The Walking Dead Midseason Premiere Opening Minutes Clip Released

AMC has released the opening minutes from The Walking Dead‘s midseason 10 premiere, “Squeeze.” The clip picks up where November’s midseason finale, “The World Before,” ended: with Carol (Melissa McBride), Daryl (Norman Reedus), Jerry (Cooper Andrews), Aaron (Ross Marquand), Magna (Nadia Hilker) and sisters Connie (Lauren Ridloff) and Kelly (Angel Theory) trapped in a cave teeming with walkers. Both the living and the dead have been placed there by Alpha (Samantha Morton) of the Whisperers, who baited Carol into falling victim to the trap our heroes must now escape when The Walking Dead returns with new episodes Sunday, Feb. 23.

“I think this first half of the season, Alpha’s kind of won. It’s Alpha one, our group zero at this point,” executive producer Denise Huth said on a past episode of Talking Dead. “I think it’ll be exciting coming back for the back half seeing how Lydia has run off on her own, we don’t know where she is, Gamma has learned that Lydia is alive, how is she going to react to that situation? Our characters are trapped in a cave. There’s a lot of question marks at the end of the midseason.”

Alpha’s daughter Lydia (Cassady McClincy) was last seen breaking away from Carol and entering into her mother’s territory alone, where Gamma (Thora Birch) is at risk of being discovered as the spy leaking secrets to the Alexandrians.

“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 on Talking Dead. “This is scary, this is terrifying.”

The midseason premiere is inspired by a horror movie and plays out like one, with ComicBook.com calling the episode a “pulse-pounding nail-biter” capable of forcing squirms “from even the most steely-nerved watchers.”

Audiences will also see newest Whisperer member Negan (Jeffrey Dean Morgan) confronting his own dangers.

“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 of the action-packed half-season. “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.”

TWD‘s midseason premiere airs Sunday, Feb. 23 at 9/8c on AMC. For more TWD intel, follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter.