In a story of teenage girls stranded in the Canadian wilderness, you know there are going to be some crazy moments. From the very first episode of Showtime’s split-timeline drama Yellowjackets, we witnessed someone being chased through the snowy woods, strung up like a piece of prized game, and devoured by her own team. We knew that cannibalism was eventually coming in this female version of The Lord of the Flies, where a high school soccer team grapples with mental illness and surviving the elements alongside the typical conflicts of girlhood, such as fighting over boyfriends and desperately trying to fit in.
With three seasons down (and supposedly two more planned), let’s rank the most haunting, skin-crawling scenes in Yellowjackets history so far.
2 / 12
Ever since the plane crash, Coach Scott (Steven Krueger) was really going through it. First, he lost his leg and had teen Misty (Samantha Hanratty)—who has a giant crush on him—as his nurse. He was surrounded by mostly hormonal teenage girls who were getting into petty fights and conjuring mystical stories about the wilderness controlling them. They also abandoned all sense of morality and ate their teammate.
As the only adult figure in the group, he symbolized the order and authority that the Yellowjackets were slowly abandoning, and it seemed increasingly likely that Ben was going to meet a grisly fate—especially after he refused to participate in eating their frozen former teammate Jackie (Ella Purnell) and escaped from the girls after the cabin burned down. He only rejoins them when Mari (Alexa Barajas) snitches after finding him in the woods. Despite his heartfelt pleas during the trial for allegedly destroying the cabin, the girls turn on their teacher and nearly execute him while he’s blindfolded. When Akilah (Keeya King) has a vision that he is their bridge home, they decide to keep him alive.
Coach Scott’s demise is like something out of a torture-porn movie. Each day, he becomes more and more emaciated, lying unmoving in his own filth; his Achilles tendon is sliced, and his will to live is completely eroded, begging to be mercifully killed. Teen Nat (Juliette Lewis and Sophie Thatcher) finally gives him what he’s been longing for by stabbing him; he dies not with pain or fear, but with a look of pure relief. We may have expected Ben to die eventually, but not in such a slow and excruciating way.
3 / 12
There’s a lot of hunting and killing of animals in Yellowjackets, but Taissa (Tawny Cypress and Jasmin Savoy Brown) kills two of them in horribly gruesome ways. Taissa is one of several characters in the teen timeline dealing with mental issues, as she often hallucinates a creepy man with no eyes and experiences episodes of sleepwalking, during which she does strange and aggressive things like eating dirt and possibly burning down the cabin. When Tai starts sleepwalking again as an adult, the family dog, Biscuit, goes missing at the same time—devastating her young son, Sammy. Tai wonders if she let Biscuit out the gate during one of her nightly adventures, but her wife discovers the grisly truth: she killed Biscuit and placed his head and heart on an altar as a sacrifice, next to a drawing of the mysterious wilderness symbol in blood.
Also, in the teen timeline, Tai helps Van (Lauren Ambrose and Liv Hewson) practice making the experience of killing something feel peaceful and in harmony with nature. She holds up a rabbit from one of the traps, listening quietly to its fearful breathing as she presses a knife against its trembling little body. Then, she swiftly slits its throat. The camera doesn’t cut away as the blood pours from its neck and the poor thing twitches. These scenes are especially upsetting if you’re sensitive to animal cruelty.
4 / 12
Shauna’s (Melanie Lynskey and Sophie Nélisse) rage calcifies in season three and leads to her being crowned Antler Queen, but we see its origins in the first two seasons when she loses both her best friend and child. For as much as Shauna mourns these losses, she is also enraged by them. She becomes a ticking time bomb that could set off at any moment. Shauna freaks out and decks Misty for humming a song that she heard in her chicken baby nightmare. Lottie (Simone Kessell and Courtney Eaton) decides to offer her body to Shauna as a way to release her rage, knowing they need Shauna mentally stable for the good of the group.
Shauna smashes her foot into Lottie’s stomach over and over, then moves Lottie flat on her back to deliver sharp, smacking punches—practically salivating with each blow. At one point, she even uses both fists at once. Lottie’s face grows increasingly unrecognizable; her eyes are reduced to slits, her flesh a swollen mound. Her consciousness fades, and she becomes nothing but a bloody pulp. When her face flies straight into the camera after Shauna’s thunderous punch, it jolts you with its gruesomeness. The nostalgic soundtrack of “Lightning Crashes” by Live, a rock power ballad about motherly grief, perfectly complements Shauna’s postpartum outburst and voices her motivations for the carnage.
