The 25 Scariest TV Show Episodes of All Time

Still thinking about that minotaur from last night's American Horror Story: Coven season premiere? The sight of Kathy Bates' decorating one of her torture victims with an enormous bull's head was one of many highlights in "Bitchcraft," the deranged return of television's creepiest show. Guess what, though? We've seen this Sunday's season four premiere of AMC's The Walking Dead already (episode title: "30 Days Without an Accident"), and it's equally memorable. All we'll say for now is this: It's raining zombies.

Now that American Horror Story and The Walking Dead are back in the game, TV's about to give horror die-hards plenty of "Oh shit!" moments and reasons to rewind those DVR boxes. It's a good thing, too, since the only thing resembling a new scary movie this month in theaters is the Carrie remake, and the jury's still out on that one. But what if episodes like "Bitchcraft" and "30 Days Without an Accident" aren't enough to satisfy your craving to shiver more than Miley Cyrus performing "Wrecking Ball" in the Antarctic?

That's where the 25 Scariest TV Show Episodes of All Time will be useful. Now you've got viewing options for the coming month's chilly, lonely nights.

TV show: Supernatural (The CW)
Air date: March 15, 2007
Streaming on Netflix?: Yes (Season 2, Episode 16)

The producers of The CW's Supernatural have yet to think of a monster, demon, or ghoul they didn't like enough to pit against siblings Sam (Jared Padalecki) and Dean (Jensen Ackles). In the clever "Roadkill," though, the boys encounter an inventive villain all the show's own.

Sam and Dean, driving down a deserted road, come across Molly (Tricia Helfer), a panicked and bloody woman screaming for help. As their luck would have it, their new gal-pal is being chased by madman/farmer/ghost Jonah Greeley (Winston Rekert), an evil spirit who murders one person every year, on the same day and at the same time.

Backed by Greeley's tragic and grim mythology, "Roadkill" is Supernatural at its creepiest and, most importantly, original.

TV show: Are You Afraid of the Dark? (Nickelodeon)
Air date: August 22, 1992
Streaming on Netflix?: No

Scared of clowns? Then do yourself a favor and keep it moving, because "The Tale of Laughing in the Dark" is all about that freaky-ass bastard pictured above. Any twenty- or thirtysomething who grew up on Nickelodeon's Are You Afraid of the Dark? is almost certainly having a panic attack right now, the result of bad childhood TV viewing memories getting dredged up. Sorry about that.

It doesn't take much to make clowns terrifying, yet Are You Afraid of the Dark? went the extra mile to ensure that Zeebo, the grinning antagonist of this Midnight Society metting makes any and all carnivals and circuses unbearable. There's Zeebo's piercing laugh. Zeebo's balloon. Zeebo's penchant for frightening kids through highly sinister phone calls. And, of course, the fact that Zeebo is actually the ghost of a Great Depression criminal who died while smoking a cigar. In other words, the quintessential Nickelodeon character.

TV show: Mad Men (AMC)
Air date: April 8, 2012
Streaming on Netflix?: Yes (Season 5, Episode 4)

Unless you're terrified that we all might be alone, fundamentally unable to know each other, Matthew Weiner's Mad Men isn't a scary show. It is unlike the other shows here, which is what makes "Mystery Date," from the show's fifth and strongest season, such a special experience. For the first and only time thus far, the period drama about afflicted ad men and women tapped a new vein: dread. A gristly real-life event forms the spine of the episode; eight nurses have been shockingly, inexplicably murdered by an actual mad man.

Terrible violence hovers over the whole of season five, like a knife ready to strike, and this early in the season, you don't know where it will fall. And so scenes like Peggy's late night in the office and Don's fever dreams alone in his apartment are underscored by suspense that's foreign to the show, but which works because of the careful writing and direction. (Watch for repeated and rhyming images.) Even non-Mad Men devotees can appreciate that. —Ross Scarano

TV show: Masters of Horror (Showtime)
Air date: October 28, 2005
Streaming on Netflix?: No

The list of directors involved with Showtime's Masters of Horror series suggests that it must be the single greatest horror show ever put on television—John Carpenter, Joe Dante, Takashi Miike, to name a few. In reality, though, creator Mick Garris's noble experiment (an anthology series in which an acclaimed horror filmmaker directs an original, hour-long film every week) was largely underwhelming, with icons like Tobe Hooper and Dario Argento reaching career-lows (at the time, rather) and tainting knockouts like Session 9director Brad Anderson's "Sounds Like" and Dante's "Homecoming."

