10 Scariest Episodes of The Walking Dead Ranked

For over ten years now, the flagship series has been terrifying and riveting audiences with its gory take on life in a zombie apocalypse.

Halloween may be over, but the spooky season never ends for fans of AMC's The Walking Dead. For over ten years now, the flagship series has been terrifying and riveting audiences with its gory take on life in a zombie apocalypse. While recent seasons haven't capitalized as hard on the horror elements that drove the show to mainstream success, the zombies continue to scare and revolt.

Now in its tenth season, the show has been going back to its roots with a larger emphasis on the horror of it all. For fans looking for a scary diversion, here are the top ten scariest episodes of The Walking Dead, ranked.

10 JSS

Our band of survivors are far from being strangers to human-on-human combat, having already faced off against The Governor's forces and the cannibals at Terminus by this point in the series. But it's still something of a shock seeing a band of humans who are so cavalier with murdering fellow survivors. Such is the situation when the Alexandrians face off against the fearsome Wolves in the Season 6 episode "JSS."

It's a top-notch hour of television and features a whole lot of bloodshed, but it's the complete lack of empathy towards their victims that make the Wolves such a chill-inducing threat. That, and their mutilated foreheads.

9 Spend

Oh, poor Noah. You were never going to last long. Not long after arriving at Alexandria, a few members of the Grimes gang head out with the cowardly Nicholas and Alexandrian leader Deanna's son Aiden on a run for supplies. While most of the episode is straightforward zombie-slaying, the group finds themselves in a hairy situation after an accidental explosion draws dozens of walkers to them.

The shambling antagonists become a big problem in the tight quarters of the building the heroes are raiding, leading to a suspenseful sequence in a revolving door that culminates in hands down the most disgustingly gory death in the entire series: Noah being slowly torn apart by walkers while Glenn is forced to watch. This one makes the list for that death scene alone, but the surrounding episode is tense and suspenseful to boot.

8 A

Scary doesn't always have to involve the characters being under threat. Sometimes it's the reaction to that threat that makes a sequence frightening. Such was the case in Season 4's "A," wherein the audience learned just how far Rick Grimes would go to protect his band of survivors.

While the climactic confrontation at Terminus is genuinely nerve-wracking, nothing in the episode is quite as disturbing as watching Rick Grimes bite a large chunk of flesh out of the neck of an attacker. Shivers, every time.

7 The Calm Before

For a few seasons now, The Walking Dead lacked the essential element of genuine shock that highlighted earlier seasons. It had been a long while since a significant death (despite Season 8's All Out War arc), villains had been lacking in bite and it seemed like the show was treading water. Then came the penultimate episode of Season 9, ending with one of the scariest and most gut-wrenching sequences the show had employed in years.

After pushing the Whisperers too far, Alpha (the leader) establishes a border between her land and the land of the United Alexandrians, Hilltoppers and Kingdom civilians. The border, however, was composed entirely of the severed heads of fan-favorite characters like Tara and Enid, as well as Carl Grimes stand-in Henry. The juxtaposition of showing people searching for their loved ones at the Alexandria Fair and then cutting to their severed heads on pikes was brutal, heartbreaking, and downright terrifying.

6 Last Day on Earth/The Day Will Come When You Won't Be

Many fans might disagree, but Season 6's finale "Last Day on Earth" and it's followup "The Day Will Come When You Won't Be" are easily two of the most nail-bitingly suspenseful episodes the series has ever offered.

From the reveal in "Last Day on Earth" of Negan and the far-reaching magnitude of his forces to the punishingly brutal payoff of who was on the receiving end of his game of Eenie Meenie Minee Mo, these two episodes represent The Walking Dead at its most brutal and terrifying.

5 Guts

The first season of any television show is always going to be the roughest, but The Walking Dead managed to shirk some of its growing pains with nifty setpieces and spine-tingling scare sequences. One of its earliest successes came in episode 2, appropriately titled "Guts." Trapped in a building with walkers flooding the streets outside, the survivors employ an idea that will become a staple of the series: covering themselves in walker entrails to successfully walk amongst the dead.

While everything goes according to plan at first, things take a turn for the terrifying once an unexpected storm comes along, washing Rick and Glenn clean of their disguise. It's tense, pulse-pounding television and sets the standard for what audiences can expect from the show going forward.

4 Evolution

The Walking Dead has always been chock-full of chill-inducing villains, from the cannibals at Terminus to the psychotic Saviors. But none so far have been as downright scary as it's latest group of evildoers, The Whisperers. Wearing the skins of the undead as a way of blending into the herd, the Whisperers make their grand debut in Season 9's midseason finale "Evolution." And what a debut it is.

Trapping the Alexandrians in a fog-covered graveyard (a welcome shoutout to classic zombie cinema), the Whisperers appear and disappear within a herd of walkers with ease, making every encounter with a zombie a tense showdown. In a break from the comics, they even manage to dispatch everyone's favorite zombie-slaying kung-fu master: Jesus. The graveyard sequence stands out as the scariest of Season 9, and a grim showcase of how deadly the Whisperers can be.

3 No Sanctuary

This episode leans far more heavily on the action elements the show excels at rather than the horror it's known for, yet it still manages to be quite scary at the same time.

The opening trough sequence is white-knuckle terror all the way through (and features some truly gag-inducing imagery) and the escape of the Grimes gang that takes up the rest of the episode is as frightening as it is wholly exciting. Thank god for Carol and her fireworks!

2 Beside the Dying Fire

Season 2's finale found The Walking Dead embracing its zombified roots with an episode that's about as close to Night of the Living Dead as the show ever got. Characters were killed off left and right (RIP, most of the Greene family) as the survivors at Herschel's farm found themselves in the path of a zombie herd.

The group is eventually forced to flee the safety of the farm they had called home for most of the season, which is precisely when the episode drops its scariest truth bomb on the audience and the characters alike: everyone is infected. From start to finish, the episode is downright terrifying.

1 No Way Out

The best-laid plans of mice and men often go awry, as the old saying goes, and boy is that the case in the Season 6 midseason premiere "No Way Out." After accidentally bringing a monstrous herd of zombies down on the gates of Alexandria, Rick and company find themselves trapped within the walls of the gated community with hundreds upon hundreds of snarling walkers. Employing the zombie-guts trick once again, the episode kicks into high gear with one of the scariest and most disturbing sequences the show has ever offered.

First, Jessies' son Sam is eaten by walkers. Then Jessie follows suit. Then Ron, Jessies son, pulls a gun on Rick. Michonne dispatches the psycho kid, but not before he lets off a shot that hits Carl directly in his eye. It's a horrifying escalation that just keeps getting worse and worse, and it unquestionably propels the episode to "Scariest TWD episode of all time" status.