WARNING: CONTAINS THE LAST OF US EPISODE TWO SPOILERS
After tuning in to the second episode of The Last of Us, viewers have been left feeling terrified by the show's manic, high-speed zombies - saying they're up there with the scariest they've seen on TV.
Adapted from Naughty Dog’s 2013 video game of the same name, The Last of Us follows smuggler Joel (Pedro Pascal) as he’s tasked with transporting 14-year-old Ellie (Bella Ramsey) across a post-apocalyptic America - 20 years after modern civilisation was destroyed by a zombie infection.
The undead beings left behind aren’t just your average dribbling zombies, either. These ones not only move fast, they also mutate as the parasitic fungus increasingly takes over.
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They begin as ‘runners’, who attack at high speeds and tend to move about in large groups.
As the fungal infection has not yet taken extensive control of their bodies, they are relatively easy to kill - that is until they become ‘stalkers’ around two weeks after becoming infected, at which point the fungus has started to sprout from their bodies.
At the third stage of infection, which arrives when a human has been infected for a year or more, the zombies are known as ‘clickers’.
These are arguably the most terrifying yet, as the fungal growth has fully enveloped the host’s head, blinding them - and simultaneously heightening their sense of hearing and spatial awareness.
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Worse still, the infection at this point also serves as a fungal armour, meaning clickers are much, much harder to kill, as Joel, Ellie and Tess found in episode two.
Many viewers found the instalment a horrifying watch, saying the zombies in the show were among the most terrifying they’d ever seen, whether its the eerie clicking sound of third-stage zombies or the moment Tess receives a chilling kiss from a runner, sending tendrils of the cordyceps crawling into her mouth.
One tweeted: “The clickers in the second episode of The Last of Us were terrifying. Oh man this show is good.”
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Another said: “The fungus zombies in the last of us genuinely scare me.”
Someone else wrote: “The last of us series really made the most terrifying zombies in tv history.”
Sharing a clip of a zombie trying to attack Ellie, a fourth added: “Nah bro we can all agree that this episode of The Last Of Us was the scariest ever made.”
Others compared the zombies to those in other well-known shows, with one writing: “At least with The Walking Dead Zombies they were slow, the zombies in The Last of Us moving like Usain Bolt.”
Another agreed: “The Last of Us makes The Walking Dead look like Disneyland Paris. TLOU zombies are Olympic sprinters I’m so sorry but I’d have no desire to survive.”
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What makes things even more harrowing, though, is that there are further stages beyond clickers.
Several years after infection, the zombies become ‘bloaters’, which may move more slowly than their predecessors after years of hosting the fungus, but are supremely strong.
There are also ‘shamblers’, identifiable by bodies covered in pustules that release bursts of spores, with jaws frozen open by the infection leaving them unable to spread the fungus with a bite.
There are also super-organism anomalies, but no doubt we’ll get to those eventually...
Featured Image Credit: HBO/SkyTopics: TV and Film