Wisely, Garris called upon Don Coscarelli (Phantasm, Bubba Ho-Tep) to kick things off with the exceptional "Incident On and Off a Mountain Road," adapted from a Joe R. Landsdale short story. It's a down-and-dirty tale of survival, lead by actress Bree Turner's impressive performance as Ellen, a young woman stranded in a forest after a car accident and trying to evade a disfigured serial killer known as Moonface (John DeSantis). Think The Texas Chainsaw Massacre mixed with The Hills Have Eyes, but with the bonus of Phantasm villain Angus "The Tall Man" Scrimm in a co-starring role. Good times.

TV show: American Horror Story: Asylum (FX)
Air date: November 7, 2012 and November 14, 2012
Streaming on Netflix?: No

Fingers crossed that American Horror Story: Coven features another two-part episode. So far batting 1.000 with extended, split episodes, the AHS franchise's producers go all out when given more narrative space. First came season 1's "Halloween" (more on that later); last year, in the middle of American Horror Story: Asylum, the already unruly season kicked into head-scratch overdrive with "I Am Anne Frank," centered around a new Briarcliff inmate (played by Franka Potente) who claims she's the (previously thought dead) concentration camp victim.

That's the least mental of the two-part episode's lunacy, though—elsewhere, Dr. Thredson (Zachary Quinto) subjects his Lana (Sarah Paulson) to aversion therapy straight out of A Clockwork Orange, and serial killer Bloody Face's identity is revealed. Yet the money-shot comes when the full extent of former Nazi Dr. Arden's (James Cromwell) experiments on sex addict inmate Shelley (Chloë Sevigny) is shown. From beauty to beast...and vomit motivation.

TV show: The Twilight Zone (CBS)
Air date: May 4, 1962
Streaming on Netflix?: No

"The Dummy" isn't the greatest ventriloquist horror ever made—that honor goes to this segment in the seminal 1945 horror anthology Dead of Night. Essentially Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling's take on Dead of Night's standout section, "The Dummy" doesn't lose much of its predecessor's menace in translation.

Cliff Robertson plays Jerry, a ventriloquist and alcoholic in the twilight of his career; even worse, Jerry believes that his longtime puppet, Willie, is alive and calling the shots in their act. Is Jerry a raving madman, or is Willie really running the show? To keep at least a semblance of his sanity, Jerry tosses Willie in the trash and starts working with a new doll, "Goofy Goggles," but Willie, not long for the garbage can, has other plans.

Voiced by Robertson himself, Willie's squealing laugh and high-pitched taunts will seep into your head worse than one of those unavoidable One Direction songs. The same goes for the episode's closing image, a cruel joke of a switcheroo aided by some on-point makeup work.

TV show: The Walking Dead (AMC)
Air date: October 16, 2011
Streaming on Netflix?: Yes (Season 2, Episode 1)

At its best, The Walking Dead plays like a brisk George A. Romero zombie movie, and no episode conveys Romero's knack for executing intense, undead-heavy set-pieces quite like "What Lies Ahead," the AMC hit's season two opener.

After fleeing from Atlanta's Center for Disease Control, Rick Grimes (Andrew Lincoln) and his not-so-merry band of survivors head down a highway littered with abandoned vehicles. And then the RV breaks down. Since, you know, there's no Midas in the zombie apocalypse, they're unable to drive away once a massive herd of flesh-eaters slowly converges onto their resting place. What ensues is, bar none, The Walking Dead's scariest sequence (directed terrifically by Spike Lee's old friend and frequent director of photography Ernest Dickerson)—some characters hide beneath cars and others find themselves trapped in the RV as an endless stream of walkers corner them. And, yes, there are casualties.