5 / 12
One of the most shocking moments in Yellowjackets is when a pair of frog scientists and their guide stumbles upon the girls howling at the moon and dancing around the fire in yet another cannibalistic ritual—this time with Coach Ben’s head on a platter. Their unexpected appearance is a connection to civilization, a jarring reminder of what the team has left behind in their warped tribe. For a brief moment, it feels like a chance at rescue and finally returning to their families is possible.
And then all hell breaks loose when Lottie, unwilling to leave the wilderness she now sees as home, takes an axe to the back of one of the frog scientists’ heads. The camera doesn’t shy away from this brutal view of his brain being spliced and blood spurting everywhere; it’s one of the goriest shots in the series. When Edwin (Nelson Franklin) hits the ground, Lottie smears his blood across her mouth—and it almost looks like she’s eating the brain matter spilling from his skull. It’s a disgusting image, but what makes it truly dreadful is the thrill Lottie gets from it. In that moment, it becomes clear why the adult Yellowjackets are so secretive about what really happened out there.
6 / 12
While the teen timeline builds up to Shauna becoming the wrathful Antler Queen, the adult timeline gradually strips away her veneer of a quiet, suburban housewife. Shauna hunts Melissa (Hilary Swank and Jenna Burgess) down and accuses her of causing all the strange things that have happened lately, like cutting her brakes, trapping her in the freezer, and even killing Lottie. In a rare moment of female ferocity and a need to physically dominate, Shauna pins Melissa to the ground by straddling her. And then, Shauna does the unthinkable: she takes a bite out of Melissa’s arm, slowly tearing off a chunk of skin, then holds it delicately between her fingers. In that chilling, soft voice of hers, she demands, “Eat it.” Reluctantly, Melissa does. The Yellowjackets’ macabre obsession with cannibalism, now twisted into self-cannibalism, completely boggles the mind and churns the stomach. Shauna’s level of depravity and the lengths she’ll go to assert control seem to know no bounds.
7 / 12
The events in this episode don’t get as much attention as all the cannibalism and killing, but Travis goes through an equally traumatic ordeal at the hands of the girls. Misty drugs everyone with shrooms for their own version of a homecoming dance—what they call ‘doomcoming’—and everyone except Jackie gets high as a kite. After Travis (Kevin Alves) and Jackie (Ella Purnell) sleep together, the girls burst into the cabin, howling like banshees with wild looks on their faces. They throw Jackie into the food pantry, sit Travis down in a chair, and start ripping off his clothes while making out with him. It’s filmed in a very surreal way, with tight close-ups and sped-up motion. When they start clawing at his belt buckle, he imagines them as creatures with sharp teeth and black eyes. Travis says stop, but the girls chase him throughout the woods with a knife, imagining him as a stag to catch. They finally tie Travis up, shove a pinecone in his mouth, and nearly slit his throat. While they are high on mushrooms and starving, which has completely messed with their senses, that doesn’t excuse their actions. It seems there’s no end to their cruelty in the unchecked environment of the wilderness.
8 / 12
As the youngest person to survive the plane crash, Javi (Luciano Leroux) is another symbol of innocence that meets a cruel fate. He smartly ran away during the hallucinatory orgy in season one’s “Doomcoming,” where the girls chased and nearly butchered his older brother. He doesn’t appear again until season two, when we learn he was hiding in a cavern warmed by a geothermal spring.
After staying silent and withdrawn for most of the season, Javi springs to action and tries to save Nat from being hunted by the feral Yellowjackets following their first card ritual to decide their next victim/meal. The girls are like sharks, their eyes black and glazed with delight as they chase their potential food. They run and scream after Nat until they reach an ice-filled lake, where Javi suddenly falls in. What’s truly chilling is how readily they let Javi drown. Misty even grabs Nat and pulls her away from trying to save him.
We see him splashing frantically beneath the freezing cold water. In a wide shot, it’s as if we, too, are watching from afar, seeing nothing but his arms helplessly flailing through a small hole in the ice. The girls quickly grab him as he begins to sink, not wanting to lose their next meal, and bring him back to camp tied up on a log to prepare for the feast. The cannibal scenes in Yellowjackets are always horrifying to watch; we are unsettled by the girls’ heartlessness, motivated by a pure survival instinct.
