The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (2024)

What’s a horror story without a boogeyman, a nefarious presence, a stone-cold killer with a plan, the bad guy just around the corner? Horror movies live and die (and sometimes, die and die and die) on the strength of their baddies, from masked murderers and supernatural beings to raging psychopaths and even the odd killer disease or two. Just who is knocking on your front door this spooky season? And why the hell would you answer?

There are clusters of killers that immediately come to mind when curating a best villains list. Take a look at the horror history books and you’ll quickly stumble onto the Universal monster movie headliners: Frankenstein, Dracula, the Mummy, and so on. Look further and you’ll find yourself amid the late ’70s and mid-80s slasher staples: Freddy, Jason, Leatherface, Michael. Continue on to the champions of the late ’80s and early ’90s: Chucky, Hellraiser, Candyman. These days, many of those same names are haunting cinemas again — shout out to “Halloween Ends” and “Hellraiser” (2022) —but we’re meeting just as many one-off weirdos in critical triumphs such as “Barbarian” and box office winners such as “Terrifier 2.”

Though their insidious ends are often the same, the most memorable predators stand out from the crowd because of the menacing means they use when picking off their victims. Of course, not all these approaches are equally effective in terms of fear. (Lubdan the Leprechaun may be entertaining but scary he is not!) So with a focus on the most actively scary antagonists in mind, IndieWire has rounded up 31 of the genre’s most iconic, chilling, and downright dastardly villains from some of the best films and franchises. Get to know them below, but make sure to double check those locks first. It is the witching season after all, and you don’t want the likes of Pennywise, the Babadook, Jack Torrance, the Strangers, or — heaven forbid — Death’s Design darkening your doorway.

With editorial contributions by Kate Erbland, David Ehrlich, Eric Kohn, Tambay Obenson, and Zack Sharf.

  • 31. Death’s Design, “Final Destination” Franchise

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (1)

    “Final Destination” creator Jeffrey Reddick first imagined his would-be horror franchise as an episode of “The X-Files,” which makes perfect sense considering the unseen supernatural killer of Death’s Design could’ve made for an understated but still sinister (read: achievable and affordable) TV antagonist. And yet, as imagined for the big screen, the faceless slasher villain is a production-heavy trickster: a snide and sneaky force that picks off survivors’ of mass casualty events with hyper-involved freak accidents that are so awful it’s hard not to laugh.

    Malfunctioning tanning beds, runaway cement trucks, and falling window panes are just some of the instruments involved the Rube Goldberg machine-like realizations of Death’s Design. If the high body counts of first act “Final Destination” terrors don’t unnerve you, then the sudden suspicion you’ll feel toward everyday objects will. —AF

  • 30. Cesare, “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari” (1920)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (2)

    Putting the expression in German Expressionism, this seminal horror achievement of the silent age has remained a definitive form of spooky storytelling by creating a nightmarish world where nothing is certain. As lanky somnambulist Cesare (Conrad Veidt) commits a series of murders at the behest of the titular hypnotist (Werner Krauss), director Robert Wiene sets the drama in the confines of a labyrinthine environment that makes the upside-down look downright homey.

    Told within the confines of a flashback, the movie presents itself as the story of a young man (Friedrich Feher) whose world falls apart as he becomes aware of the doctor’s evil scheme; with time, however, it’s clear that this unreliable narrator may be a victim of his own confusion. Regardless of whether we’re supposed to take the supernatural events of “Caligari” in literal terms, Veidt’s performance as the sleepwalking killer has remained iconic for nearly 100 years, and on some level represents the first bonafide zombie onscreen: The threat of an unthinking humanoid lurching forward, with the mechanical intent of killing his victim and zero empathy, evokes a primal terror that only gets spookier with age. —EK

  • 29. Norman Bates, “Psycho” (1960)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (3)

    No serious cinephile has ever doubted the intrinsic power of Anthony Perkins’ seminal performance as the star of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 masterpiece “Psycho,” but perhaps, all these decades on, it’s been a little taken for granted. Perkins himself reprised the role throughout its strange, winding franchise life, Vince Vaughn took on the part for Gus Van Sant’s ambitious aping, and even Freddie Highmore added his own youthful spin in “Bates Motel,” but it’s hard to top the raw power of the first film.