Since Romero's lost his mojo (avoid his 2009 travesty Survival of the Dead at all costs), zombie movie lovers must rely on The Walking Dead to get their intestine-chewing fixes. "What Lies Ahead" doesn't make that seem so bad.

TV show: Hammer House of Horror (ITV)
Air date: November 29, 1980
Streaming on Netflix?: No

Most doppelgänger stories revolve around the recently discovered new guy systematically trying to ruin the original person's life. Hammer House of Horror's "The Two Faces of Evil," on the other hand, doesn't have time for such slow-burning dread. Why marinate the dead chicken when you can just rip it apart, limb from limb?

On a nice countryside drive with his family, a man encounters a hitchhiker wearing a yellow raincoat—upon closer inspection, the vagrant looks just like him, except for his oily skin, rotting teeth, that one long and pointy brown fingernail, and those hissing sounds coming from his mouth. As dude quickly learns, his double wants nothing more than to eliminate him, by any means necessary.

"The Two Faces of Evil" thrives on its morbid surprises, but we'll tease you with this telling image of what's to come.

TV show: Tales from the Crypt (HBO)
Air date: June 10, 1989
Streaming on Netflix?: No

This Christmas, in between viewings of Jason Eisener's divine holiday short "Treevenge," track down a DVD copy of Tales from the Crypt's first season and watch "And All Through the House." The HBO's show's second-ever episode is a fast-paced and sinister triumph directed by Robert Zemeckis (Back to the Future, Forrest Gump), who revamped one of the segments from the excellent 1972 British anthology film, also titled Tales from the Crypt.

As in all the best E.C. Comics stories, the main character in "And All Through the House," an unhappy housewife (played by Mary Ellen Trainor), is a terrible person. She's materialistic, a bad mother to her young daughter, and, worst of all, cold-blooded murderer, having just killed her husband on Christmas Eve. Little does she know, though, that an escape mental patient (Larry Drake), dressed in a Santa Claus outfit, is prowling around outside her house, has seen everything, and isn't interested in calling the police.

Nothing says "Yuletide cheer" like this handsome face.

TV show: American Horror Story (FX)
Air date: October 5, 2011
Streaming on Netflix?: Yes (Season 1, Episode 1)

The craziest TV pilot ever made? Our vote goes to American Horror Story's debut episode, an onslaught of batshit ideas, bizarre editing, overbearing "scary" music, and wonderfully weird imagery. While introducing the season's central family, the Harmons (Dylan McDermott, Connie Britton, Taissa Farmiga), co-creators Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk made sure to let curious viewers know just how demented their show would get.

Simply titled "Pilot," American Horror Story's inaugural hour throws damn near everything but the "Piggy Man" killer at the screen, starting off with a tightly directed opening in which the little girl-monster in the Murder House's basement offs a couple of mean-spirited, pre-teen twins. Before "Pilot" ends, you've met the show's S&M ghost, nosey and abrasive neighbor Constance (Jessica Lange), and Larry the weirdo burn victim (Denis O'Hare). Plus, you've seen how the elderly housekeeper (Frances Conroy) looks like a gorgeous sex kitten (played by Alexandra Breckenridge) in Ben Harmon's adulterous eyes and been subjected to the show's now-standard usage of jump cuts, dreamlike cinematography, and morbid sense of humor.

"Pilot" was also AHS fans' first sampling of the show's amazing opening credits sequences, introduced without any warning or signals—the warped music just begins, along with a barrage of what-the-fuck visuals. At first, you can't tell if it's part of the show, a surrealistic dream sequence, or something else. All you know is that it's equally badass and mesmerizing.

TV show: Fringe (Fox)
Air date: December 9, 2010
Streaming on Netflix?: Yes (Season 3, Episode 9)

If you had to categorize the criminally slept-on Fox series Fringe, you'd probably call it "science fiction," thanks to stuff like parallel dimensions and alternate timelines. On occasion, though, Fringe dabbled in horror, with the results often making fans wish Agent Olivia Dunham (Anna Torv) and cohorts Peter (Joshua Jackson) and Walter Bishop (John Noble) would drop the heady algorithms and go full-blown Friday the 13th: The Series.

