30 of the most disturbing TV scenes ever

Abraham and Glenn meet Lucile, The Walking Dead

The last shot of The Walking Dead season 6 finale showed a leather-jacket clad maniac bashing in the brains of a mystery victim with a barbed wire-covered baseball bat from the point of view of said victim. And that was just the appetizer. When the zombie drama returned for season 7, we saw the entire scene play out in gruesome, disgusting detail. And that still wasn't even the most disturbing part! That's because after the identity of the victim (Michael Cudlitz's Abraham) was revealed and we endured Jeffrey Dean Morgan's Negan delivering blow after blow after blow to the skull, we had to watch something even worse, as the big bad moved on to a surprise second victim — Steven Yeun's Glenn. As if losing the fan favorite was not brutal enough, our last image of Glenn was his left eyeball popping out of his skull while the former pizza delivery guy–turned–postapocalyptic hero struggled to say his final words ("Maggie, I'll find you") to his devastated wife, all while choking on his own blood. Welcome to season 7, everyone! —Dalton Ross

The Red Wedding, Game of Thrones

As soon as the band at Edmure Tully (Tobias Menzies) and Roslin Frey's (Alexandra Dowling) wedding feast began playing ''The Rains of Castamere'' — a song all about what happens to anyone who dares to eff with the mighty Lannister clan — Catelyn Stark (Michelle Fairley) knew something horrible was about to happen. But, she couldn't have imagined the carnage that would follow: At the signal of her host, Walder Frey (David Bradley), a gaggle of supposed wedding guests pulled out weapons and began slaughtering all of Catelyn's friends and allies, including her pregnant daughter-in-law Talisa (Oona Chaplin).

A wounded Catelyn pleaded with Walder, begging him to spare her son Robb (Richard Madden) — who had married Talisa despite being promised to a Frey girl, thus inspiring Walder's revenge. But, the older man refused, leaving a shattered Catelyn to murder Walder's young wife — right before her own throat was slit. And here's the kicker: As she bled, Catelyn had no idea that her presumed-dead daughter Arya (Maisie Williams) was literally standing right outside of the Frey castle, thisclose to finally reuniting with her family. Those Starks really can't catch a break. —Hillary Busis

Damon Pope's revenge, Sons of Anarchy

Gangster Damon Pope (Harold Perrineau), the father of the girl Tig (Kim Coates) killed in his misdirected retaliation for Clay's (Ron Perlman) shooting, wanted an eye for an eye in the season 5 premiere. As gasoline was poured on Tig's daughter Dawn (Rachel Miner), who was being held hostage in an enclosed area in the ground, Pope had Tig chained close enough to watch — but far enough away that he could only wail powerlessly. Tig begged Pope to kill him instead. ''Know my pain, Mr. Trager,'' Pope said. Then, he tossed in the cigar he'd been smoking to burn Dawn alive. Watching the flames engulf her was horrifying, but hearing her scream ''Daddy!'' for the last time was one of the most traumatic moment on SOA. —Mandi Bierly

Human cello, Hannibal

As you might expect from a show centered on pop culture's most famous serial killer, Hannibal did not lack for gruesome violence. But the apex of the show's artistic approach to death came about halfway through season 1, when empathetic investigator Will Graham (Hugh Dancy) ran up against a musically-inclined murderer whose grotesque crime was enough to impress Hannibal Lecter (Mads Mikkelsen). Tobias Budge (Demore Barnes) might have only lasted an episode, but his transformation of a victim's body into a human cello will stick with us for a long time to come. —Christian Holub

Peter Rumancek's werewolf transformation, Hemlock Grove

Teen Romany Peter Rumancek (Landon Liboiron) goes through his awkward phase approximately once a month, triggered by the full moon. Any pop culture lover worth their weight in dog treats has seen plenty of wolfy changeovers, from the awesome '80s effects of An American Werewolf in London to Twilight's practically cuddly pack to the emolicious Vampire Diaries hybrids. But, considering Hemlock Grove was executive produced by torture porn master Eli Roth, it's no surprise Peter's shift was one of the most brutal, graphic, sickening phases ever envisioned. The crunch of bones and the sight of Peter's inner wolf literally bursting from within his body — only to eat the leftover human skin — well... let's just say it's enough to put us off nighttime walks in the woods indefinitely. —Lanford Beard

