Annabelle

A horror movie is only as good as its villain. The big bad is the entire nucleus of the film, otherwise you’re left with an often forgettable cast made up of dozens of generic, regurgitated characters. Which isn’t to say that horror movies don’t create multi-dimensional and iconic characters, they created an entire archetype byway of the Final Girl, but most aren’t reoccurring characters. In fact, most characters in horror movies are one-offs, they either die or they scurry off into the sunset having narrowly avoided death. It’s the killer that keeps coming back, and keeps the people coming back.

Why is the villain so much more important than the protagonist in a horror movie? Becuase you don’t go to a scary movie to see a happy ending, you don’t go for romance, you barely even go for character development. You watch scary movies to be scared. We want to feel frightened, and those characters that can truly scare and/or entertain us also earn our affection. We latch onto their sadism, we crave it with sequel after sequel, constantly returning to Elm Street or Haddonfield or Crystal Lake because we know where and who to go to when we need a good scare.

So what makes a good horror villain? It starts with their effectiveness as an agent of terror. That goes beyond body count. Any shitty slasher can kill a bunch of teenagers over the course of ninety minutes, an iconic villain delivers fear whether they’re taking a life or not. Characters like Annie Wilkes, Norman Bates, Jack Torrance or Minnie Castevet are villains who kill few people, if any of the course of their movies, and they remain effective because they possess a foreign malevolence. Good villains are singularly interested, they’re drawn to wickedness. It’s not just about elaborate kills or a terrifying design, they should have a corrupt depravity that makes our skin crawl.

It doesn’t matter why they are the way that they are. As fun as backstory can be, there’s still something effective and primal about an unthinking, unmotivated killing machine. There is room for motive, as long as that motive works to make the villain scarier instead of convoluting their mythos. But as stories as interpretations are bound to change over time, the mark of a great villain is one who remains effective across decades. Above all else, they should be able to build a legacy of fear that extends across generations and iterations that solidifies their memorability.

Three faces occupy the horror genre’s Mount Rushmore, and have done so for close to four decades: Michael Myers, Jason Vorhees, and Freddy Kruger. Headlining the Halloween, Friday the 13th, and A Nightmare on Elm Street franchises respectfully. Each of whom has cultivated a legacy of fear, and an unimpeachable track record of terrorizing victims. Ironically, each one of them has seen their stories and motivations bastardized and upended over the course of several movies each. However, as giants of the genre they remain effective.

Each character came to prominence over a transformative period for the genre. Myers hit the scene in 1978, near the tale end of a new golden age of horror in the 70s, where names like Tobe Hooper, Wes Craven and John Carpenter were breaking new ground. If Myers kicked off the slasher craze, it was Jason in the 80s who sent it into overdrive, emerging as the standard for the sub-genre all on his own. Freddy Kruger arrives in ’84 and brings a dark and depraved personality that was sorely missing from the genre, delivering a toxic magnetism that was largely unseen in villains to that point. They were the ones who managed to be effective when horror was at its most inventive, and when it was at its most crowded and overwrought.

They exist at opposite ends of the spectrum. On one end you have Jason and Michael, two mute, hulking behemoths. They carve their way through characters without saying a word, leaning into their own quiet brutalities. On the other end you have Kruger, a foul-mouthed, quippy deviant that toys with his victims before killing them. The trio expresses the duality of the genre: the slow, methodical and skulking version of terror, as well as its elaborate and over the top elements.

Kruger appears in seven movies, Jason in twelve, and Myers in eleven (technically 12), each delivering their fair share of unshakeable iconography. There’s the Myer’s head tilt, Jason’s constant reanimation, and Freddy’s propensity to call everyone a bitch. Each is the master of their own domain. Michael wreaks havoc in Haddonfield on Halloween, Jason hunts anyone and everyone who sets foot near Crystal Laker, and Kruger invades and tortures Elm Street residents in their dreams. However you want to position them on the podium is up to you, but the question remains, who is the fourth face of horror?

