivalent of unsettling children’s book fairy-tale animation.
TCM, 8:00 p.m. ET
What better way to spend Halloween night than to wallow in some vintage Vincent Price horror films? (Answer: There are few better ways. The Price is right – and in terms of holiday wallowing, consider it Walloween.) The evening begins at 8 p.m. ET with 1953’s House of Wax, continues at 9:45 p.m. ET with 1961’s The Pit and the Pendulum, and keeps going with 1964’s The Masque of the Red Death (11:15 p.m. ET) and 1959’s House on Haunted Hill (1 a.m. ET). And saving the best for last, it ends (at 2:30 a.m. ET) with one of my favorite horror films of all time: the darkly comic, brilliantly inspired 1973 film Theatre of Blood, in which Price plays a ham Shakespearean actor who takes revenge on his critics by killing them in gruesome ways inspired by plays from the Bard. Diana Rigg co-stars, and the two of them, together (pictured, in one of their many disguises), are magnificently malevolent.
FX, 10:00 p.m. ET
Halloween is a fitting night to check in with a series called American Horror Story – even if this current season, Apocalypse, is apocryphal, at least in a biblical sense. Especially since one of this year’s villains has just outed himself as the Antichrist. (Which reminds me of that old, irreverent Biff Rose ditty, “Uncle Jesus and Antichrist.” But I digress…