The Walking Dead is a show full of surprising twists and turns. Fans never knew what would come next, even those who read the original comic book series. The writers always had something new up their sleeves to throw into the mix.
Over time, they mastered the art of storytelling with different kinds of episodes. Each episode was able to tell a unique kind of story. The writers even developed episodes with that fear factor and creepiness that didn't seem possible that far into the series. In this article, I will be going over some of those episodes that continued to surprise and terrify fans.
1. "Prey" (season 3 episode 14)
During the war between Woodbury and the prison, Andrea became torn when it came to choosing between Rick's group and the Governor's. She wanted peace between the two groups, knowing that there were innocent people on both sides. However, she soon found out what the Governor was truly like and she knew that there was no changing him. After uncovering the truth, she finally decided to choose to return to Rick's group at the prison.
In the fourteenth episode of the third season, Andrea made the dangerous trek to the prison with the Governor on her tail. The way this episode was shot was very eerie. It was like Andrea and the Governor were playing a game of deadly hide-and-seek. Andrea went from sneaking behind trees to lying in a field to hide from the Governor. But he still found her.
She even outran his truck that chased her to an abandoned warehouse. The warehouse was dark and quiet as the Governor searched for Andrea. Every little noise she would make brought the Governor closer to capturing her. Thankfully, Andrea would make it out and head to the prison. However, right when Andrea thought she was safe, the Governor would grab her from behind.
The end of the episode would show her captured in the same area where the Governor had held Glenn and Maggie. This episode had fans feeling uneasy throughout, wondering who would win the deadly game of hide-and-seek.
2. "The Calm Before" (season 9 episode 15)
During this episode, the Kingdom holds a fair to bring the communities together to trade and share in fun activities. It was the perfect place for Alpha to blend in among the new faces in the crowds without anyone recognizing her. To disguise herself, we are shown her scalping a woman from Hilltop, who was on her way to the fair.
She wears her hair and outfit, acting like a normal fairgoer. Ezekiel even approaches Alpha at the fair and speaks to her as if she were part of a connected community. Later on, we figure out Alpha's true intentions at the fair when she tells a scouting group about a new border she's marked.
We then see heads on pikes, sticking out of a hill in a line. Multiple people's heads are shown up close, and what makes it even creepier is how they display the reveal. The camera would show people at the fair looking for a specific person and then cut to that person's head on a pike. It was really chilling!
3. "Ghosts" (season 10 episode 3)
Carol was struggling with nightmares after Henry's death, so she decided to take caffeine pills to keep herself awake. Throughout the episode, we see Carol continue popping these pills and experience hallucinations of Henry. She even imagines Daryl telling her an entire story about his father, only for Daryl to deny telling her that story later on. At one point, Carol patrols the building and finds herself caught in a trap, dangling from the ceiling. She kills walkers and has an encounter with the Whisperers. However, when she tells the others this, they find no trail of Whisperers nearby.
Carol is left paranoid, and the audience is thrown into confusion. But at the end of the episode, a Whisperer is shown fleeing the scene. The audience finds out that the Whisperers were truly there and Carol wasn't hallucinating. She may have hallucinated Henry's appearance and Daryl's story, but the Whisperers were there. This was haunting to watch. To know that the Whisperers were truly there, but watching as the group struggled to believe Carol in her delirious state.
4. "Open Your Eyes" (season 10 episode 7)
After witnessing Alpha brutally murder his friends, Siddiq deals with severe PTSD in the form of flashbacks. Whenever he sleeps, he is pulled back to the moment he was forced to watch each of his friends' untimely deaths. While dealing with this, Siddiq also struggles to figure out why several citizens of Alexandria are falling ill to some kind of stomach virus. Dante, a new doctor to Alexandria, is there to help Siddiq, but he seems to struggle to keep up with the number of sick patients.
Throughout the episode, Siddiq seems to be in this daze as he's told about doing things he can't recall. This includes messing up medicines and so on because of his lack of sleep. Eventually, Siddiq finds out that the cause of the stomach virus is because someone messed with the water. At the end of the episode, it is revealed that Dante was the one who messed with the water, the medicine, and had been killing patients.
Dante was revealed to be the Whisperer who made Siddiq open his eyes and watch his friends die. Sadly, Siddiq found this information out too late and Dante killed him. This was a psychologically chilling episode for fans to watch.
5. "One More" (season 10 episode 19)
In this episode, Aaron and Gabriel go out on a run to find more supplies for the depleting Alexandria. They find a warehouse in their travels and a nice bottle of liquor, so they decide to indulge. The next day, Gabriel wakes up and notices that Aaron is missing. Another survivor who lives at the warehouse had taken him captive. The survivor then proceeds to make Gabriel and Aaron play a game of Russian roulette. They take turns either deciding to shoot themselves or the person in front of them. Every time one of them goes, they always decide to shoot themselves.
It was the survivor's intention to show that people were inherently selfish and that one of them would choose to shoot the other. However, after seeing that neither of them would do so, he decided to let them go. It seemed that this man was in the process of changing, but Gabriel killed him anyway. The two eventually found the man's brother tied in the attic and were told that he made their family play the same game.
6. "On the Inside" (season 11 episode 6)
This is one of the creepiest episodes in The Walking Dead, in my opinion. After escaping Alpha's horde, Connie is still paranoid and lacking sleep because she is afraid the Whisperers will find her. She and Virgil are trying to make their way to Alexandria while also trying to run away from potential Whisperers at the same time. They spot a house and decide to hole up there for the night.
Virgil had checked the house and deemed it safe, but Connie was still paranoid so she decided to check the house again. When she goes into the bathroom, she sees a pair of eyes peeking through a razor deposit slot in the wall. She freaks out and tells Virgil, and the audience is torn on whether or not she truly saw something since she's sleep-deprived.
However, fans were truly freaked out once Virgil and Connie became separated and chased down by humans on all fours. It seems that cannibals were living in the walls of the house and would hunt down whoever came inside.
7. "Variant" (season 11 episode 19)
Aaron, Jerry, Elijah, and Lydia are on their way to Alexandria to deliver supplies when they stop at an old Renaissance fairground. They stay there for the night to rest, and throughout the episode, we see creepy shots of walkers acting abnormally. We see shots of them grabbing the outer walls of the Renaissance fairgrounds, as if they are about to start climbing.
The only time we've really seen walkers climb was in the first episode of the show when everything was still new, but walkers hadn't climbed since then. At night, walkers sneak up on Lydia and Aaron while they are on first watch. They mention how they checked the whole place, and it was secure.
The group then notices that the walkers seem to be trying to fight back. This makes them believe they are being surrounded by Whisperers. However, Aaron soon kills a walker that had climbed up to where they were hiding and realizes it was just a walker. This surprised fans and made them question where these variant walkers came from, giving the episode a creepy feel.
The Walking Dead is streaming on Netflix right now.