There’s obviously no official measurement by which we can identify the last figure of the genre’s Mount Rushmore, but no one really reads these anyways, so I’ll do what I want. Neither longevity, nor body count can be used as the sole criteria. Villains that appear in one movie can be just as effective as those that spawn franchises. In much the same way, villains who hardly spill any blood can be just as terrifying as those who murder by the dozen. What’s important is their overall memorability and impact, and that’s what we’re going to unpack.

Ghost Face

Ghost Face would have a strong case for the fourth spot if they actually existed. The character belongs to the Scream franchise, and upon examination, Ghost Face is more of a moniker than a person. Much of Scream’s popularity comes from its slick and bloody whodunit angle. It’s the rotating cast of characters - any of whom could be the killer, that breathes new life into every sequel. The problem with this case is that the identity of Ghost Face is assumed by several people over the course of four - soon to be five - different movies. The genius of the mask and cloak is the provision of anonymity. Anybody could be the killer. The meta-horror masterpiece relies on the indistinguishable form that the Ghost Face costume provides. Ghost Face isn’t real, it’s just a mantle people that take up, assuming the duties of butchering the citizens of Woodsboro, California. The image of the screaming ghost, however, is too iconic to overlook. Despite numerous characters having been behind the mask, the character stands on its own. When you look back at a Scream movie, you don’t think about the time when Debby Salt or Billy Loomis killed somebody, you think about the time when Ghost Face killed somebody. Illustrating that the image of the character far outweighs the actual killer underneath the cloak.

Leprechaun

The biggest problem with the Leprechaun is that he’s more or less a joke. He appears in eight films, none of which are particularly good, spouting limericks and being gross. He winds up in space, Las Vegas and “Tha Hood,” throughout his travels because of some contrived plot that completely changes from movie to movie. The Leprechaun comes off as hokey more often than it seems charmingly low budget. He’s vicious and violent, and his presence certainly stays with you once you finish one of his movies. In college, two of my friends and I decided to power through every Leprechaun film, and as creative as each iteration is, his presence becomes grating after a while. His tacky Irish schtick grows tiring within a couple movies. He’s certainly dastardly and underhanded enough to belong on this list, but his mythology is too tainted with campiness and ill-advised hip hop performances to give him a real shot at fourth place.

Xenomorph

The Xenomorph is the dark horse of this competition. The Alien franchise has transformed in science-fiction over its lifespan, erasing the Xenomorph from the horror icon conversation. However, there are few things as intimidating as a towering, lanky, sharp, blood thirsty alien stalking people in the throes of space. Gaunt, slick and skulking, the Xenomorph is arguably the most tenacious character on the list. Its entire reputation is built on aggression and stealth, picking off victims with it’s second mouth over the course of 6 movies. It’s a killing machine, but it’s not singular, it’s a species. There was only one in the original 1979 Alien, but over the course of several decades audiences came to understand that there are plenty of Xenomorphs roaming around space. Given their abundance, we can’t really acknowledge the Xenomorph as an individual character, being that there are several Xenomorphs who take centre stage over the course of half a dozen movies. The image, design and execution of the creature, however, remains as iconic as any monster put to film in history.

Samara

Samara is a tough one. We come to recognize her as a sympathetic figure over the course of The Ring Franchise. We see her softer edges and tragic backstory, but that makes her no less terrifying when she oozes out of our TV screen after we just watched the video tape. “You’re gonna die in seven days,” is just about as iconic a line as you’ll find throughout the genre, and it speaks to Samara’s greatest case: her unstoppability. Samara is the manifestation of the inevitable. She is consequence. She comes for whoever watches the tape, she doesn’t discriminate and she doesn’t reason, she simply comes for any and all perpetrators without thought, only compulsion.