Television doesn't get much sicker than "Marionette," the heartwarming tale of a scientist's efforts to resurrect his dead lover, Amanda, by removing people's organs and stuffing them into his deceased boo's corpse, which is strung up on wires like a puppet. One particularly indelible image: Amanda's stringed-up and lifeless body performing ballerina dance moves.

TV show: Thriller (NBC)
Air date: June 6, 1961
Streaming on Netflix?: No

The Twilight Zone is universally recognized as the greatest genre anthology series of all time, and rightfully so. But the most underrated one? Thriller, the horror-centric program hosted by Frankenstein's monster himself, Boris Karloff, and remembered for presenting knockout scare-fests like "Pigeons from Hell," widely considered to be Thriller's crowning achievement.

No arguments here. It's the quintessential "creepy old house" story: Two brothers happen across an old, seemingly desolate mansion on a swampy plantation, decide to spend the night in it, and encounter a cavalcade of supernatural nightmares come to life. "Pigeons from Hell" satiates horror lovers of all kinds, from those who appreciate subtler frights (i.e., Robert Wise's The Haunting, The Strangers) to folks who prefer all-out insanity.

Directed by John Newland, Thriller's best episode offers quieter jolts (creaking doors, bumps heard from unseen rooms) and in-your-face visuals, like bloody-headed ghosts armed with hatchets, ready to dismember. Though it's uneven pacing and suspect acting have dated "Pigeons from Hell" some, it's primal terror remains effective.

TV show: Are You Afraid of the Dark? (Nickelodeon)
Air date: October 2, 1993
Streaming on Netflix?: No

If you never played "Ghosts in the Graveyard" as a little kid, we're very sorry. A much cooler and more tense version of hide-and-seek, you'd designate one friend to to be the "ghost," who'd then hunt down everyone else, nab someone and turn he or she into the new "ghost," and restart the cycle. Nothing like giving your pre-teen peers heart palpitations on a warm summer night.

Naturally, Nickelodeon's Are You Afraid of the Dark? based an entire episode around that concept. In "The Tale of Old Man Corcoran," two young brothers befriend a group of adventurous peers after moving into a new neighborhood. The crew's favorite pastime is playing hide-and-seek in the local graveyard, where, per the town's lore, the cemetery's deceased groundskeeper, Old Man Corcoran, still marauds around playing his harmonica.

Not only the scariest Are You Afraid of the Dark? episode, "The Tale of Old Man Corcoran" is also home to the show's greatest third-act twist, a real whopper that M. Night Shyamalan would later remix. We'd like to believe that Shyamalan's entire career is based around Are You Afraid of the Dark?

TV show: The Twilight Zone (CBS)
Air date: October 18, 1985
Streaming on Netflix?: No

Though interesting in theory, the 1980s resurrection of The Twilight Zone is three seasons' worth of spotty television, with just as many winners (the Bruce Willis-led "Shatterday," for instance) as there were ill-advised misfires (the cheesy remake of the O.G. Twilight Zone's classic "The After Hours"). And then there's "Nightcrawlers," a visceral and oppressively bleak sneak attack directed by the great William Friedkin (The Exorcist, The French Connection).

"Nightcrawlers" hints at what Friedkin would later convey in his 2006 feature film Bug—world-crushing paranoia. Its central character is Price (Scott Paulin), a neurotic Vietnam vet frantically telling people inside a roadside diner about how the ghosts of his former unit, "The Nightcrawlers," are after him. He and his comrades were "sprayed" with some kind of substance that allowed them to make things appear with their mind, like the T-bone steak Price wishes onto the diner's grill.

"Nightcrawlers" isn't one of those sentimental, moral-driven Twilight Zone episodes—it's a violent, waking nightmare, one that culminates with a wild finale in which Price's "Nightcrawlers" prove their validity in massacre fashion.

