For all the brutal kills, supernatural showdowns, and bloodthirsty villains that Buffy the Vampire Slayer served up over its seven-season run, the scariest Buffy episode to me is the one I least expected. As someone who has grown up obsessing over the darkest corners of horror - from Cronenberg to Carpenter - I thought I was immune to the creepy curveballs that TV could throw my way. Then I saw “Go Fish.” Nestled late in season 2, it’s an episode most for being monster-of-the-week filler, but underneath the surface (literally), it's a body horror nightmare hiding in plain sight. It’s chilling, disturbing, and loaded with effects that still hold up today.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer is best known for mixing high school melodrama with the supernatural, but “Go Fish” leans hard into genre horror, and it’s all the better for it. What makes the episode genuinely terrifying isn’t just the gore or the transformations - it’s the existential dread bubbling beneath every scene. The practical effects are grotesque in all the right ways, and the episode’s final twist is arguably one of the bleakest outcomes in Buffy the Vampire Slayer history. For a horror fan like me, “Go Fish” is unforgettable for all the wrong reasons.

Season 2's "Go Fish" Is A Body Horror Masterpiece

Buffy Goes Full Cronenberg

Like many of the scariest Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes, “Go Fish” starts off deceptively tame. Sunnydale High's swim team is suddenly on a hot streak, and Principal Snyder wants to keep them happy, no matter how obnoxious they get. But soon, students start turning up dead (or more accurately, ripped apart). The team is being picked off one by one, but in true Buffy fashion, it’s not what viewers think. Much to the shock of both fans and the Scooby Gang, the mutilated corpses weren’t the work of a demon or monster. They were the aftermath of something much, much more disturbing.

The body horror in “Go Fish” is played for shock, and it works. The Buffy episode’s standout moment comes when Gage, played by a pre-Prison Break Wentworth Miller, undergoes a grotesque transformation. As Buffy watches in stunned horror, Gage peels his own skin off like a wetsuit, revealing a slick, gilled creature beneath. It’s a moment straight out of a David Cronenberg movie, one that’s lived in my head ever since the episode first aired in 1998. The practical effects are gruesome and tactile, the transformation unsettlingly slow, and the camera doesn’t flinch.

The monsters themselves - hulking amphibious creatures that seem like distant cousins of the Gill-man from Creature from the Black Lagoon - are a genuine triumph of late-’90s TV effects. They’re slimy, sinewy, and terrifying in the way they move, dripping with menace and otherworldliness. There’s something profoundly uncomfortable about the idea that these creatures used to be students, that these scary Buffy monsters were human teenagers now grotesquely re-engineered into something unrecognizable.

What’s most disturbing is how “Go Fish” handles the change. It doesn’t offer any kind of redemption or cure. These aren’t kids who made a bad decision and learned a lesson. They’re victims of a system that put performance above humanity. That’s part of what makes this arguably the scariest Buffy episode: it doesn’t just show horror - it follows it to the most chilling conclusion possible, with zero intention of comforting the viewer.

What Happens To The Sunnydale Swim Team Is Beyond Bleak

A Fate Too Horrifying To Forget

By the end of “Go Fish,” the full scope of the horror becomes clear. The swim team didn’t just mutate - they became monsters, permanently. After it’s revealed that a shady Russian swim coach was dosing the team with fish DNA to enhance their performance, the irreversible effects have already taken hold. The remaining of the team, now fully transformed, escape into the ocean. That’s it. There’s no last-minute reversal, no heroic save, no cure.

This is what cements “Go Fish” as perhaps the scariest Buffy episode of all. Not only does it take a dark concept and push it to the edge, it commits to the most hopeless conclusion possible. The boys are simply gone forever. There’s no effort to recover them, no emotional fallout, and worst of all, no one even seems to grieve. These kids are written off, literally and figuratively, by their town, their school, and the show itself.

It's rare for a TV show to commit to this level of bleakness.

What really gets under my skin is the total lack of closure. Buffy often used monsters as metaphors, but this time, the metaphor is horrifyingly real. The swim team is sacrificed to athletic success and chemical shortcuts, and no one pays the price except the victims themselves. There's no redemption, no justice - just a new life as sea creatures in the vast, uncaring ocean.

It's rare for a TV show to commit to this level of bleakness. Most would offer some kind of twist to undo the trauma, or at least address it in future episodes. Not Buffy. “Go Fish” happens, and then it’s never mentioned again. That silence is deafening. It makes the horror feel all the more real, like the fate of the Sunnydale High swim team is something too disturbing to talk about. As a horror fan, that’s what stuck with me. I’ve watched people get decapitated, possessed, and flayed alive in countless movies, but something about “Go Fish” haunts me in a way those films never did.

"Go Fish" Showed How Desensitized Sunnydale Had Become

No One In Sunnydale Seems To Care That An Entire Team Of Kids Just Vanished

What might be the scariest part of “Go Fish” isn’t even the monsters, it’s the aftermath. Or, more accurately, the lack of one. By the time the credits roll, the school’s championship-winning swim team has literally turned into fish monsters and swum away forever, and nobody bats an eye.

There’s no memorial service, no news coverage, not even a throwaway line in a later Buffy episode. It's as if losing half a dozen students is just another week in Sunnydale. While the show often played fast and loose with its monster-of-the-week format, “Go Fish” quietly highlights something deeply unsettling: Sunnydale’s residents are numb to tragedy. After so many supernatural events, the community doesn’t just tolerate horror - they ignore it entirely.

If you’re a kid growing up in Sunnydale, you’re not just fighting vampires, you’re fighting apathy.

That desensitization is terrifying. If you’re a kid growing up in Sunnydale, you’re not just fighting vampires, you’re fighting apathy. The idea that your schoolmates can vanish into the ocean as literal monsters and nobody will care is chilling on a deeply human level. It reframes the episode’s horror, making the real monster not just what’s in the water, but what’s happening on land.

That’s why, even with all the gory transformations and eerie creatures, the lasting dread of “Go Fish” is rooted in its silence. That, to me, is real horror. It’s what makes it not just among the scariest Buffy the Vampire Slayer episodes I’ve seen, but the scariest shows or movies full stop.