    It’s even harder to imagine entering it now without the full knowledge of the twists to come (and how they frame not only the entire film, but Norman’s entire being), but it makes for a thrilling experiment. Imagine you don’t know what you know about Norman (and if you really don’t know, remedy that ASAP), and take him at his word from the start. Guess what: he’s still positively skin-crawling, wearing his disaffection in every glance of his eyes and shift of his body, Perkins wholly slipping into the poisoned only-son and never breaking along the way. When Hitchcock and his leading man finally unspool why all this madness is happening, it only deepens the horror, and even if Norman’s life has only ever conspired to turn him into a bad guy, that doesn’t mean he’s not damn good at it. —KE

  • 28. Jane, “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?” (1962)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (4)

    Opposite Joan Crawford as Blanche, Bette Davis is the titular Jane in “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”: a tragic two-hander about sisters whose toxic codependence threatens to swallow them whole. Although there’s a philosophical discussion to be had regarding the definitive villain of Robert Aldrich’s 1962 psychological horror, Davis turns Jane into a mesmeric pinwheel of regret and jealousy that’s not so much haunting as it is lastingly arresting to behold. Unable to move past the starry promise of her childhood, the aging woman fins herself unraveling in a cruel finale to a long life of troubles. —AF

  • 27. Nosferatu, “Nosferatu” (1922)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (5)

    The godfather of vampire cinema, F. W. Murnau’s “Nosferatu” began as an unauthorized adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel “Dracula” and ended has one of the most influential horror movies ever made. Max Schreck gives one of the genre’s great silent performances as Count Orlok, a vampire in Transylvania whose blossoming feelings for a real estate agent’s wife have terrifying and tragic consequences.

    Murnau filtered Stoker’s vampire story through his own lens of German Expressionism, creating an atmosphere rich with shadows and a stark contrast between light and dark spaces. The visuals of Orlock’s shadow creeping up a wall or the camera looking up at Orlock, his frame and limbs elongated even more by the angle, will forever be iconic touchstones of the horror genre. The movie’s terror is built into its craft, making it the rare silent film that continues to frighten. —ZS

  • 26. Samara, “The Ring” (2002)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (6)

    The terrifying thing about Samara isn’t that she’s a little dead girl who climbs out of a well and then videodromes her way through your television (though actress Daveigh Chase lends her a stooped and unnerving ghoulishness). No, what makes Samara so damn scary — what director Gore Verbinski saw in the character’s J-horror origins, and emphasized in every which we he could — is that she’s unstoppable. She’s an undead terminator. Once you see her creepy ersatz Maya Deren short, it’s game over man. There’s something about the inescapable dread of it all and the post-9/11 powerlessness churning below it that makes Samara so much more than just a long-haired little girl who’s still bitter about her awful childhood; no matter what you learn or where you hide, your only choices are to die or put someone else in the line of fire. Samara further cranks up the chill factor by weaponizing our technological creature comforts against us. Why does a psychic child who was raised on a remote island rely on phones to freak out her victims? Did she ever even watch TV before her ghost began using them as portals to the world of the living? We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. Once you see her awful student film, no place is safe. —DE

  • 25. Pinhead, “Hellraiser” Franchise

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (7)

    As far as sadomasochistic alien species go, the Cenobites aren’t subtle. Arriving in a torrent of strobe lights and smoke —summoned from their hell-like dimension by a [checks notes] glorified Rubik’s cube? —these extradimensional beings pluck humans away from Earth so they may chain them up and torture them into oblivion through a mind-bending vice of pleasure and pain. As portrayed by Doug Bradley, Pinhead (who was originally known as Lead Cenobite before earning the nickname among fans) delivers the cold, hard facts “Hellraiser” facts to his unlucky victims with a stern indifference that’s at once chilling and comedic. The character has been played by a number of actors across the franchise’s surprisingly lengthy history (11 films!), most recently by Jamie Clayton in the reasonably fun “Hellraiser” (2022). —AF

  • 24. Leatherface, “The Texas Chainsaw Masscare” (1974)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (8)

    You’ve got to love the relative simplicity of Leatherface, so named because of the leather (human, oops!) he opts to wear on his visage. Turns out, when you kill for fun and dabble in cannibalism, you can also get some kinky accessories out of the deal. First introduced in Tobe Hooper’s seminal 1974 chiller and loosely inspired by serial killer Ed Gein, Leatherface could have been the sort of one-note baddie that got by on the strength of his sartorial choices alone, but subsequent franchise entries (including one about a teen Leatherface!) have more fully developed his character.