TV show: The Twilight Zone (CBS)
Air date: April 4, 1963
Streaming on Netflix?: No

In 1963, when The Twilight Zone was set to begin its fourth season, Rod Serling was ready to test viewers' endurance. He and CBS expanded the episode duration's to a full hour, rather than the usual 30-minute blocks, to replace the dropped series The Nurses mid-season. For the most part, the move was a success, resulting in a few Zone high-points that benefitted from having more narrative room to breath, including a superb Dennis Hopper leading the ghost-of-Hitler parable "He's Alive," one of Serling's greatest TV scripts.

And then there's "The New Exhibit," one of the show's most horror-minded entries. It's shit-your-pants fodder for people who can't walk past Madame Tussaud's with both eyes open. In it, Martin Balsam stars as Martin Senescu, a wax museum employee who rescues five of his favorite wax figures before the museum gets shut down, those of infamous grave robbers Burke and Hare and serial killers Jack the Ripper, Henri Désiré Landru, and Albert W. Hicks. And, because it's what killers do (even inanimate ones), Martin's new prized possessions, stashed in his basement, eviscerate anyone who dares fuck with their owner.

Props go to the episode's makeup department, who covered the five actors you see above (yes, those are real people) in enough face-cake to make them look creepily waxy.

TV show: American Horror Story (FX)
Air date: October 26, 2011 and November 2, 2011
Streaming on Netflix?: Yes (Season 1, Episodes 4 and 5)

Now that Hollywood has given up on horror in October (next year's fifth Paranormal Activity movie won't improve matters, either), people craving scares in the month of Halloween fortunately have something new to anticipate yearly—an especially freaky American Horror Story episode airing on or around All Hallow's Eve. Co-creator Ryan Murphy has said he's going to take the show's holiday episodes seriously, and in AHS' jump-off season, he made good on that promise.

A two-parter that aired over two weeks, "Halloween" officially brought American Horror Story: Murder House into its own. Whereas the three previous episodes were randomly, though awesomely, bizarre, "Halloween" gave the showrunners the chance to focus on the season's best subplots—namely, the aftermath Tate's school shooting incident, the origins of that S&M spectre, former home owner Dr. Montgomery's heinous experiments, and how anyone who dies in the Murder House (i.e., Ben's late mistress, Hayden) doesn't stay completely dead.

In the American Horror Story universe, Halloween is the day when ghosts can roam free, given a 24-hour reprieve away from their designated place-of-haunt. Thus, "Halloween" is an apparition free-for-all.

TV show: The Twilight Zone (CBS)
Air date: June 10, 1960
Streaming on Netflix?: Yes (Season 1, Episode 34)

Ask anyone whose childhood included long, miserable days spent inside Macy's or Sears while his or her mother shopped for tacky clothing—department stores mannequins are goddamn creepy. The way their lifeless eyes seem to follow your every move, accompanied by those painted-on smiles. A happiness that's empty, soulless. Their arms stuck in upward positions, as if they're waiting for just the right time to attack.

The Twilight Zone creator Rod Serling tapped into that shoppers' unease in his script for "The After Hours." Marsha White (Anne Francis) is looking for a gold thimble—a present for her mother—inside a vast department store when she's directed to the ninth floor, a vacant space whose only occupants are numerous mannequins. Which begin to talk to Anne, and taunt her. And a few of them look exactly like the employees who solicited her downstairs.

And you thought Mannequin 2: On the Move was horrifying.

TV show: Hammer House of Horror (ITV)
Air date: October 11, 1980
Streaming on Netflix?: No

Being that Hammer Film Productions was involved, the British anthology series Hammer House of Horror was never not going to kick ass. The legacy forged by the likes of Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing, in classic films like The Curse of Frankenstein (1957) and Dracula: Prince of Darkness (1966), was on the line. And, boy, did the series deliver.

