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The Call is Coming from Inside the Starship: Horror in Star Trek

By Ames

Gather ‘round the campfire… or at least that one saute pan that’s always on fire in Neelix’s kitchen. We’ve got some scary stories to tell from some of the spookiest Star Trek episodes out there. Okay, most of the time, the episodes that go for that horror-movie style of terror really don’t get there (many of them DO end up on our Bottoms lists), but that doesn’t mean there’s nothing spine-tingling about Trek. Space is a fearsome place! Full of scary monsters and things! In fact, there’s one right behind you! Aaah!

So this week, A Star to Steer Her By is holding a flashlight under our chins, putting on our raspiest voice, and telling some frightening tales in the dark. Check out all the scariest moments below and listen to this week’s terrifying episode (things get spooky at 1:14:28), if you dare. After all, what have you got to be afraid of?

[images © CBS/Paramount]

“Catspaw”

Star Trek’s first and so far only Halloween-specific episode is also possibly one of the least scary. I suppose the dead man that beams onto the pad and keels over is icky, but the trio of witches, the generic creepy castle, the giant black cat, the goofy shapeshifting, and the tiny puppets are all more campy and weird than spooky.

“Wolf in the Fold”

There’s a serial killer on the loose, and we swear to Apollo it isn’t Scotty no matter how many times he’s spotted with a bloody knife in his hand next to a dead body. Both our horror-adjacent episodes in TOS are from Lovecraft associate Robert Bloch, so it’s no wonder the twist is that somehow Jack the Ripper is some kinda incorporeal entity that feeds on fear. Is that scary? I can’t even tell.

“Conspiracy”

Okay, if nothing else, this season one episode of The Next Generation has a chest burster that even H.R. Giger might be impressed by. That gorey puppet inside Remmick’s torso is just naaaasty! The rest of the plot circles around a pretty standard horror trope of an Invasion of the Body Snatchers kind of thing, with these little cockroaches taking over the bodies of even the highest up in Starfleet.

“Remember Me”

How claustrophobic are you? Do you mind enclosed spaces? What if you were in a room that was slowly closing in on you? In “Remember Me,” it’s not a room that’s closing in on Dr. Crusher, but the whole universe that’s constricting down to nothing. Also, people are just vanishing, never having existed in this alternate universe. It’s a psychological mindgame that’d drive a lesser mind insane.

“Night Terrors”

Most of “Night Terrors” is Deanna floating around in the dreamspace blandly calling out for someone, but you might forget that the rest of this episode is chock full of really offputting moments from everyone’s sleep-deprived minds! There’s Picard thinking the turbolift is going to crush him, Riker seeing a snake in his bed, Worf nearly killing himself, and the icing on the horrifying cake: a bunch of cadavers sitting stock straight around Bev!

“Identity Crisis”

Update 1/26/24: How could I forget to include “Identity Crisis,” which features such a creepy use of the holodeck that I’m still on edge about it? When Geordi removes all the known elements from a holoimage and there’s still a shadow on the wall, it’s disconcerting! And then the humanoid shape making the shadow appears, my skin crawls every time! It’s so effectively unnerving that I had to add it to the horror list!

“The Game”

Another Invasion of the Body Snatchers sort of story, seen from the point of view of Wesley, the last hold out on the crew to turn. Sure, it’s a pretty simple story about paranoia and the spread of something analogous to a disease and… video games or whatever, but watching every single one of your friends and family members turn into mindless drones that then hunt you down all across the ship is horror movie fodder right there.

“Realm of Fear”

We’ve talked before about what a terror box the transporter is, so when Barclay starts seeing creatures coming towards him while transporting, you just know things are going to get icky. These haunting buffer worms are already disquieting, but they can also bite you in the middle of getting beamed somewhere and that’s when things get gross. Or grosser, I guess.

“Schisms”

You’d never think a space show about meeting new aliens would even attempt an abduction episode because we talk with extraterrestrials every day, but here we are. And you know what? Though it doesn’t quite scare you, it definitely elicits an unnerved response! People on the ship are losing time and sleep and getting experimented upon, and I’d entirely lose my shit if I woke up on an alien operating table, no matter what the holodeck thinks it looks like.