    And, more than anything about how he got his mask (murder) or what his family is into (also murder), Leatherface is a chilling, horrifying, seemingly insurmountable bad guy, all big-bodied bluster and, oh yeah, blazing chainsaw. —KE

  • 23. Jack Torrance, “The Shining”

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (9)

    The dead twins, the bloody elevator, the rotting woman in room 237… there’s a lot of scary business lurking inside the Overlook Hotel, but none of it can hold a candle to the most horrifying thing of them all: writer’s block. Is Jack Torrance some kind of ghost? Has he really been the caretaker since at least 1921? We don’t know, and it doesn’t matter. There are any number of different ways to interpret the character and the way that Jack Nicholson plays him, but the enduring genius of “The Shining” is that Stanley Kubrick allows us to entertain them all at the same time. But even at face value, Jack is a horror villain for the ages.

    A family man who abandoned his career as a teacher in order to become a novelist, Jack finds himself being haunted by all of the blank pages that stick out from the back of his typewriter. Their blankness and unrealized potential reflects his own, and Jack’s sense of self gradually drifts away from him like a pad of butter sliding off of a breadknife. Regardless of the film’s greater mythology, Nicholson’s performance allows you to appreciate how the film’s most urgent demons are the ones that Jack brought with him; his creative frustration erupts into a kind of patriarchal bloodlust as he starts to see his wife and son as symbols of his own limitations. Or something like that.

    When Jack Nicholson looks at you with that terrifying glint in his eye, it doesn’t really matter what his motivation is — not when it’s clear that he’s ready to chop down his writer’s block with an axe if he has to. —DE

  • 22. Jigsaw, “Saw” Franchise

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (10)

    Between the endless sniping among accomplices and that cancer-treatment-at-gun-point plot, OG Jigsaw John Kramer became considerably less scary — and less believable — as his time in the “Saw” franchise went on. (That’s no fault of act Tobin Bell by the way; he’s intensely watchable even when the series turns into a full-on cop melodrama.) Still, the sprawling, morally confused framework Kramer gave his successors is timelessly terrifying. Imagine waking up in a room, greeted by a creepy puppet/pig/video tape and forced to fight for your life via gamified torture. It’s teeth-grindingly awful stuff, with too many calling cards to ever forget it was Jigsaw that did this. At the very least, the judgmental executer of the ungrateful has earned a spot among the most creative killers with a painstaking appreciation for detail and creepy craftsmanship. —AF

  • 21. The Mother, “Barbarian” (2022)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (11)

    Zach Cregger’s “Barbarian” is new enough that spoiling the entirety of its serpentine plot feels needlessly risky for those who might still see it. Suffice to say, the genuinely unnerving horror includes an unforgettable villain (one of multiple, in fact!) who tortures her victims with her strangely maternal instincts. —AF

    Read IndieWire’s review of “Barbarian” by Jude Dry

  • 20. Chucky, “Child’s Play” Franchise

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (12)

    From “Annabelle” and “Dead Silence” to “The Boy” and “Magic,” there are more creepy doll and puppet movies than the toys’ target demographic can typically count. Still, if there’s one plaything to rule the horror genre, that’s Chucky: also known as the human criminal Charles Lee Ray. After an attempted burglary goes sideways, Ray finds himself stuck in a toy story and decides to transfer his soul to a Good Guy doll using the power of voodoo. In the sequel, his sex pot soulmate Tiffany Valentine ends up in a doll too. Together, the spiteful hunks of plastic plot to reassume their human forms with few misgivings about the body count they wrack up along the way. —AF

  • 19. The Entity, “It Follows” (2014)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (13)

    Scary movies are often likened to nightmares, but the description has never felt more apt than it does when applied to David Robert Mitchell’s anxiety-driven “It Follows.” What could be more classically nightmarish than the idea of being pursued by something that you’ll never be able to escape? Mitchell gets a lot of mileage out of his clever premise (a demonic STD marks a target to be hunted by a shape-shifting entity that will stalk its victim until they pass the disease to someone else), but “It Follows” is such an unnerving experience because of how brilliantly the film renders its anonymous monster. “It” could be anyone: A tall man. An old woman. A naked dude on your roof; Mitchell conditions your eyes to scan every shot for suspicious characters.