Sadly for fans of hardcore horror, the series only lasted one season, but it left behind a slew of gems. Case in point: "The House That Bled to Death," a haunted house tale that begins no differently than, say, The Amityville Horror or Poltergeist. A family moves into a new home, learns about the massacre that happened inside long before they entered, and begin to experience a variety of freaky shit.

But "The House That Bled to Death" can lay claim to one incredible sequence that no Amityville-like motion picture has yet tried to top: At a child's birthday party, while everyone's happily eating cake, a ceiling pipe undoes itself, points one of its opened ends down upon the kiddies, and spews out blood all over them. How's that icing taste?

TV show: Buffy the Vampire Slayer (The WB)
Air date: December 14, 1999
Streaming on Netflix?: Yes (Season 4, Episode 10)

Last year, Joss Whedon cemented his legacy for horror fans with The Cabin in the Woods, his and director/co-writer Drew Goddard's cleverly meta horror-comedy that's destined for cult classic status. Fourteen years beforehand, however, Whedon exercised his first-rate scare tactics on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, writing an episode that's moody, supernatural, and creepy as fuck, all without any dialogue.

Written and directed by Whedon, "Hush" brings forth "The Gentlemen," a group of Nosferatu lookalikes who steal voices, rendering their victims speechless as the smiling ghouls rip out their heart. Pretty gruesome stuff for The WB, huh? Somehow, Whedon convinced the network to go for it, and the resulting hour (well, 44 minutes minus commercials) is a beautiful, dark, twisted fairy tale of horror.

TV show: The Ray Bradbury Theater (HBO)
Air date: June 4, 1985
Streaming on Netflix?: No

The late Ray Bradbury was a literary titan, a major influence on writers like Stephen King, and a diverse storyteller able to work magic in science fiction, fantasy, and horror. "The Playground," made into a terrifically nerve-rattling episode of his anthology TV series The Ray Bradbury Theater, holds up as Bradbury's scariest contribution to horror fans' nightmares.

William Shatner plays Charles Underhill, a single dad who refuses to let his young son hang out in the local playground, due to the childhood traumas Charles experienced at the hands of a bully named Ralph and his friends. Charles is so messed up by his past, in fact, that he keeps seeing Ralph's ghost, until one day when he finally mans up, heads to the playground, and confronts his demons. Too bad for him, though, those demons don't like happy endings.

The episode's director, William Fruet, fortunately, loves psychological terror, keeping the dread on high alert until the episode's surreal and oppressively downbeat climax.

TV show: Tales from the Crypt (HBO)
Air date: July 17, 1990
Streaming on Netflix?: No

Put Geraldo Rivera into a slasher movie/haunted house hybrid and you've got the Tales from the Crypt episode "Television Terror." Morton Downey, Jr. gives excellent "asshole" as talk show host Horton Rivers, an arrogant tool who, hungry for ratings, breaks into an abandoned "murder house" with his cameraman and leads his viewers through the locale's bloody history.

Any older readers who were duped into watching Geraldo idiotically open Al Capone's vault will find "Television Terror" especially gratifying. For everyone else, though, it'll most likely leave you shaking. Rivers' night quickly goes to hell, with the house's undead murderers showing up for their own 15 minutes of fame, which Rivers is more than happy to keep documenting, as long as people keep watching. They do, of course, even as Rivers meets a grisly fate in the episode's brutal and bleak ending.

TV show: Doctor Who (BBC)
Air date: June 9, 2007
Streaming on Netflix?: Yes (Series 3, Episode 11)

For all the accolades received and legacies forged throughout its 40-plus-year run, Doctor Who is rarely seen as being particularly frightening. Funny? Yes. Thrilling? Definitely. Intelligently written, strongly acted, and purely addictive television? No doubt. But scary? Not quite—well, save for the 2007 episode "Blink," guest-starring a young, then-unknown Carey Mulligan as the primary targets of nightmare-fuel-providers known as the Weeping Angels.

The hook is clever: the Weeping Angels, or stone statues, are powerless whenever you look directly at them, but look away, cover your eyes, or even blink and they'll turn your day into a drag. And in that, the Weeping Angels defy everything you know about horror movies, how a film's scariest moments cause people to shield their eyes or redirect their eyes away from the screen. In "Blink," doing so spells your doom.

