"Before she brought you in, she made me promise that I would not harm you, that we would talk, and that I would exchange you for my wife's return. That is not gonna happen."
— Daniel Salazar preparing for a torture session
These examples really put the Fear in Fear the Walking Dead...
All spoilers on this page are left unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
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In General
- First off, there's the walkers. Secondly, it only took a few weeks to kill off pretty much everything. By Season 2, which is around a week or two in after the outbreak got rolling, and they're already resorting to firebombing the entire east and west coastlines to stop the infected. And as we know, their efforts to thin them out was in vain.
- Freshly turned zombies are particularly creepy cause they still look humannote , except they're slightly off due to their Zombie Gait and vacant cloudy eyes.
Season 1
- Griselda getting injured as the group tries to escape the rioting city. A broken leg is never pleasant to deal with in the first place, but in an apocalyptic world, it has become a death sentence.
- Nick recounting what he saw in the church after running from it and ending up in the hospital with Travis. He tells Travis in a hushed voice that his girlfriend Gloria was eating people. When Travis tries to reassure him it was the drugs making him see things, Nick seemed more frightened by that notion because it boils down to two options: either Nick really witnessed his girlfriend eating people, or that what he saw was his own mind going insane. Either option is terrifying to come to a conclusion about.
- The slow collapse of Los Angeles. And watching the power grid go out over the city, block, by block.
- Daniel ends up torturing Adams for information, by cutting the latter's arm and attacking what's inside. While we only see bits of it, the pain of this situation is spelled out in brutal detail:Daniel: The outer layers have less nerves. The deeper, the more sensitive. You need a steady hand.
- At one point, Nick and Strand are stuck in a hallway where the door is closed. Meanwhile, walkers are closing in on them. This situation is scary enough, but there is also the flickering lights, where one instance makes it look like they teleported a short distance.
- After Adams shoots Ofelia, we see a whole new side of Travis. He pummels the shit out of Adams until Madison tells him to stop. By this time, his knuckles are very bloodied. It's just so jarring to see this peaceful man suddenly become violent when the situation calls for it.
Season 2
- The plane crash that left all but one survivor dead or mortally injured. Chris has to Mercy Kill one survivor who has been pinned to his seat with his torso broken in half.
- The Hotel filled with zombies. Especially Alicia being trapped on one of the top floors with them roaming around.
- How Chris meets his end. After crashing the car with his new "friends", Brandon and Derek, he ends up incapaciated, and then gets shot in the head by his buddies.
- And when Travis learns of this, he goes batshit insane over Derek and Brandon to the point of beating them to death with his bare hands, and when a fellow hotel occupant tries to intervene, Travis slams his head with the door, and the guy dies from the wound soon afterwards.
Season 3
- The scene where a crow was eating a man's brains. WHILE THE MAN IS STILL ALIVE.
- Madison, Nick and Jeremiah finding Gretchen and her whole family murdered and turned.
- Nick and Jake set out to find Troy and discover him using the grenade launcher to guide a herd of walking dead toward the ranch. A wall of trailers and RVs is hoped to turn the herd, but it fails and the ranchers and natives evacuate to the bunker-like pantry. The pantry into which Alicia evacuated everyone doesn't have enough air for them all; she asks for those bitten to come forward. A dozen people are given morphine and euthanized. As the air gets thinner, People begin passing out and rising as the dead. The Slow reanimation of the survivors in the bunker is one of the many bone-chilling moments of the season. And Alicia being stuck in the bunker with them while unconscious just adds to the dark bleak tension.
Season 4
- Hurricanes often remind us how powerless we are against Mother Nature; now imagine that in an apocalypse without organized shelter, government aid and relief, or weather forecasting. Our biggest advantage against hurricanes is our ability to forecast them and give the people in the line of fire a chance to evacuate. Yet after the fall of society, survivors like Morgan's group are pretty much SOL. Add in walkers and you're in for a bad time.
- When John and Strand are stranded on a small island after the hurricane, perhaps the biggest threat to them is not walkers, but a hungry alligator who's been eating good in the storm's wake and knows there is trapped prey on the island.
Season 5
Season 6
- Teddy’s plan to end as much of civilization as he can with the nuclear submarine is completely bonkers and completely terrifying considering this madman is perfectly within reach of achieving such a goal. Pioneers, Saviors, Whisperers, not even the mighty hordes like the one commanded by Alpha even hold a candle to the utter devastation planned by Teddy. There’s always a chance for even a massive horde to be destroyed or lured away, and humans like Negan can be reasoned with (and Negan himself was known to team up with heroes against a common threat if it came down to it). The destruction caused by a submarine’s worth of missiles is enough to destroy the continent of North America, damming any survivors to try to eke out a living in a nuclear fallout that will last well beyond the end of their natural lives and beyond. That’s nothing to say if Teddy had enough missiles to take out his insane plan on the rest of the world.