    It doesn’t matter what they look like — they all strike the same fear in you as soon as they start ambling towards the camera. Constant vigilance is required for survival, but it gets to be exhausting, and death never sleeps. There’s no escape, only deferment. And even after the lights come up, you can still feel it drawing closer. —DE

  • 18. Pearl, “Pearl” (2022)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (14)

    Starting with Ti West’s blood-spattered “X,” Mia Goth has spent her A24 stint turning rural slasher villainess Pearl into one of the scariest characterizations in modern cinema. In the original, Goth plays both Maxine — an up-and-coming porn actress — and (thanks to some heavy prosthetics) the elderly Pearl: a farmer who grows lethally covetous of Maxine and her friends’ youth. Prequel “Pearl” tells the antagonist’s origin story, tracing from her tortured childhood and stunted marriage to her first kill. In her most terrifying moment, delivered as a one-shot monologue with Goth speaking directly to camera, an agonized Pearl picks apart her dreams and limitations in a tortured moment of self-reflections that’s scary if only because her madness begins to make strange sense. —AF

  • 17. Ghostface, “Scream” Franchise

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (15)

    Wes Craven made Ghostface so iconic that most of us naturally assumed it had been created for the movie, but the Munch-inspired mask that lends “Scream” its title was first manufactured as a simple Halloween costume by a novelty company called Fun World in 1992. The fact that it was so readily available — so insidiously generic — not only underlined just how transformative certain tropes can be when they’re worn by the wrong people (a gruesome phenomenon that “Scream” sequels were quick to exploit), it also made it possible for the getup to sweep across the country as soon as the slasher movie that made it famous became a cultural phenomenon. Michael Myers or Jason Voorhees had been available off the rack for decades, but those iconic monsters were always just individual people — Ghostface could be anybody, and the sight of seeing 10 of them at your grade school Halloween dance brought Sidney Prescott’s horror all too close to home. “Scream” was all about stabbing a hole through the wall between horror movies and real life, and Ghostface made that point sharply enough that people still flinch whenever they see that costume in the wild. —DE

  • 16. Candyman, “Candyman” (1992)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (16)

    In Bernard Rose’s unsettling horror effort about a hook-handed terror tells the tale of a skeptical white doctoral candidate working on a thesis on urban legends, who learns of the Cabrini-Green “Candyman” folklore and goes to investigate. The film boasts one of the horror genre’s most intriguing movie baddies, who comes with a tragic backstory that makes him sympathetic: a famous black artist and son of slaves who pays a steep price for falling in love with a white man’s daughter, after she hires him to paint her portrait.

    Played by the physically imposing Tony Todd, whose sonorous voice haunts long after the movie ends, the character may not be as broadly popular as other “monsters” of slasher movie lore like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers, but he certainly has a cult following all his own. —TO

  • 15. Dr. Hannibal Lecter, “The Silence of the Lambs” (1991)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (17)

    The good doctor (played in Jonathan Demme’s film by Anthony Hopkins in the signature role of his vast and varied career) might balk at the idea of anyone “dissecting” him (and his big, tasty brain), but that’s precisely what author Thomas Harris, filmmakers like Ridley Scott and Brett Ratner, and an entire (beloved, short-lived) television series have attempted to do over the decades. While it’s hard to blame any of them for that — Lecter’s emotional backstory and professional exploits do make a feast of a tale — there’s something indelible about the cannibal murderer’s most well-known cinematic turn.

    Sure, it’s fun to imitate his particular cadences and love of fava beans, a fine chianti, and some well-butchered human flesh, but Hopkins and Demme’s version is all the more chilling because it doesn’t try to build in something as pedestrian as reasons for all that nastiness. Hopkins’ masked murderer arrives fully conceived, even if most people realize there’s a lot more going on underneath all that leather, and that he unnerves everyone around him (Clarice, all those ill-fated prison guards, the audience) is the product of a chilling performance embodied by a remarkable performer.

