The Walking Dead Reveals the Horror Movie That Inspired Its Midseason Finale

The Walking Dead cast and crew kicked off production on Season 10 with a viewing of a horror movie that ultimately inspired a set piece in its midseason finale, “The World Before.” When operating on intel passed along from disillusioned Whisperer Gamma (Thora Birch) to Aaron (Ross Marquand), who expected to discover the location of the walker horde corralled by Alpha (Samantha Morton), a reckless Carol (Melissa McBride) pursued Alpha in a chase that ended with herself, Aaron, Daryl (Norman Reedus) and Hilltop’s Connie (Lauren Ridloff), Kelly (Angel Theory), Magna (Nadia Hilker) and Jerry (Cooper Andrews) helplessly trapped in a cave and surrounded by a swarm of walkers.

According to the latest episode of TWD‘s Facts and Easter Eggs, the finale’s cave set was inspired by 2005’s The Descent, a horror film about a cave expedition gone wrong. Trapped in a constricting cave system, a group of vacationers are then forced to survive and escape from blood-thirsty creatures.

Our heroes find themselves in similar peril: the midseason premiere, reportedly titled “Squeeze,” sees the group attempting to escape through the cave’s narrow tunnels — a situation that poses the biggest danger to the burly Jerry.

“The fear that’s about to happen is something that reminded me of just horror movies I haven’t seen in a long time,” Andrews said in an episode of Talking Dead that followed the midseason finale. “This is scary, this is terrifying.”

The coming midseason premiere is part of what the cast have called a terrifying and nail-biting second half of Season 10, which picks up where that scary cliffhanger left off.

“We’ve trapped a bunch of people in a cave full of walkers, so we have to tell that story. So, that’s definitely going to be a big part of when we pick back up,” showrunner Angela Kang previously told EW. “Obviously, we have Negan embedded with the Whisperers, so we’ll continue to kind of tell the story that’s involved there. And then, not necessarily specific to the episode back, but just as a whole, at this point now some lines have been crossed, right? The border has been crossed by both sides. There have been these acts of war and so things are now escalating very, very fast. And we kind of get to the big conflict between the Whisperers and our people.”

The Walking Dead Season 10 returns with new episodes Feb. 23 on AMC. For more TWD intel, follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter.