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

The Walking Dead scares up a backstory for The Ferals, the crawling creatures creeping on Connie (Lauren Ridloff) and Virgil (Kevin Carroll) inside a haunted house of horrors. Spoiler warning for Season 11 Episode 6, “On the Inside.” On the run from walkers after the cave collapse where she went missing during The Whisperer War in Season 10, Connie fears they’re being watched when hiding out inside the house with Virgil. Investigating creaking hallways decorated with portraits of people with scratched-out eyes, the sight of a peeper’s bloodshot and yellowed eyes looks back at an unnerved Connie. They’re not alone.

When she’s separated from Virgil, vibrations of rumbling footsteps alert the deaf Connie that something is behind her: a hunched-over creature, grunting and growling with hunger as it chases its prey on all fours. Connie crunches human bones with every step when she escapes into a basement littered with the picked-clean leftovers of past victims. 

A crawler slithers out of the darkness and pounces on Virgil like a predator on prey. “Hungry,” snarls the hunched and haggard creature of a man, all instinct and feral. Connie and Virgil escape for a breather and he realizes they were led to the house, herded like prey. “I’ve never seen people this far gone.”

They make a run for it through claustrophobic corridors crawling with Ferals scurrying on hands and feet. The Too-Far-Goners are goners for good when Connie, covering herself in walker guts and gore, lets in a zombie horde outside the house to feed on the Ferals. 

Wanting to craft a “good old-fashioned haunted house horror story” for Connie’s comeback, the Ferals are an extreme example of people who are “too far gone in this world” of the zombie apocalypse. 

“We’ve seen people who are cannibals, we’ve talked about people that Maggie has run across, we’ve seen the Whisperers. We were just talking about people that have gone completely feral, and what kind of desperation would it take to get to that point,” explained showrunner Angela Kang on The Walking Dead: Episode Insider. “[Director and special make-up effects creator] Greg Nicotero and his KNB Group, they did all the creature decisions and made these people unique from zombies and have their own sort of terrifying look.” 

The hall of horrors with defaced portraits hints at the unseen backstory of the Ferals, cannibal crawlers who watch before herding people to their house of horrors.

“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,” Kang said. “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 Walking Dead Recap With Spoilers: “On the Inside”

READ: What Happens to Connie in The Walking Dead Comics?

READ: Virgil Finds Connie on The Walking Dead

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