Head-turning sex, True Blood

Bill (Stephen Moyer) couldn't control his lust for Lorena (Mariana Klaveno), even though she'd once again outmaneuvered him. But, he could control whether she looked at him as he was above her — by turning her head 180 degrees around!! Not only did she show no sign of discomfort (besides the dribble of blood coming out of her mouth), but, she smiled. For a show full of sex and violence, this True Blood scene raised the bar for creepiness. —Abby West

Beecher takes a bite, Oz

Cover your eyes/groin: The second season opener of HBO's prison drama Oz contained a moment of aggression that still haunts to this day. Beecher (Lee Tergensen) is awakened in the middle of the night and commanded by his intimidating new cellmate to perform oral sex on him. Beecher obliges... right up until he bites off the tip of the guy's you-know-what and defiantly spits it out. It's that kind of behavior that will earn you a trip to the hole, and plenty of winces from viewers. —Dan Snierson

A delicious hunt, Yellowjackets

Yellowjackets didn't mess around. Before the show premiered, audiences knew to expect a story about a high school girls soccer team that's left to survive in the wilderness for 19 months after their plane goes down. What they didn't expect is that the series would open on one of its most gruesome scenes: One of the girls running for her life in the woods, seemingly hunted by her teammates, only to fall into a trap (and onto spikes). Her body was then drained of blood and...turned into dinner. From the very first episode, it was clear that this show was not going to shy away from the dark side of survival. —Samantha Highfill

Carter's pain and despair on the floor, ER

What's the only thing worse than our beloved Dr. Carter (Noah Wyle) being stabbed by a patient? It's having Carter collapse to the floor and see his intern, Lucy (Kellie Martin), bleeding to death from stab wounds on the other side of the room — one of the long-running medical drama's most chilling images. —Whitney Pastorek

The big reveal, V: The Miniseries

The aliens have come to destroy us, of course. But first, we're treated to their leader, Diana (Jane Badler), snacking on parakeets and ripping off her human skin to reveal the reptile underneath. —W.P.

Family shenanigans, The X-Files

The Peacocks are like any other close, loving American family...except for how they're inbred mutants, and mom lives under the bed. When Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson) rolled her out, the moment was so horrifying, Fox banned this X-Files episode from reruns. —W.P.

Poussey's death, Orange Is the New Black

Poussey Washington's (Samira Wiley) death took the harsh reality of life in prison seen on Orange Is the New Black to devastating new heights. During a peaceful protest, Poussey is accidentally suffocated by CO Baxter "Gerber" Bayley (Alan Aisenberg). To stop Suzanne "Crazy Eyes" Warren (Uzo Aduba) from being escorted to psych, Poussey intervenes only to be improperly restrained face down by Bayley. As the struggle continues, he puts all his weight on Poussey, so she is unable to breathe and suffocates. The senseless and horrifying death not only shocked fans, but started the prison riot that was the focus of season 5. —Alamin Yohannes

Dexter's Thanksgiving

Disturbing and gross things were nothing new on Dexter — sawed-off limbs, gruesome murders, a dead Rita (Julie Benz) bathing in blood. (R.I.P.!) Yet, one of the most troubling scenes of the whole series involved the least blood of all: season 4's tense Thanksgiving dinner scene. Not that it wasn't violent: Giving us a glimpse of life inside an abusive household, the episode depicted Arthur Mitchell (John Lithgow), a.k.a. the Trinity Killer, breaking his son Jonah's (Brando Eaton) finger and later choking him after he destroyed the urn containing Arthur's sister's ashes. As if that wasn't disturbing enough, the scene showed Arthur's repressed wife and daughter running to his aid when Dex (Michael C. Hall) threatened to kill him for his continued abuse of his family. We don't think we've ever been more thankful for our own families. —K.W.