“Frame of Mind”

Riker’s having yet another terrible time being abducted by aliens in “Frame of Mind.” This one’s another of that more psychological type of horror because you can never tell what’s real or what’s not (spoilers: absolutely freaking none of it!) because the aliens in question are messing with Riker’s brain, which is scary enough as it is without being trapped in a psych ward!

“Sub Rosa”

Another in that category that’s more camp than creep is “Sub Rosa,” more famously known to be kinda sorta a romance plot… ish? But with ghosts that turn out not to even be ghosts? When Nana’s corpse suddenly becomes possessed by Ronin and pops up to ker-zap Data and La Forge in the middle of a cemetery, you can see some of the horror elements coming in, but then the episode’s just about over anyway.

“Genesis”

Let’s get past the really (really!) shoddy science in this one if we can, because at the core of “Genesis” are some staple horror tropes. There are monsters on a darkened ship hiding behind any corner. There are people mutating into monsters, with really commendable makeup! There’s Picard knowing he’s infected too and needing to solve the problem before he turns into a marmot for some reason… but again, we’re ignoring the shoddy science, no matter how hard that is.

“The Adversary”

We hope you like the classic horror movie The Thing, because this episode is basically just The Thing on a starship, somehow with less body horror. There’s a shapeshifter loose on the Defiant, running around sabotaging systems. He can take the form of anything or anyone around you. You can trust no one! Especially Eddington!

“Empok Nor”

The spookiest Deep Space Nine episode has got to be “Empok Nor,” an episode that seemed to know from the get go what aesthetic it was going for and nailed it. There’s a LOT happening here, and somehow it doesn’t crumble. We’re on a busted station that’s full of zombie Cardassians with a taste for blood, and they infect Garak and turn him into a serial killer. Just the scene with all the corpses strung up from the ceiling raises the hairs on the back of my neck.

“Faces”

In addition to just being a solid early outing for the Torres character to get some development, “Faces” is also freaking nightmare fuel. Everything the Vidiians touch is just terrifying. They are monsters who will harvest your organs while you’re alive. But when Sulan walks in with Durst’s face stapled on, it is straight up something from a horror show, and a good horror show at that. I want to vomit just thinking about it.

“Threshold”

Again, we have another episode that is so goofy it’s hard to be scared by it, but you can see some of the old B-movie horror images in here. A generic lizard monster scooping up a woman and carrying her away is the cover of just about every sci-fi anthology out there! A couple of tweaks and this could have been some good horror, and even a good episode for Paris, but then he had to mutate into a salamander and botch it.

“The Thaw”

One of the best known horror episodes is the one that literally scares some characters to death. As if clowns aren’t scary enough on their own, they also psychologically torture people in a mind funhouse where a horror clown can guillotine you whenever he wants. Sure, it’s a little heavy handed on the fear stuff, but it’s a great performance from Michael McKean and a lot of trippy visuals that prove that horror doesn’t only happen in the dark.

“Macrocosm”

How much do you love Ellen Ripley in the Alien movies? Enough that you want to watch Kathryn Janeway do the same thing to a really bad CGI blob? Like in “Genesis,” it’s pretty scary to return to the ship to find everyone infested with something or other, but overall the horror tone kinda escapes this episode because of the needless flashback and just terrible floating gelatin creature. Janeway looked great though.

“Darkling”

Is it still a horror episode if you just straight up adapt the plot of a classic horror novel? When the EMH decides to do his take on Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, there’s definitely some of that cringe factor that’s present in the book, especially when he captures and tries to experiment on Torres. The horror-thriller nature of the episode also ends up with the monster kidnapping a girl again, like we mentioned in “Threshold.” Fewer lizards though.

