10 Scariest TV Episodes Ever Made

Some of the most terrifying images I’ve ever seen, and some of the most heart-stopping jump scares I’ve ever experienced, have been in horror TV shows — particularly in self-contained episodes that play like their own little standalone horror movie, like the Sunset Cocktails party from Widow’s Bay. Some of the scariest TV episodes aren’t even from horror shows, like the cleanup episode of Chernobyl, where the workers are moving highly radioactive debris by hand.

10 Hush

Buffy The Vampire Slayer Season 4, Episode 10

The first season of Buffy was a bit too campy to really frighten its audience. The writers were more interested in doing their own little tongue-in-cheek riffs on their favorite horror movies than using that horror to put their characters through the emotional wringer.

But by the fourth season, Buffy was one of the best shows on television, perfectly balancing the horror with the drama. The season 4 episode “Hush,” in which the people of Sunnydale mysteriously lose the power of speech, is deeply disturbing, because it plays with the most powerful tool in a sound designer’s toolkit: silence.

9 Beach Reads

Widow's Bay Season 1, Episode 4

When a TV show shifts away from its established main character to shine a light on a supporting player, it can either turn out disastrous (see: Ted Lasso) or incredible (see: The Last of Us). In its fourth episode, “Beach Reads,” Apple’s brilliant horror comedy Widow’s Bay delivered the latter.

Shifting the focus to Kate O’Flynn’s Patricia as she hosts the Sunset Cocktails party, “Beach Reads” is an emotional rollercoaster, as we see her fail miserably, turn it around, and start to win everyone over. And that’s before the shocking twist ending deflates all the joy and reveals what’s really going on.

8 The Bent-Neck Lady

The Haunting Of Hill House Episode 5

The saddest episode of The Haunting of Hill House is also the scariest, and the most lovable character in the show is also the most tragic. Everyone else is deeply flawed and dysfunctional, but Nell was a sweet kid who just wanted her family to get along.

“The Bent-Neck Lady” goes back and reveals the source of Nell’s trauma: she’s been haunted by her own ghost all her life. The noose-wrapped spirit was terrifying enough on her own, but finding out who she was and how she got there made it all the more unsettling.

7 Teddy Perkins

Atlanta Season 2, Episode 6

After Jordan Peele’s Get Out revitalized the social thriller genre, Donald Glover did his own riff on it in his surrealist TV series Atlanta. Atlanta is technically a half-hour comedy, but it often felt just as much like a hard-hitting drama, and it bordered on full-blown horror in a couple of episodes, and season 2’s “Teddy Perkins” is the show’s creepiest installment by far.

Atlanta had a lot of memorable episodes, but none of them made an impression quite like “Teddy Perkins.” Glover’s portrayal of the title character is as mesmerizing as it is horrifying, and it makes for a self-contained horror masterpiece.

6 Lonely Souls

Twin Peaks Season 2, Episode 7

Just about any given Twin Peaks episode could be included on this list. The show introduced its most haunting setting — the Black Lodge — in just its third episode. But arguably the most frightful installment in the series is the season 2 episode “Lonely Souls,” where we first learned that Leland Palmer had been inhabited by the nefarious Killer BOB.

The death of Laura Palmer’s cousin, Maddy Ferguson, might be the single most unsettling sequence in the entire Twin Peaks saga. It still chills my spine to this day (and my spine ain’t what it used to be).

5 The Day Will Come When You Won't Be

The Walking Dead Season 7, Episode 1

The Walking Dead’s season 7 premiere was so relentlessly intense and excessively gory that it made a lot of fans quit the show and never come back. Following on from the season 6 finale’s cliffhanger, season 7 opened with a full hour of the series’ new big bad — Negan, played spectacularly by Jeffrey Dean Morgan — torturing and tormenting our beloved heroes for his own amusement.

It’s pure torture porn, switching between acts of physical torture (like beating Glenn’s eyeball out of his skull) and psychological torture (like forcing Rick to wrap his head around chopping off his son’s hand). “The Day Will Come When You Won’t Be” might not be very tasteful, but you can’t deny that it’s deeply affecting. It’s The Walking Dead’s answer to Hostel, or The Human Centipede.

4 Home

The X-Files Season 4, Episode 2

The X-Files had a lot of fun with the familiar tropes and conventions of horror cinema. In any given monster-of-the-week episode, they could throw Mulder and Scully into a stealth remake of The Thing, or a werewolf-infested episode of Cops.

In the season 4 episode “Home,” The X-Files toyed with the old trope of the inbred hillbilly murder family, seen in The Hills Have Eyes and The Texas Chain Saw Massacre. The X-Files didn’t get any scarier than this; this was the first episode to receive a viewer discretion warning.

Black Mirror Season 4, Episode 5

Usually, the scariest thing about a Black Mirror episode is the techno-dystopian social implications of the plot devices. In a world where memories are recorded, no one’s secrets would be safe. In a world where the 24-hour-a-day torture of a notorious criminal is a popular tourist attraction, we’ve all become just as evil as her.

But in the season 4 episode “Metalhead,” the scariest thing is the robot dog relentlessly hunting down Maxine Peake. This might be the most pared-back, minimalistic episode of Black Mirror. It boils down the A.I. debate to one simple question: why, in the name of all that is holy, would we willingly create something capable of killing us?

2 Living Doll

The Twilight Zone Season 5, Episode 6

Rod Serling’s seminal horror anthology The Twilight Zone is responsible for some of the freakiest visuals and most haunting plot twists in television history. There’s one where an alien race arrives with a cookbook full of recipes involving our precious human meat. There’s one where a climate crisis melts the human race off the face of the Earth.

The scariest Twilight Zone of all (and there’s a lot of stiff competition) is the season 5 episode “Living Doll.” This episode was a precursor to every creepy-doll movie from Annabelle to M3GAN to The Boy, and it remains the spookiest example of that now-overdone trope.

1 Open Wide, O Earth

Chernobyl Episode 3

Chernobyl isn’t technically a horror show, but it’s the scariest TV series I’ve ever seen. There’s no show about zombies or vampires or living dolls that terrified me as much as Chernobyl. The miniseries as a whole is a profound cinematic masterpiece, capturing both the sheer horror of nuclear fallout and the sheer corruption of the government cover-up.

Every episode of Chernobyl has some deeply unsettling moments, from the bird falling out of the sky as an ominous warning sign to the soldiers being forced to execute irradiated dogs. But the scariest episode of the series is the third one, “Open Wide, O Earth,” in which we see the desperate struggles of the manual cleanup of radioactive debris, and the real-life body horror of radiation poisoning as it rapidly takes hold of Jessie Buckley’s husband (and, after she foolishly ignores the advice of the nurses, takes hold of Jessie Buckley, too).