    But there’s also a more hinky problem at work: we know Lecter is big-time evil (turns out, cannibalism and murder are bad things), but that doesn’t keep us (and, again, our chattering surrogate Clarice) from wanting to get close to him. Such is his power: you know whatever Lecter tells you or shows you (or tastes you?) is going to be a nightmare beyond all reason, but you want to look anyway. You can’t help yourself, and neither can he. —KE

  • 14. The Xenomorph, “Alien” (1979)

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    If this were a list of the best horror movie monsters, we might wax poetic about H.R. Giger’s insidious creature design, or how the Xenomorph’s extraordinary lifecycle — all three stages of which are nightmare-inducing in their own way — so perversely appropriates human anatomy and reproduction that the alien seems like something the Devil invented just to get back at God (the prequel films suggest that isn’t far from the case). But when you’re talking about the best horror movie villains, the Xenomorph stands out for a different reason: It’s a giant asshole.

    First, it chokes you and shoves an egg down your throat. Next, it gives its host a short reprieve; just long enough to enjoy a last supper with your work colleagues. Then it gives you a front-row seat to your own disembowelment, before growing into a slimy apex predator that hunts its prey for sport. It has no reason, compassion, or vulnerabilities. The Xenomorph just wants to kill, and it goes about it in such an arrogant way (the last thing many of its victims see is the creature’s slimy wet smile). That arrogance, of course, reflects our own; the Xenomorph is the perfect embodiment of our Sisyphean curiosity and ambition, and it won’t stop until the entire human species has paid the ultimate price. Sure, maybe we had it coming, but there’s no excuse for killing Harry Dean Stanton and Yaphet Kotto in the same movie. Jerk. —DE

  • 13. Pennywise, “It: Chapter One” (2017) and “It: Chapter Two” (2019)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (19)

    Though the ancient evil sometimes known as Pennywise awakens only once every 27 years, the child-nabbing eater of souls enjoys a reputation that precedes, well, “It.” Based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name, the clown character first terrified TV audiences with Tim Curry wearing the crown for Tommy Lee Wallace’s 1990 miniseries. Then, Bill Skarsgård picked up the wig and shoes for Andy Muschietti’s duology, bringing his own twisted spin to the supernatural predator. It’s the showmanship that makes Pennywise truly scary: luring the children of Derry, Maine into the sewers with the promise of popcorn and performance only to rip them apart limb from limb. —AF

  • 12. The Tethered, “Us” (2019)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (20)

    In Jordan Peele’s sophomore outing, “Us,” audiences witnessed an underworld parallel to our own through the harrowing fight of the Wilson family. When doppelgänger beings known as the Tethered arise to take the place of their counterparts above ground, each family member is pitted against a vicious version of themselves. The masterful doubling work of Lupita Nyong’o as Red and Adelaide Wilson stands out as an artistic achievement that ought to have earned the actress more awards recognition, but Winston Duke, Shahadi Wright Joseph, and Evan Alex are similarly dazzling. Elisabeth Moss and Tim Heidecker bring out some of the most fiendish conceptual fun in the Tethered with an unforgettable scene involving voice assistant Alexa and a down-low-too-slow for the ages. —AF

  • 11. Art the Clown, “Terrifier” (2016) and “Terrifier 2” (2022)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (21)

    There’s a perverted goofiness to Damien Leone’s “Terrifier” that makes Art the Clown at once the best — and worst — type of blood-splattered playmate. Introduced in a segment of Leone’s “All Hallows’ Eve,” the black-and-white killer clown was a standout success from the 2013 anthology horror film and has since received two standalone killing sprees. Both see actor David Howard Thornton nailing over-the-top sadistic kills that match “Saw” and “Hostel” pound-for-pound on gore and guts, but are set apart by just how much this blood-thirsty entertainer seems to be enjoying himself. The dastardly duology isn’t for the faint of heart, with “Terrifier 2” boasting one of the meanest onscreen murders in recent horror memory. —AF

  • 10. The Babadook, “The Babadook” (2014)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (22)

    There are any number of “un-killable” horror movie villains, but few that actually follow through on that threat in a meaningful way. The genius of Jennifer Kent’s instant classic of a debut — and the iconic monster that bears its name — is that its frayed nerve of a heroine doesn’t just have to survive the Babadook, she has to learn how to live with him for the rest of her life. A terrifying abstraction who pops out of the pages of a mysterious children’s book in order to wreak all sorts of Rorschach-like havoc on the poor Australian widow who brought it into her home, the Babadook is sort of like a shape-shifting cross between Robert Smith, Edward Scissorhands, Pierrot le Fou (of “Cowboy Bebop” fame”), and maybe also a demonic ferret for good measure. Most of all, he’s a trollish metaphor for the deep-seated kind of grief that can never be fully vanquished, taunting Essie Davis’ character as it takes shape in the darkest shadows of her mind. It’s only once she realizes that the Babadook will never go away that she learns how to bring him to heel. —DE