9 / 12
Season two of Yellowjackets was steadily building up to the end of Shauna’s pregnancy with her belly getting bigger by the day. At one point, she has a nightmare about giving birth to a twitching rotisserie chicken and then gnawing into it, bringing to mind David Lynch’s grotesque and surreal Eraserhead. When she goes into labor (fairly prematurely), it’s a horrific situation for any woman to give birth in, let alone a teenage girl: unmedicated, inside a rustic cabin in the middle of the woods, and during the freezing winter. Her labor and delivery nurses are her frightened young classmates, with Misty leading the charge, but taking the Red Cross Babysitting Training course twice is the extent of her medical knowledge. Even though Coach Scott is the only adult in the room, he cannot cope with the intensity of the moment and leaves (although, granted, he is also missing a leg and has a lot to deal with physically).
Sophie Nélisse’s performance in the scenes that follow takes your heart and squeezes it tight, especially after we’ve been duped by golden, dreamlike images of Shauna cradling her bouncing baby boy. Instead of a warm, roly-poly son placed in her arms, she’s handed a blanket that, we cannot see, but know holds his small, lifeless body. Shauna’s ear-piercing screams and desperate pleas of “Can’t you hear him crying?” are absolutely gutting—especially because she believes so strongly that her vision was real. Thankfully, the most disturbing fan theory that the Yellowjackets would eat Shauna’s baby doesn’t come to fruition, but the scene of her birth is still harrowing, especially for women who have experienced infant loss. Shauna’s grief ignites the rage that puts her on the path to Antler Queen.
10 / 12
The last episode of the third season, “Full Circle,” finally reveals that the infamous “Pit Girl” from the pilot is Mari. Even though she could often be snarky, it’s impossible not to feel sorry for her when she draws the Queen of Hearts and ends up being hunted. Mari cleverly leaves her clothes behind to throw her teammates off her scent, but sadly, it’s not enough to avoid the pit—now lined with newly sharpened spikes that Travis had meant for Lottie. What’s so disturbing is, of course, the idea of the hunt itself—that former friends and teammates savagely chase her down, no longer seeing her as a living and breathing person with her own personality, but only as chunks of meat to sink their teeth into. It’s also in the way they capture Mari, stripping her without hesitation and hanging her upside down like a slaughtered animal, letting the blood out of her pale, thin body which dangles in the biting wind. Shauna demands a piece of her hair for her cloak, making a melodramatic claim over Mari’s body and soul. If more hunts follow in future episodes, they’re sure to be just as frightening.
11 / 12
All during season one, you can cut the tension between Jackie and Shauna with a knife. They’re best friends, but since Shauna secretly envies the pretty team captain and is sleeping with her boyfriend, they’re more like frenemies. Jackie quotes Beaches and nails exactly how Shauna feels about her: “You’re so fucking jealous of me you can barely breathe.” These tensions come to a head during an argument when Jackie (rightfully) points out how insane the group is for sexually assaulting and attempting to kill Travis, as well as worshipping the wilderness as some powerful deity. Shauna kicks Jackie out of the cabin and she spends the night outside by the fire—only for it to die down, leaving her frozen by morning. Shauna’s screams when she discovers Jackie’s body are blood-curdling, her mouth gaping wide. She cannot stop trying to shake Jackie awake.
Jackie’s death is disturbing, but what’s even worse is what happens to her dead body afterwards. When the girls put her on a funeral pyre two months later, wind causes snow to blanket her body, leaving her unrecognizable and perfectly roasted. The smell becomes enticing to the starving teenagers, and they wander out in a daze before greedily eating her. The scene is filmed with fantastical shots of a Roman-style feast—the girls draped in togas and laurels, food oozing and drinks pouring into their mouths—quickly intercut with the grim reality of what’s happening to Jackie’s body. We see short but terrifying flashes of her flesh ripping, meat sliding between their teeth, hands gnawing. The sounds of the Yellowjackets’ excited gulping and gnashing sends a chill down your spine, knowing that this beautiful young girl with her own hopes and dreams ended up being eagerly devoured by her friends.
12 / 12