Life after The Day After

If TV movies count, The Day After from the '80s is an honestly harrowing view of nuclear apocalypse: Pretty much everyone stumbles around and dies of radioactive fallout at the end. It's so harsh because it doesn't sensationalize anything. And, it's not like that (also scary) TV movie Salem's Lot, where you can be like, Well, vampire children floating up to windows at night isn't a real thing. Because, especially back then, a nuclear endgame could actually happen. —Joe Lynch

Bloody valentines, Supernatural

Over its 15 seasons, Supernatural had a handful of memorable openings. But if we're talking about gore, it's hard to top the couple that returns home from a date and starts making out, only to then begin eating each other. By the time the woman's roommate comes home and finds them, the man is ... still chewing. (Sorry!) Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles) would later discover that Famine (James Otis) was in town and the cause of all the bloody chaos. —S.H.

Needle time, The Real Housewives of New York City

There was this scene in a lost-footage episode of The Real Housewives of NYC where Ramona got Botox in her armpit, and it was extremely disturbing. It starts with the doctor inserting a huge needle into her skin — and that was just the numbing agent. Sonja was there for emotional support, but, she's the one who ended up needing a juice box so she wouldn't pass out. —Tanner Stransky

All of Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story

Let's be honest: absolutely everything about Dahmer — Monster: The Jeffrey Dahmer Story was disturbing, if not downright traumatizing. But one scene stands out among the rest, primarily because Dahmer's victim was just 14 years old, the killer's youngest known victim. After being groomed, drugged, and lobotomized, Konerak Sinthasomphone (Kieran Tamondong) manages to escape Dahmer's apartment and is found by neighbors (Niecy Nash, Dia Nash) who call police, desperate for their help. When Dahmer (Evan Peters) returns home, he calmly, eerily convinces officers that Sinthasomphone is his drunk 19-year-old boyfriend. The fear in Dahmer's eyes is palpable — he knows this could be the moment he's found out — but police try to keep their distance for (ignorant) fear of getting HIV or lice, even as they enter Dahmer's grungy, rotting-corpse-scented prison of an apartment where the body of another victim lies on the bedroom floor just out of sight. Sinthasomphone was eventually found dismembered in Dahmer's apartment. —Gerrad Hall

The massacre at Seattle Grace, Grey's Anatomy

When widower Gary Clark (Michael O'Neill) comes to Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital, he won't leave until he's killed the doctors he holds responsible for his wife's death — but, that doesn't stop him from trying to kill any surgeon he comes across.

Watching this two-episode shooter story on Grey's keeps you on the edge of your seat, but, one of the most hard-to-watch moments is when Clark shoots Charles Percy (Robert Baker), and then drags Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) out of her hiding spot under the bed to hold her at gunpoint. Clark asks her if she's a surgeon, and Bailey, being the quick-thinker that she is, lies and says she's a nurse so that her life is spared. —Laura Harold

Leland/Bob kills Maddy, Twin Peaks

Easily four of the most horrifying minutes ever to air on network television. Possessed by the evil spirit Bob (Frank Silva), Leland Palmer (Ray Wise) chases his niece Maddy (Sheryl Lee) around the living room as she screams in abject, blood-curdling terror. Over and over, we see the murderer shift from Leland to Bob, Bob to Leland. And, as only Twin Peaks' creator and the episode's director David Lynch could master, the scene alternates between disturbing realism and nightmarish surrealism. Growling like an animal, Leland/Bob punches Maddy, mauls her with his mouth, and fatally rams her head into a framed picture on the wall. It's simply astonishing that this scene made it past ABC's censors. —Missy Schwartz

The meat grinder, You

Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) is a practical guy. He's also a murderer. So when he needs to get rid of a body during You's second season, he thinks of Love (Victoria Pedretti), and specifically, Love's kitchen. The result is a montage that cuts back and forth between Love cooking a delicious meal and Joe using her kitchen to chop up a body. Yes, he even uses the meat grinder. And yes, we get a nice close-up shot of it. —S.H.

An old-school fight to the death, Deadwood

When right-hand men Dan Dority (W. Earl Brown) and Captain Turner (Allan Graf) go after each other on the filthy streets of Deadwood in the show's third season, it turns into a brutal, nearly five-minute-long fight to the death. They are drowned, bludgeoned, and (ugh) eye-gouged, and by the end of it all, you feel as exhausted and hollowed-out as they do. —K.S.