Jig Saw

Jigsaw is an odd candidate, actually he’s hollow. That’s not a joke about puppets, it’s a condemnation of Jigsaw’s effectiveness. First of all, the image above is Billy the Puppet, that’s because John Kramer’s face doesn’t really install fear in people’s hearts, and neither does John Kramer the character. Despite there being nine Saw movies, Jigsaw exists as a memory in well over half of them. He’s taken out at the end of the third movie, rather unceremoniously and returns in every film via flashback. Jigsaw, the character isn’t the legacy that lives on, it’s the traps. It’s Jigsaw’s weird insistence that he doesn’t actually kill anyone, despite definitely killing people. His legacy is his ingenuity, it’s his contraptions, it’s his ridiculous abundance of warehouses in which to torture people. The character is manipulative, and resourceful, and has innumerable contingency plans, but never really becomes bigger than his games. In the end, Jigsaw is a hypocritical cancer patient with too much time on his hands, who basically just incited a trend of torture porn.

Minnie Castevet

Minnie Castavette from Rosemary’s Baby is probably one of the lower tier horror movie villains, which is understandable as she’s not technically thee villain. She’s certainly duplicitous and finagling, and it doesn’t hurt that she’s a devotee to Satan himself, but therein lies her shortcomings. She is essential to the plot of Rosmary’s Baby (1968), and as wonderful of actress as Ruth Gordon is in the role - she won an Oscar for god sakes - she isn’t ultimately the “big-bad” of the story, that moniker goes to the literal Devil. There’s no shame in being shown up by the lord of darkness, he’s the architect of evil, but that renders Minnie Castevet a worker bee. Now, she does coordinate a plot to bring the Satan’s hell-spawn into the world, doing so without a shred of remorse. It’s the kind of psychotic behaviour worthy of celebration, however, she remains an underling.

Pinhead

An explorer from the nether-regions of reality. An angel to some, and a demon to others. Pinhead may be the most chilling character on this list. He’s domineering and unforgiving, fuelled only by a duty to inflict pain and punishment on those who call to him. He wishes to tear souls apart, to main flesh and flay the minds and bodies of all those whom he encounters. He dresses like a bloodied dominatrix and speaks with unnerving distortion. He is a perfect marriage of terrifying design and equally terrifying motivation. He appears in 10 Hellraiser movies to mixed results. The problem with Pinhead is that as strange and abhorrent as he is, he always seems to be foiled in the end. He remains a behemoth of pain, taking countless lives in all of his movies, but he’s thwarted way too often to be recognized as the impervious villain he appears to be.

The Thing

How do you even begin to describe The Thing? It’s a grotesque, parasitic, shapeshifting entity from outer space that could be sitting right next to you. The true horror of The Thing, in every iteration, is that it’s unknowable until it’s too late. You can’t really take precautionary measures against it, because once you know what you’re up against, your chances of avoiding assimilation are slim to none. You can wield a flame thrower, quarantine suspects and test bloods and organic materials, but The Thing is too crafty to be thwarted. Thinking you’ve isolated the parasite in one person means that it’s definitely found its way into two other people. It’s constantly multiplying, leaving a wake of paranoia and body horror in its wake.

Hannibal Lecter

Dr. Lecter is a personal favourite. It’s the nebulous accent, it’s the shapeless body, it’s the deliciously sharp tongue used to cut people down in a matter of seconds, sometimes fatally, and in more ways than one. Hannibal Lecter is probably the most fun villain on the list. You can’t help but fall in love with his cadence and surgical articulation. He’s both a genius and a sociopath, revelling in emotional and psychological torment, while still sticking to a code of refinement. In some sick sense we enjoy Lecter’s games, we enjoy his wit and nihilism. Where many people would be put off by a cannibal therapist, we are enthralled by his acumen. However, Lecter falls apart when you acknowledge his diminishing returns. He works best in small doses, yet has gone on to appear in four movies. Lecter is on screen for just over 16 minutes in The Silence of the Lambs (1991), proving he works best as a sample, given the fact that he fact that he bags up and steals every scene that he’s in.

