For his crimes, some people might call Rick Sanchez a monster. Rick would call those people rick-diculous.
But whether he’d admit it or not, he and the rest of the characters from Rick and Morty have horror baked into their DNA. For a full decade, the Adult Swim series has spent every episode at least partially focused on making you, the viewer, deeply uncomfortable. Even in its lighter moments, you’re still left with the rattling realization that Harold the Garbage Goober used to be a doctor before he got a job eating trash off the floor.
And so, in celebration of the Halloween season, here are Rick and Morty’s most horrific episodes, hand- picked to give you a case of the hoo-has.
“The Ricks Must Be Crazy” Season 2, episode 6
Ignore the “A” plot. While Rick and Morty explore slavery with extra steps all the way down, the car is instructed to “keep Summer safe” in an alien parking lot. Summer, dead set on sticking to a road paved with good intentions, requests that the car stop using lethal force, then physical force. With every new parameter, the ship’s resulting defense measures become more deeply upsetting. “Psychological option detected. Gestating.”
“Rest and Ricklaxation” Season 3, episode 6
Rick and Morty has always had a streak of taking the classic “man was the real monster all along” sci-fi trope and holding it under a microscope, reminding viewers that the characters they love are some of the worst people in the world, usually through high-concept metaphor monsters. In “Rest and Ricklaxation,” Rick and Morty have their negative personality traits milked out of them at an alien spa, inadvertently revealing that A: They’re terrible people and B: they’d be even worse if they got better.
“The Vat of Acid Episode” Season 4, episode 8
Terror isn’t always about monsters, slashers, and the unknown. Sometimes, the most frightening yarn you can spin for an audience is a wordless love story, adorned with some light body horror at the peak of a mountain, bookended by the most traumatizing recorded use of Eric Clapton’s “It’s In The Way That You Use It.”
“Amortycan Grickfitti” Season 5, episode 5
Jerry becomes the mascot for a group of masochistic torture demons who take twisted, erotic pleasure from how cringe he is. The monster designs are characteristically incredible, and Rick’s decision to wear a whole marlin as a torso piercing when he’s infiltrating the underworld is some chef’s kiss snottiness. It’s Hellraiser for people who don’t understand why they keep making Hellraiser.
“Night Family” Season 6, episode 4
Not just a disturbing re-imagining of the Smith family as rasping, otherworldly monsters — ever-present, always waiting — “Night Family” dares viewers to wonder: What if you were finally held accountable for all the times when you didn’t rinse the dishes? It can truly be said that in six seasons, a handful of spin- off projects, a pile of video games, comics, and fan films, no entry in the Rick and Morty multiverse has ever given us quite this many hoo-has.
“Something Ricked This Way Comes” Season 1, episode 9
Is it the scariest Rick and Morty episode? Not by a country gleep glorp. But if you’ve already spent the lead-up to Halloween burning your brain out with what Rick rightly calls “Twilight Zone, Ray Bradbury, Friday the 13th the Series voodoo crap magic,” it’s a nice palate cleanser to watch Alfred Molina’s mysterious antique shop proprietor get his guts stomped out to notes of DMX.
“Rickdependence Spray” Season 5, episode 4
For all its fart jokes, obscene language, and surface-level puerility, Rick and Morty is, like all great science fiction, an opportunity to ask the big questions – to observe, speculate, and imagine. In that spirit, we put it to you: What is horror? Is it limited to men in rubber masks, chasing lascivious teens through boiler rooms and campgrounds? Is it latex prosthetics and fake machetes glued to fake heads?
Or is it that which disturbs? That goes too far? That makes us feel unsafe? If “horror” is more a feeling than a genre painted with broad strokes, then nothing fits the description better than “Rickdependence Spray,” the lowest-rated episode of the show in the Roiland era, and the only one that made series co-creator Dan Harmon admit that, yeah, maybe they went a little bit too far.