TV show: Night Gallery (NBC)
Air date: March 1, 1972
Streaming on Netflix?: No

After The Twilight Zone ended in 1964, Rod Serling gave the genre anthology format another shot with Night Gallery, though much less effectively. Hamstrung by NBC executives, Serling didn't oversee Night Gallery with the same kind of freedom he'd had with CBS and Zone—furthermore, his heart wasn't in it as much. As a result, only a handful of Night Gallery episodes left lasting impacts anywhere near even second-tier Zone installments, but one episode is scarier than damn near all of The Twilight Zone. And, of course, it was written by Serling himself.

Serling adapted "The Caterpillar" from author Oscar Cook's original short story. It's pure E.C. Comics material—a douchey British civil servant named Macy (Laurence Harvey) moves in with a married older man and his young, beautiful wife, whom Macy endlessly eye-fucks. Thinking he needs to kill the man in order to bag his wife, Macy pays someone to leave an earwig on the guy's pillow—earwigs are tiny insects that love human ears, veraciously burrow their way into them, and, since they can't see anything inside a person's head, the bugs feed on the brain as they seek an exit.

Basically, if an earwig enters your skull, you're toast, but only after experiencing the worst kind of drawn-out, agonizing pain. Which, that's right, Macy himself eventually meets firsthand, leading to a final twist, delivered through a wonderful piece of dialogue, that's sick, macabre, and brilliant.

TV show: The Twilight Zone (CBS)
Air date: February 26, 1960
Streaming on Netflix?: Yes (Season 1, Episode 21)

It's not the most original idea in the world: A woman keeps seeing a duplicate of herself in a bus station. Nope, not too dissimilar to Fyodor Dostoevsky's The Double, or any other doppelgänger story ever written. But The Twilight Zone's "Mirror Image," written by Zone mastermind Rod Serling, has one distinction that's unique amongst other stories of its kind: It's a mind-fucker that's just as creepy, if not creepier, than the brain-scrambling works of David Lynch.

And it was made way back in 1960, no less, once again proving that Serling was so far ahead of his time. "Mirror Image" is the scariest Twilight Zone episode because it's so damn eerie, with director John Brahm slowly laying out its psychological unease, letting the viewer's mind work at the same pace, and just as unsettlingly, as protagonist Millicent Barnes (Vera Miles). Indeed, just off the in the distance, seen in the bathroom's mirror, as the lavatory door is closing, that's another Millicent, smiling malevolently at the Millicent we're following. Commence shivering.

Millicent's cocky ally, Paul (Martin Miner), laughs off her seemingly nutty explanation that she's being tormented by her evil clone from another, much less pleasant dimension. As "Mirror Image" ends, though, Paul's in for a rude awakening—without spoiling anything here, we'll just say that it's exactly what you're thinking, but staged with an off-kilter visual sense and a haunting, otherworldly score. The final shot isn't exactly a gut punch—the sensation it causes feels more like head trauma.

TV show: The X-Files (Fox)
Air date: October 11, 1996
Streaming on Netflix?: Yes (Season 4, Episode 2)

Chances are, you've seen The Hills Have Eyes, either Wes Craven's original or Alexandra Aja's remake, and maybe even Wrong Turn and its straight-to-DVD sequels. And what do those movies have in common? Families of deformed backwoods maniacs. Another shared trait: None of them are half as scary as the most unnerving The X-Files episode of them all, "Home."

The show's first episode to receive a viewer discretion warning, "Home" introduces viewers, alongside agents Mulder (David Duchovny) and Scully (Gillian Anderson), to the Peacock family, a pack of hideously disfigured farmers who never leave their Pennsylvania home. Oh, and they like to kill, whether it's decapitating intruders or leaving triple amputees in their household to rot and die slowly.

Doesn't sound scary to you? Well, tough guy, imagine being kidnapped by those pretty folks in the image above and forced to watch them hack your limbs off. Feel free to cringe now.