The Criminal Minds Season That's Too Creepy For Fans To Watch

Criminal Minds follows a relatively similar formula to other network procedurals: a group of law enforcement agents spend the episode solving a crime. However, the series adds its own spin on things by making those crimes extra horrifying. While the NCIS team is hunting down international arms dealers, the agents of the Behavioral Analysis Unit (BAU) are dealing with a guy who made chili out of one of his victims.

Yes, even though there are plenty of lighter character moments from the series that fans love, most are drawn to the show by the outlandish murders the agents are investigating. But sometimes those crimes are just too horrifying, even for hardcore Criminal Mind aficionados. There are plenty of episodes throughout the series that have been noted for their grisliness and according to some fans on Reddit, a lot of those episodes aired during the show's ninth season. In fact one fan, sabertoothdiego, even started an entire thread called, "Is it just me or is season 9 f—— creepy?"

It was not just them. Several others jumped in to comment with their own opinions on the episodes that made season 9 almost too much to handle, even for Criminal Minds super-fans.

Season 9 wasted no time in traumatizing Criminal Minds viewers. In the thread discussing its many gruesome episodes, Gramsx said, "YES I started s9 yesterday actually and I was eating soup while watching the first episode....I didn't finish my soup."

Yes, the premiere episode, "The Inspiration," and it's follow up, "The Inspired," were definitely not made with dinnertime viewing in mind. What starts off as your typical "kidnapping women and taking them to a park to murder them ritualistically by shooting them in the heart" case turns extra creepy when the team discovers that before he kills his victims, the unsub feeds them parts of his previous' victims head. As they dig deeper into the case, Dr. Reid (Matthew Gray Gubler) proposes the theory that the killer is forcing his victims to imitate the behaviors of female praying mantises, who eat their partner's heads after mating.

As if that wasn't unnerving enough, we find out that the killer has an identical twin. Although the brothers were separated at birth, it turns out they share the same penchant for murdering women they feel rejected by. The case is grim and disturbing and we're not surprised to hear that it put Gramsx off their soup.

While the episode "Rabid" doesn't have the narrative complexity of an identical twin reveal, it certainly makes up for it with its visceral subject matter. The episode begins with a man getting kidnapped off the street. He's locked in a cage in a dog kennel by the unsub, and although he's surrounded by the ferocious barking of canines, there's also the howling of something even scarier.

When the victim hears a human woman screaming in a cage across the room, he calls out to her, thinking he might have an ally in his horror. The woman is a fellow victim of the madman but unfortunately, she's in no state to help. As the BAU team investigates other victims of the unsub, they discover that he kills by infecting one victim with rabies, letting it drive them to full red-eyed, foaming at the mouth madness, and then having them attack the next victim to continue the horrible cycle. Oh, and he films the attacks, so he can relive them later.

The brutality of "Rabid" was a bridge too far for some fans. As HeyMissW wrote in the same season 9 Reddit thread, "I can't watch the whole episode. It still give me the deep-down creeps. I just can't get through it."

Some of the horrors of season 9 are more psychological in nature. In the episode "The Edge of Winter," Agent Morgan (Shemar Moore) is interviewing the surviving victim of a pair of sadists who kidnap and detain victims at a farm before killing them and dumping their bodies in public. As Morgan interviews Daria (Aasha Davis), the show flashes back one year to show us the BAU team investigating the murders.

During the investigation, the team finds the kidnappers, but has a hard time determining who committed the murders themselves. In the past, we watch as the evidence points to the disturbing fact that it was Daria who killed their victims after she developed Stockholm syndrome while in captivity. In the present day, Morgan asks her about this, hoping that she has recovered. But Daria is not over it. Not only is she still in love with her captor, but she also confesses that if he asked her to, she would kill for him again.

The revelation is truly a living nightmare. As sabertoothdiego said, "Holy s***, the episode where the woman has such severe stockholm syndrome that even a year later her mind is still broken!"

Those are just a few examples of why season 9 of Criminal Minds is one of the most unsettling eras of the whole series.