Pazuzu

Perhaps the most vindictive villain on the list, Pazuzu is as malevolent as they come. Pazuzu is the demon that overtakes the body of Regan in 1973’s The Exorcist. Despite transforming Regan into a green, decaying, revolting shell of a young girl, Pazuzu succumbs to the conventional tactics used to exorcize demons across all popular media. However, Pazuzu is enveloping; once Regan is possessed her body deforms and contorts, she becomes crass and she floats, she becomes gaunt, and she even stabs herself with a cross. One of the more famous images from the movie sees Regan turn her head 360 degrees and vomit green bile all over the room. It’s a testament to the depravity that Pazuzu will go to in order to keep the body that he’s stolen. Pazuzu reaches some of the highest highs a horror villain could wish to reach given what he accomplishes over the course of the movie, but he is done away with all too soundly.

Annabelle is one of the cornerstones of the Conjuring universe. She has three movies of her own thus far, and appears in several others mostly just to fuck shit up. Annabelle’s biggest shortcoming is that she’s a doll. I know she is an incredibly strong demonic presence, capable of unleashing all kinds of terror, but at the end of the day she’s jus a doll. I just don’t think a doll is that scary. Sure, she has the power to sometimes open her little glass case, but for the most part, she’s confined to a holy box of plexiglass. To her credit, Annabelle courts chaos, it’s not just the doll that’s supposed to be the scary part, it’s her ability to summon and loose dark forces. The separate entities that she mobilizes are often equally as dangerous, allowing Annabelle to exist as the designer of evil, without necessarily enacting it. She’s the eye of the hurricane, moving in silence as wreckage and havoc gravitates around her.

Leatherface

Leatherface might have the best case for the 4th spot. Appearing in nine movies, he has the longevity, consistency and iconography to match with any great villains of the genre. He’s always been the carnivorous oaf, swinging a chainsaw at wayward Texans. In another life Leatherface is probably the best offensive lineman ever produced by the state of Texas, which is signifies his brute strength. His relentless mania is what makes him so terrifying. The famous shot of him swinging his chainsaw at sunset with reckless abandon is a full display of his unquenchable lust for carnal horror. Plus he wears other people’s skin over his own face. The knock against his resume is that he’s part of a team. He’s a member of the Sawyer family, a group of cannibals that terrorize their county. Leatherface is both the idiot and the muscle of the group, proving his limited worth as a villain.

Norman Bates

Norman Bates is a difficult case. He’s the headlining villain in what is, by all accounts, the signature horror thriller of the 60s. He has no supernatural elements and no connection to demonism, just a shit load of maternal trauma. Norman is one of the iconic figures in all of cinema, let alone horror. The initial, steely corruption that paints the character in 1960’s Psycho erodes over the course of several ill-advised sequels. In his first outing, the character is an opaque well of grotesque faithfulness, exacerbating and navigating his relationship with his dead mother. There’s almost nothing you can do but be shocked at the depravity of Norman’s state, while also pitying his misfortune. His psyche is demented, and probably should’ve remained mysterious over the course of the Psycho franchise in order to maximize the effectiveness of the character.

Pennywise

I first watched the first 15 minutes of the 1990 IT miniseries at a family-friend’s house when I was about 9 years old. When Pennywise lunges at the screen, I nearly peed myself. Georgie’s wink all but sealed a week of nightmares for me. He’s probably the character that has caused me the most amount of fear in a single moment. He’s a staggeringly phenomenal idea: A killer clown who lives in the sewers, luring and eating children. But at the same time Pennywise isn’t that. The big problem with the character - and this is no shot at Stephen King, is that there’s something inescapably, primally scary about a sewer-dwelling evil clown. However, when he’s shapeshifting into giant crab spiders or mummy’s or whatever it may be, the fear lessens. There is a certain amount of psychological horror that comes with boundlessness. He can be anyone, at any place at anytime, but for all his tricks, he’s never scarier than when he’s the clown. Pennywise has also been dormant for a long time, no reference intended. Outside of the 1990 miniseries, it was quiet for IT until the reboot in 2017 and again in 2019. He simply doesn’t have the amount iterations, nor longevity that some of the other heavy hitters have.