Kid casting an evil spell, The Twilight Zone

Kids are creepy. Sure, they can be all adorable and ruddy-cheeked, but as anyone who's seen The Shining or The Bad Seed can tell you, everything that makes them so cute can make them equally upsetting in a different context. And this classic Twilight Zone episode has perhaps one of the scariest tykes in all of TV history. Six-year-old Anthony is practically omnipotent. With a point of his finger and a scrunch of his brow, he can send you to the cornfields never to be seen again, or, as he does in the episode's most disturbing sequence, turn you into a monstrous jack-in-the-box with a human head. — K.S.

Fatal forced birth, House of the Dragon

Game of Thrones made its name as the dominant TV show of the 2000s with bloody, shocking violence — much of it directed by Miguel Sapochnik. But when it came to crafting the first episode of Thrones' much-anticipated follow-up series, Sapochnik focuses on a different kind of violence. Sure, the House of the Dragon premiere has gore to spare thanks to the kinetic jousting tournament, but the single most disturbing sequence takes place in the royal chambers, where King Viserys Targaryen (Paddy Considine) reluctantly orders his physicians to overcome the pregnancy difficulties of his beloved wife Queen Aemma (Sian Brooke) by forcibly removing his long-awaited heir from her womb. Sapochnik's camera does not shy away from the gruesome brutality of this forced birth. —C.H.

Night Gallery's earwig scene

If you don't like putting things in your ears, and you don't particularly like insects, it stands to reason that you would very much dislike ''The Caterpillar,'' the episode of Rod Serling's other irony-laden horror series Night Gallery, in which an earwig crawls into Laurence Harvey's ear canal and slowly drives him crazy. Luckily, they manage to get the thing out by the end of the episode. Wait, what's that you say? It laid eggs? ARRRGGGGGHHHH! —K.S.

Jack keeps his head and takes someone else's, 24

Jack Bauer (Kiefer Sutherland) always espoused an ends-justify-the-means philosophy, but we really didn't start to get it until that second season of 24, when he executes lowlife Marshall Goren (Carl Ciarfalio). Oh, and he decapitates the corpse to help establish cred. Heroic? Not so much. Just disturbing. —A.W.

Not-so-good hair day, Arrested Development

It was no surprise that Tobias (David Cross) would go get hair plugs, or, that something would go wrong. But, there was something especially biting about the callousness with which Lindsey (Portia de Rossi) meets the ever-worsening Tobias, as his body rejects the hair and starts shutting down. She makes him keep the hair plugs in so they can have a fundraiser! That's cold, even for AD. —A.W.

More plane trouble, Lost

We were just as disoriented and confused as the Oceanic 815 crash victims as we watched them stumble about the debris-strewn beach on Lost. And then, one of them — we'd later find out his name was Gary Troup (Frank Torres) — gets sucked into the engine, causing it to blow up, resulting in even more damage and dismemberment. We were sooo not prepared for that. —A.W.

The suitcase scene, The Americans

The slower the scene, the more painful the experience. In its third season, The Americans took things to another level when Russian spies Elizabeth (Keri Russell) and Phillip (Matthew Rhys) have to help get rid of a body. How'd they do that? Oh, just by slowly breaking many, many bones until said body fit into a suitcase. Watching tiny Elizabeth have to put her full weight into breaking a femur? That's an image you'll never forget. —S.H.

Town's feast, Criminal Minds

Criminal Minds is full of serial killers equipped with their own brutal methodologies, but Floyd Feylinn Ferell (Jamie Kennedy) pulls off one the show's most upsetting moves. Floyd is a cannibalistic serial killer who abducts women and kills them after force-feeding them fingers. During his interrogation, Floyd asks for a priest from his Florida community to speak to him and reveals that during a search party, Floyd fed one of his victims to Father Marks and all the Bridgewater residents who were there. Never forget Father Marks saying, "God is in all of us," and Floyd responding, "so is Tracy Lambert." —A.Y.

Sex with a pig, Black Mirror

By this point, Black Mirror has a well-burnished reputation as the premier sci-fi anthology TV series of the 21st century. But for all the star-making performances and dystopian twists that were to come over the course of multiple seasons and specials, the show still never got more disturbing than its very first episode, where a British Prime Minister (Rory Kinnear) is blackmailed into having sex with a pig on live television. You don't actually see the, um, action, but the shot of Kinnear walking up to a pig surrounded by cameras is hard to forget. —C.H.