“Scorpion” et alia

Pretty much any time we encounter the Borg, it’s absolutely terrifying, so I’m distilling all the episodes with our assimilation-happy friends to this one that also adds in Species 8472 just to up the terror. I always say that walking around a Borg Cube would make for a truly unnerving theme for a haunted house. What’s scarier than finding just a creepy pile of Borg parts that someone (who?! why?! eek!) left in the middle of the room? Pardon me while I go change my pants for… no reason.

“Revulsion”

Boy, there are a lot of scary-themed episodes in Voyager (maybe because being so far from home naturally lends to being afraid?), and we’re only halfway through the list we compiled! Yet another serial killer is on the loose in “Revulsion,” and we get to watch him hunt down Torres on his creepy ship full of corpses. Yikes.

“One”

This one stands out because most of the horror comes from the idea of being alone and the tricks that your mind can play on you when you’re the most helpless. It doesn’t help that the ship is also playing tricks on you as well, giving false readings as things are literally falling apart. Oh, and the lives of the crew are depending on you lest they suffocate in their sleep on corrosive nebula air. Is a madman loose on the ship or are you just hallucinating? No pressure. Are you scared yet?

“Juggernaut”

There’s a lot of echoes of “Revulsion” in this episode, and I’m here for it. We’ve got some great settings full of just grody, gross smog making it impossible to see what’s right in front of your face. We’ve got a campfire tale of killer monsters that live in the smog. We’ve got Torres wandering around this spooky ship that might have a killer monster in it… and I’m no longer here for it; I’m hiding under my bed.

“The Haunting of Deck Twelve”

Are you afraid of the dark? Well the crew sure is! As we discussed this week, the structure of the episode could have used a little more finesse to prop up the horror themes, but there’s some good stuff here. Watching the lifeform dangle Janeway’s life in its smoky tendrils is downright unnerving. The cinematography also framed some scenes in the style of classic horror moments, and those didn’t go unnoticed either.

“Silent Enemy”

Update 1/26/24: One more that I neglected to add before was this early Enterprise episode that had some great horror elements going for it. Sure, the sum of its parts somehow added up to less than we were expecting and the aliens were too badly CGI’ed to be scary, but it’s one of the tensest episodes I can think of because, for most of the episode, we don’t know what’s lurking in the darkened corridors and talking back to us with our snippets from our own conversations! Eek!

“Vox Sola”

Are spiderwebs still scary without the spiders? I’m gonna say yes, as long as the webs themselves are some kind of lifeform that is sucking the energy out of you, infesting the ship, and growing to fill a whole damn cargo bay. This is a rare instance of something that seems like it’s going to be a horror episode turning into normal science fiction in the way that the ordeal is resolved, and that’s quite refreshing.

“Impulse”

For reasons, Enterprise decided to capitalize on the zombie resurgence that the previous year’s 28 Days Later had reignited. So they made a very by-the-book zombie story that really wasn’t much else. The episode is that general sort of suspense that one expects from a genre where normal people turn into monsters lurking in dark corridors. The filming serves that creepiness and the makeup was bang-on too, so there’s that.

“Context is for Kings”

Discovery gets in on the scary stuff early in the series in the very first episode aboard the titular starship and our first mission is to subdue a monster on the corpse-filled Glenn. Things get scary, with massive piles of gore to wade through, until we learn that Ripper is really just a loveable giant tardigrade that you just wanna snuggle up with like an oversized teddy bear! Big “Devil in the Dark” vibes off that twist.

“All Those Who Wander”

Okay, last one we have the guts to watch before cowering under the blankets, and it’s a very recent episode! Strange New Worlds actually makes the Gorn into a real villainous race that is not only powerful, but downright scary. This nerve-racking episode is structured just like a good “monster on the ship” story like Alien, and even includes a chestburster (or I guess a bunch of backbursters).

— Well I’m gonna have some nightmares tonight after all that. Were they all good Star Trek episodes? Oh certainly not, but you gotta love when the lights get dim and the camerawork gets fancy and there’s probably something creeping in the corners. Keep the nightlight on with us for more next week, as we wrap season six of Voyager over on the podcast and give our tops and bottoms. Also be sure to hang out with us on Facebook and Twitter, and check under your bed for monsters. You’re bound to find some.

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