  • 9. Asami Yamazaki, “Audition” (1998)

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    Eihi Shiina practically pumps ice into your veins as Asami Yamazaki, the merciless siren-turned-serial killer of Takashi Miike’s notoriously brutal “Audition.” The nerve-wracking film reveals the villainess punishes the men who fail to love only her, torturing them in calculated fits of revenge that sometimes end in death but can also spell fates far worse. Ryo Ishibashi plays Shigeharu Aoyama: a widower who falls into Asami’s sights after he’s convinced to hold fake “auditions” for women to be his new partner. —AF

  • 8. The Lipstick-Face Demon, “Insidious” Franchise

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (24)

    Ever since James Wan hit us with that jump scare (you know, the dinner table jaw-dropper that almost materializes from within Patrick Wilson?!) in the first “Insidious,” the so-called Lipstick-Face Demon has punctuated the thrills and chills of the supernatural franchise with near-surgical precision. Composer Joseph Bishara, whose avant-garde stylings accompany the films, also lends his form to the silent stealer of souls. With claws ground to a fine point and an engine-red face (so red it’s also earned the character the nickname “The Man with Fire on His Face”), Lipstick-Face is the unforgettable main event of the 2010 original. He reappears at just the right times in subsequent films, creating a sinister sense of scope to the series’ demonic realm that makes its later chapters feel more real. —AF

  • 7. Paimon, “Hereditary” (2018)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (25)

    “The Exorcist” and the demon Pazuzu spider-walked so “Hereditary” and Paimon — “one of the eight kings of hell” — could straight-up sprint. Ari Aster’s triumphant meditation on generational trauma and familial grief spends its running time ratcheting up the dread through an unseen presence tormenting Annie Graham (Toni Collette) and her son Peter (Alex Wolff). The fear is so effective (Fire in the living room! Desk head slam! Attic decapitation!) that the antagonist’s almost abrupt introduction in the film’s final scene becomes a kind of agonizing relief to the audience: an overdue if decidedly grim answer to the gnawing question, who or what is doing this?

    “You are Paimon,” a brilliantly cast Ann Dowd coos, worshippers surrounding the feet of a now-possessed Peter. “We’ve corrected your first female body and now you give this healthy male host. We reject the trinity and pray devoutly to you.” Chills. —AF

  • 6. The Armitages, “Get Out” (2017)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (26)

    By the time would-be deuteragonist Rose (Allison Williams) reveals she’s been in on her family’s body-snatching scheme for the entirety of “Get Out,” protagonist Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is already ensnared in the Armitages’ appalling trap. There’s a churning torture to the manner in which we quietly watch as surgeon Dean (Bradley Whitford) and hypnotist Missy (Catherine Keener), along with their unhinged son Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones), quietly work Chris through a system optimizing the abduction of Black people and — through a metaphysical realm known as the Sunken Place — transplanting white customers’ minds into their bodies. The result is an unimaginably disturbing portrait of entitled oppressors flitting between every level of racist terror. —AF

  • 5. The Strangers, “The Strangers” (2008) and “The Strangers: Prey At Night” (2018)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (27)

    There’s comfort in understanding a killer’s motivations. Even if the dastardly details won’t save you from an untimely demise, they can add punchy specifics to your last words and give your loved ones something to go on when investigating your death in the sequel. No such luck for Kristen (Liv Tyler) and James (Scott Speedman), whose harrowing attempt to survive the titular strangers — Bag-head (Kip Weeks), Pin-Up Girl (Laura Margolis), and Dollface (Gemma Ward) — in writer-director Bryan Bertino’s agonizing home invasion saga from 2008 ends with a brutally cold exchange: “Why are you doing this to us? “Because you were home.” —AF

  • 4. Michael Myers, “Halloween” Franchise

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (28)

    Over time (and lots of sequels, both good and bad), Michael Myers’ fraught backstory has gotten both flattened and distorted from its original shape, though David Gordon Green’s recent sequel, complete with some smart retconning of bad earlier choices (like a familial connection between Myers and Laurie Strode that now doesn’t actually exist) has returned the iconic baddie to his former glory.

