<\/p>\n
Most people don’t think of Star Trek<\/a><\/strong><\/em> as a horror franchise. They think of it as optimistic science fiction, full of diplomacy, exploration, and the belief that humanity will eventually figure things out. That reputation is largely deserved, but almost entirely incomplete. Across nearly 1,000 television episodes spanning 60 years, the franchise has produced some of the most genuinely terrifying hours in science fiction television history. Here are the best of them.<\/p>\n 10. ‘Wolf in the Fold’ \u2014 The Original Series, Season 2<\/strong> 9. ‘Catspaw’ \u2014 The Original Series<\/a>, Season 2<\/strong> 8. ‘Genesis’ \u2014 The Next Generation, Season 7<\/strong> 7. ‘Conspiracy’ \u2014 The Next Generation, Season 1<\/strong> 6. ‘Empok Nor’ \u2014 Deep Space Nine<\/a>, Season 5<\/strong> 5. ‘The Thaw’ \u2014 Voyager, Season 2<\/strong> 4. ‘All Those Who Wander’ \u2014 Strange New Worlds<\/a>, Season 1<\/strong> | Related: Star Trek Legend Weighs in on AI: ‘Evolve or Die’<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n 3. ‘Schisms’ \u2014 The Next Generation, Season 6<\/strong> 2. ‘Q Who’ \u2014 The Next Generation, Season 2<\/strong> 1. ‘Best of Both Worlds’ \u2014 The Next Generation, Seasons 3\u20134<\/strong> Which Trek episodes do you<\/em><\/strong> think were scariest?<\/p>\n \ud83c\udfacSIGN UP for Parade\u2019s Daily newsletter to get the latest pop culture news & celebrity interviews delivered right to your inbox<\/strong><\/a>\ud83c\udfac<\/p>\n This story was originally published by Parade<\/a> on May 17, 2026, where it first appeared in the News<\/a> section. Add Parade as a Preferred Source by clicking here.<\/a><\/i><\/p>\n<\/div>\n \u2018 The preceding article may include information circulated by third parties \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n \u2018 Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.yahoo.com \u2019 <\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Most people don’t think of Star Trek as a horror franchise. They think of it as optimistic science fiction, full of diplomacy, exploration, and the belief that humanity will eventually figure things out. That reputation is largely deserved, but almost entirely incomplete. Across nearly 1,000 television episodes spanning 60 years, the franchise has produced some […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":2420686,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[25172],"tags":[474262,474263,319398],"class_list":["post-2420685","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-entertainment","tag-robert-bloch","tag-science-fiction-television","tag-star-trek"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/05\/The-Scariest-Star-Trek-Episodes-Ever-Made-Ranked.jpeg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2420685","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2420685"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2420685\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2420687,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2420685\/revisions\/2420687"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2420686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2420685"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2420685"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/celebrity.land\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2420685"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
Written by Robert Bloch<\/strong>, the author whose 1959 novel Psycho<\/em>Alfred Hitchcock<\/a><\/strong> adapted for the screen, this episode follows Scotty as he becomes the prime suspect in a series of murders on a pleasure planet<\/a>. The real culprit is an incorporeal entity that feeds on fear and one that, the episode eventually reveals, was also Jack the Ripper<\/strong>. It’s been called<\/a> the ‘scariest episode of the original series’ with a Gothic atmosphere that holds up across six decades.<\/p>\n
Another Bloch-penned entry, this one leaning directly into Halloween<\/a> iconography: black cats, skeletons, witches, a haunted castle on an alien planet. It’s campy by modern standards, but it remains the original series’ most overt attempt to make the audience genuinely uncomfortable.<\/p>\n
A pathogen spreads through the Enterprise crew and begins de-evolving the crew members into their prehistoric ancestors. Worf transforms into a spined, Predator-like creature. Picard<\/a> de-evolves into a primate. Data is unaffected and must save the ship alone. MovieWeb ranks it among the most ‘disturbing Trek episodes ever<\/a>‘, and the image of a fully de-evolved Worf stalking the corridors is hard to shake.<\/p>\n
Picard discovers that parasitic alien creatures have infiltrated the upper ranks of Starfleet, taking control of commanding officers from the inside. The episode climaxes in a scene that remains, to this day, perhaps the single most graphically violent moment in franchise history. It’s been called a genuine piece of Cronenbergian<\/a> body horror.<\/p>\n
Written by future Hannibal<\/em><\/strong>showrunner Bryan Fuller<\/strong>, this episode strands Miles O’Brien and a salvage team on an abandoned Cardassian space station that is very much not empty. SlashFilm <\/strong>calls it<\/a> Trek’s purest execution of the haunted house format, a self-contained slasher episode that functions as a miniature horror film<\/a>.<\/p>\n
The Voyager crew discovers colonists in artificial hibernation, trapped inside a computer-generated environment controlled by a single entity: Fear itself, manifested as a malevolent electronic clown played by Michael McKean<\/strong>. It is one of the stranger hours in franchise history and one of the most unsettling.<\/p>\n
The newest entry on this list and among the most deliberately frightening. The Enterprise crew investigates a crashed ship and discovers Gorn hatchlings which, in Strange New Worlds, are not the lumbering lizard men of the original series but fast, vicious, chest-bursting predators that drew directly from Alien<\/strong><\/em><\/a>, Ridley Scott’s horror template and made no effort to hide it. It worked.<\/p>\n
Crew members on the Enterprise begin suffering sleep deprivation and vague, unshakeable dread. Under hypnosis, they reconstruct fragmented memories of a cold metal table and alien hands working in the dark. Screen Rant calls it<\/a> the single scariest episode in franchise history, and the alien abduction horror it deploys is all the more effective for how long the episode withholds showing the creatures responsible.<\/p>\n
The first appearance of the Borg<\/strong>. Q launches the Enterprise into deep space and the crew encounters a species that destroys entire civilizations not out of malice but purely out of hunger. The buildup is exquisite with barren planets<\/a>, stripped clean, as the crew realizes that what left them that way is an existential threat in the true sense of ‘cosmic horror.’<\/p>\n
Technically two episodes, and impossible to separate. The Borg return and assimilate Captain Picard<\/strong>, transforming him into Locutus <\/strong>and using him to nearly destroy Starfleet at the Battle of Wolf 359. It’s the franchise<\/a>‘s greatest cliffhanger and one of the finest horror achievements in science fiction television history. The image of Patrick Stewart<\/a> in Borg implants, announcing the Federation’s imminent destruction in a flat monotone, is as frightening as this franchise gets. And <\/em><\/strong>everyone had to wait until the next season to find out how Riker’s attempted destruction of Picard would turn out.<\/p>\n