Candyman

Candyman is the perfect distillation of myth-come-true. Candyman is what happens when you balk at consequence and legend. Now, as long as you don’t look in the mirror and say his name five times, you should be good, but character’s do have a habit of breaking that singular rule. Candyman is the hook-handed, bee-chested, bellowing villain that stalks the Cabrini-Green projects in Chicago. He’s tragic, scorned and seductive. He has a gothic nature, causing him to deal in retribution. By every force at his expense his name will mean something, it will carry weight and consequence and terror. He’s the smoothest character on the list, emitting a psycho-sexual aura that allows him to seemingly glide from victim to victim. Like most horror icons, Candyman’s imperfections are no fault of his own. His mythology and backstory constantly change from movie to movie, until it doesn’t make sense. Why are all of his relatives white? He becomes a figure instead of a character and his story is stripped for parts. The elements that make Candyman effective are swapped for convolution.

Chucky

With Chucky, we run into the same problems that we do with any villainous doll: we can all pretty much beat the shit out of a doll. Yes, the voice, and eyes, and uncanny speaking patterns are eerie, but Chucky is just a doll with the soul of a criminal. His main target is a traumatized child, and outside of his patented vulgarity, he’s really not all that intimidating. Across eight movies Chucky spills no shortage of blood, the problem is that Chucky slowly slips into parody overtime. His movies become more about slapstick puppetry than they are about anything all that scary. Chucky is an undeniably memorable character, but he isn’t ultimately that effective.

Annie Wilkes

Annie Wilkes is a plodding, psychotic basket case. She’s a perfectly deranged amalgam of sympathy and psychosis. She’s stan culture gone wrong. She’s obsessive, and compulsive, and obsessive compulsive. She abides by a code of prudish ethics that are the complete antithesis to her actual actions over the course of 1990’s Misery. I’m fairly sure someone has wholesome as Annie would frown upon kidnapping and mutilation, but here we are. Out of necessity and lunacy, Annie descends from a helpful stranger to a crude torturer. The reason why her transformation is so scary is because we see flashes of her rage and instability throughout her descent. More importantly, we witness her make sense of her violent decisions and we watch as she becomes nihilistic. We spend a lot of time with Paul Sheldon, the man whom she holds captive, and we watch Annie from his perspective. We see Annie, his only source of communication and chance of survival venture to all kinds of extremes and despairs, fluctuating from scene to scene. It illustrates why her erratic behaviour is so scary.

Jack Torrance

Jack is a little bit of everything. He has proximity to the supernatural, while also being completely deranged and berserk. He’s regular at times, but also increasingly unhinged. The scariest part of Jack is that we don’t really know when the evil spirit of The Overlook envelops him. He becomes horrific in an instant, without a chance at redemption, nor an interest in it. He turns on his family as well as his sanity in a way that seems both all at once and a long time coming. It’s what makes Jack so effective, he is a character that is ready to erupt, except we don’t see the eruption. By the time we’re assured he’s gone insane, he’s been a seething, demented axe murderer for days. We can never get a read on his anger, he’s always slightly more extreme, or confrontational, or homicidal than we expect him to be at any given moment. Of course, Jack is ultimately undone by his own son, tricked in a snowy hedge maze which doesn’t really speak to Jack’s talent as a psychopath.

The Verdict

So who gets that fourth spot? Ultimately I’m not really sure. But then what was the point? Again, ultimately I’m not really sure. I’m not sure there’s been a horror movie villain as integral to the success of the genre as Jason, Michael or Freddy in the above group. They all have their individual stylings and intricate mythologies. They each provide a specific brand of terror. Unfortunately, the majority share the distinction of having been re-written and partly ruined over decades of sequels and reboots. But to their credit, each character has clearly stood the test of time, having made it to this arbitrary From 15th list. While we can’t definitively add a fourth character to the horror’s Mount Rushmore, we can at least enjoy the array of characters that make the genre what it is.