- The finale doesn't skimp on the terrors of ten entire nuclear warheads wreaking hell on all of Texas.
- The opening credits doesn't even use the theme tune, only an ominous wail and the sounds of the nuclear warheads being launched. Teddy is the character present in the middle of the intro, which usually changes with each episode to highlight the season's anthology focus. He's grinning and has his arms outstretched, like he's proclaiming himself as some sort of dark messiah. And when the title appears, light suddenly illuminates the screen until it's completely white, meaning that you just witnessed a nuclear explosion up close.
- Utterly afraid of what’s coming once the missiles hit, Morgan and Grace ultimately decide to commit suicide, not wanting to try to live through the horrible events about to unfold. After years of surviving horrors and walkers, this is what drives our heroes to give up and decide it’s better to simply die than face what’s coming. Thankfully, the appearance of Rufus and Baby Mo changes their minds.
- Grace even says that as bad as past nuclear disasters like the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Chernobyl were, they had some precision or containment to them. This impending disaster will have no such mitigation, and will be even WORSE than those defining moments of horror in history. Chernobyl will not be inhabitable for another few thousand years; now apply this to TEN regions of the southern United States, and think about how Teddy still wasn’t satisfied with this.
- Dakota's death. She decides to die from one of the nuclear warheads detonating, and its initial blast reduces her to a hot, charred, ashen corpse. Which still stands. Because of that, many viewers have already labeled this scene as one of the most horrifying ways to go in the entire Walking Dead universe, even if she deserved it.
- By episode’s end, the remaining survivors who didn’t get evacuated by the CRM are left stuck in the heart of a now-destroyed Texas, left to somehow deal with the nuclear fallout. On top of the walker apocalypse already taking place. Unless they can somehow get away from the state, they’re going to have to live in bunkers and try to scavenge for whatever food and water they can find for the rest of their lives, provided they don’t succumb to the radiation.
- Even though Morgan’s group knew what was coming, Texas is a huge state likely full of survivors who didn’t have any idea that the missiles were approaching. They easily could’ve just been going about their day surviving or even enjoying peace in a fortified community, only for it all to come crashing down with no warning at all. And it’s entirely possible they’ll never learn why the missiles struck.
Season 7
- The state of Will, after he was pushed off a building by Strand, is bound to remind viewers of Glenn's demise from Negan. Half of his face is bloodied to the point where we can see his muscles like his face is made of raw ground beef, and the eyeball is exposed. Also, his bodily organs are scattered all over the place!
- This ends up becoming Strand's preferred form of execution as the season goes on. The only good thing is that the victims are dead on impact after falling several stories, but it's still a terrible way to go, especially when you know why you're being taken to the roof.
- Arno suffers a particularly messy death when Daniel turns the tables on him and lowers him in a cage to a horde of walkers. The cage has very little bars towards the bottom, so even though Arno tries to protect himself, he can do nothing but squirm until the walkers begin tearing him apart at the legs. It’s so bad that when Daniel finally raises him up, some of Arno’s legs have been stripped to the bone by the starving walkers.
- The radiation sickness that Charlie and John, Sr. fall victim to prove just how woefully unprepared our survivors were for the nuclear apocalypse. John, Sr. noted he was very careful and quick but was still afflicted with radiation burns. Most of the group’s supplies and protections were hastily put together and weren’t professional equipment, meaning even if you’re trying to eke out a careful living, unless you have said professional equipment, you’re just as likely to die of poisoning.
- Charlie’s condition quickly deteriorates within what appears to be days, and she becomes bedridden and loses her hair as she wastes away.
- Ali had been exposed to the same radiation almost as long as Charlie and much longer than John. If he hadn't been killed, he would have suffered through the same sickness. Even if Howard had been more merciful to him, he was doomed to die far too young.
- Strand becomes so paranoid and monstrous that his one follower who was loyal to him, Howard, is ultimately thrown off the Tower just because Strand believed John was the more committed member of his community. Even before this, Strand is so bad that he's shown having numerous people thrown off the roof on a whim.
- Alicia and Strand's bickering destroys the Tower and lures in an irradiated horde, and once they hit the Tower's flames, it will pollute the atmosphere to become complete inhospitable. It's no wonder the group is forced to flee, Teddy's victory becoming absolute in Texas - and keep in mind, he wanted to do this to the entire continent if not the world.
