Watch: Connie and Virgil Fear the Ferals in a Scary Scene From The Walking Dead

Connie (Lauren Ridloff) and Virgil (Kevin Carroll) make a run for it in a scene from the latest episode of The Walking Dead. Spoiler warning for Season 11 Episode 6, “On the Inside.” After coming across a weakened Connie — who barely escaped from a Whisperer cave hiding Alpha’s (Samantha Morton) zombie horde in Season 10 — Virgil helps her back home in the wake of his life-changing meeting with Michonne (Danai Gurira). A swarm of walkers traps the pair in an abandoned house, where Virgil and Connie quickly realize they’re not alone when they’re preyed upon by a pack of cannibalistic crawlers: the Ferals.

In the spoilers scene from “On the Inside,” a quick-thinking Connie covers herself in walker gore. The camouflage hides her from the dead she sics on the flesh-hungry ferals, people too far gone after surviving a decade-plus of the zombie apocalypse. 

“We’ve seen other groups and how depraved they can be, or how their morals have changed, and things like that, but we wondered: how far could somebody go and lose their humanity? Not just personality humanity, but their actual humanness,” Kevin Deiboldt, who wrote the episode directed by Greg Nicotero, said on Talking Dead. “For the Ferals in this episode, we thought of them as a family, and this was their family house. And after the apocalypse, they just started becoming more and more animalistic.”

“When you start focusing on just surviving, and you start to lose your sense of self,” added Deiboldt, “what would happen if you take that to the nth degree?”

Deiboldt devised a backstory not seen on The Walking Dead but hinted at in the episode, where the unnerved Connie braves her way through a hallway of horrors decorated with mutilated portraits. 

“We thought that’s creepy, so that’s really fun. But in the backstory of it, we actually do think that those are pictures of relatives or even some of the people who became feral and are living in that house,” showrunner Angela Kang said on Walking Dead: Episode Insider. “And as they sort of descended into a much more feral state, they just started destroying the vestiges of their humanity. So we totally had a story reason why we did that, but at the same time, we just thought it looked super weird and creepy.”

READ: The Ferals Backstory You Didn’t See on The Walking Dead

READ: The Walking Dead Recap With Spoilers: “On the Inside”

READ: Welcome Back, Connie: Lauren Ridloff Returns to The Walking Dead

“On the Inside” is now streaming on AMC+. 

Follow the author @CameronBonomolo on Twitter for all things TWD. The Walking Dead Season 11 airs Sundays at 9/8c on AMC.