    John Carpenter’s original film does build out a backstory for kiddo Michael — at the tender age of six, he killed his big sister with a giant kitchen knife — it never offers much else in the way of explanation. All the better than to play up the real key to Michael’s murderous tendencies: he’s evil, plain and simple. By the time he evolves into “The Shape,” thanks to years in a psychiatric institution that apparently did zero good, he’s fully turned into the hulking, horrifying personification of a terror nearly supernatural in its reach.

    Nimble, resilient, and seemingly unavoidable, Michael’s quest to kill pits him against a few fearless foes, but his ability to rise from the dead (and kill a lot while doing it) is seemingly impossible to beat. The ‘70s and ‘80s bred heaps of classic killers, but Michael Myers remains the best of the bunch. —KE

  • 3. Annie Wilkes, “Misery” (1990)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (29)

    Stephen King has crafted scores of unimpeachable villains over the course of his storied career, but the enduring power of nurse/serial killer Annie Wilkes is tough to top. So firmly entrenched in her own ideas about what’s right and what’s wrong, what’s necessary and what’s disposable, what’s worth committing grievous acts of violence over and what’s worth just a well-placed finger cut-off, she’s a nutcase with a hell of a worldview.

    She also toplines a story that’s both fantastical and believable, as a crazed fan who sets out to shape the world (and her favorite book series) into the image she so desires, authorial command be damned. She was scary and prescient when King first created her, but she’s become more brutal and blazingly real in the decades since. —KE

  • 2. Frank Booth, “Blue Velvet” (1986)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (30)

    You shouldn’t put on a David Lynch suspense staple — let alone the one starring late Academy Award-nominated genre crawler Dennis Hooper in his most notoriously terrifying role — without carefully considering what you’re getting into first. That’s advice that could’ve helped Kyle MacLachlan’s wildly misguided Jeffrey Beaumont: a college kid who, after discovering a severed ear in a field while visiting back home, becomes ensnared in the bizarre underpinnings of “Blue Velvet.”

    At the core of this surrealist spine-chiller is Frank Booth: a depraved, psychopathic gangster whose insidious influence on an unendingly strange crime underworld in North Carolina is punctuated by fits of violent, sexual rage rooted in his traumatic childhood. These outbursts are most often directed at Isabella Rossellini’s heartbreaking portrait of Dorothy Vallens: a peculiar nightclub singer whose misty-eyed sorrow reflects the kaleidoscopic horror of Frank’s cruelty. From the oedipal assaults of Frank’s Baby persona to the almost banal brutality of his Daddy side (“Fuck you, you fucking fuck!”), the one-of-a-kind tormenter is the worst kind of earthly evil: torturing, tortured, and hopeless. —AF

  • 1. The Thing, “The Thing” (1982)

    The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (31)

    Even in the ancient days of 1982, there wasn’t anything particularly novel about a monster who preyed on human paranoia; “The Thing” may have been adapted from a 1938 John Campbell novel called “Who Goes There?,” but our intrinsic fear of the other goes all the way back to the Book of Genesis. And yet, from the Bible to “Invasion of the Body Snatchers” and all points beyond, that primal human distrust has never been articulated more deviously than it is in John Carpenter’s creature feature masterpiece.

    Despite assuming any number of different forms over the course of the movie (and never having a default appearance), the Thing is a genuine character unto itself; the first fact we learn about this nasty alien parasite is that it’s light years more advanced — and more patient — than we are, and so it feels like a genuine adversary once it starts mutating its way through the employees of a remote Antarctic research station.

    Sure, flamethrowers come in handy from time to time, but wit and communication are the only real defenses against a monster that loves to hide in plain sight. And while an alien that can mimic our DNA and turn character actors into disgusting piles of tissue and ooze is already scary enough, the most frightening thing about the Thing is that it feeds off our natural cynicism. It makes sense that we don’t know when it crashed on Earth, or if it’s really gone; the Thing has always been here, and it always will be. —DE

The 31 Best Horror Movie Villains, from Michael Myers to ‘The Thing’ (2024)

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