Billy – Black Christmas
You wouldn’t have Michael Myers if it weren’t for Billy from Black Christmas. We’re not talking casual inspiration here. According to director Bob Clark, John Carpenter asked him what he would do with a sequel to his now 50-year-old cult holiday horror pic. Clark responded that his killer who preys on assertive and sexually empowered young women would escape from an institution and return to town … on Halloween. A genre was born.
Black Christmas set the template for the slasher movie: the misogynistic violence, the final girl trope and POV shots trapped in the killer’s perspective all came together in the Canadian classic. But its largely unseen villain stands apart from the calm, calculated and ruthless killers that he made way for. Billy is all uncontrollable rage; and all too real because of it. The grisly violence he unleashes is pent-up perversion and toxic energy, which is easily pinned on any other male character in the movie and beyond. And it’s most viscerally felt in the horrifying sounds – a medley of ungodly pleasure and pain – that we here in his prank calls, the ones are pointedly “coming from inside the house”. Radheyan Simonpillai
Annie Wilkes – Misery
When famous mystery writer Paul Sheldon gets into a snowy car accident, a local woman named Annie Wilkes saves his life and takes him in. Played as equally demonic and saccharine by Kathy Bates, Annie’s the original toxic superfan, a genre of obsessive human all-too-prevalent on social media today. Annie loves Paul so much that it hurts – mostly him, such as in the scene where Annie takes a sledgehammer to his ankles after she reads his latest manuscript and discovers he’s killed off her favorite character. One of my deepest-held truths is that people who are most adverse to swearing are usually secretly evil … and maybe I got that from Annie, who hates cussing. No movie line evokes as much guttural fear for me than one of her cockadoodles or dirty birds. Alaina Demopoulos
M3gan – M3gan
There’s something that just feels very satisfying about marrying the creepy potential of children’s toys and AI into a campy-yet-horrifying movie. Whereas nightmarish toys have been a horror movie staple for decades now, the genre is still feeling out the grotesque potential of AI – what unites them is that both invoke time-honored fears that items devised by humans to serve us will find ways to turn the tables. If M3gan plays its eponymous villain equally for frights and laughs, that’s probably for the best (how else to make a hyper-intelligent children’s toy deliver a chilling monologue just before slashing a neck?) and it’s also true to the film’s point – a murderous AI nannybot is equal parts absurd and terrifying.
Whether you view her as fundamentally a scary doll or AI run amok, what works best about M3gan is her uncanniness, the way she tries to be human but just can’t quite get there. That, I would argue, it what scares us the most – the small-yet-consequential gaps between ourselves and the beings that we create in our image, resulting in grotesque consequences. The unique way that M3gan spins out its title character’s not-quite-human uncanniness is what makes this film memorable and powerful within the overcrowded horror world. Veronica Esposito
Count Orlok – Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror
FW Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Terror is famously an unauthorised, copyright-nudged adaptation of Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, but I can’t be alone, surely, in finding Murnau’s dome-headed ghoul Count Orlok a thousand times nastier than anything Francis Ford Coppola, Terence Fisher or Tod Browning ever dreamed up. We’re more used to the prince of the undead as a cloak-swirling drama queen, but the stiff-limbed, claw-fingered plague-carrier of the story’s earliest film iteration is powerful enough to haunt everyone’s nightmares more than a century later.
The scene in which Orlok smells blood – literally – after Hutter (Murnau’s tweak on Harker) cuts his hand at the dinner table, is still alarmingly freaky, while the way he seems to float through space is genuinely disturbing. Robert Eggers tries to jazz him up a bit in his new remake of Nosferatu, but in all honesty, it’s really not necessary; the relief you feel when Murnau has Orlok vanish in a blaze of sunlight is never going to be surpassed. One for the ages. Andrew Pulver
Nancy – The Craft
Great villains are not made by outfits alone, but did anyone ever look as good as Nancy Downs while trying to spook an ex-friend to death? Or at any other point in the 1996 witch flick The Craft: the layers of rosaries under the studded dog collar, the vinyl trench, red sunglasses and burgundy lipstick, her short slicked hair getting more dishevelled as the mean teenage witch with a jealousy problem and a noose in her locker becomes more powerful – and more unhinged.
The movie’s plot insists that Nancy, played with insouciant sourness by Fairuza Balk, is corrupted by the powerful magic she and her friends harness as they cast ambitious spells. But her backstory – poor girl at the fancy school, creep for a stepfather, and worst of all, friends who talk behind her back about how she wishes she wasn’t “white trash” – makes her megalomaniac joyride seem more like a depiction of a woman relishing the chance to do things her way for a change. Which is why, when Nancy gets her just deserts – confinement in a mental institution – it feels like a betrayal. In real life, Balk bought a struggling occult shop in LA. I prefer that ending. Francesca Carington
Michael Myers – Halloween
There have been so many incarnations of Michael Myers – between misbegotten cash-in sequels, more ambitious decades-later follow-ups, remakes, and countless ripoffs – that you’d think the slasher of that genre’s 1980s boom would have long lost his power to scare, much like how his William Shatner mask was gradually flattened and distorted into an amorphous white blob. Yet going back to John Carpenter’s original 1978 Halloween, there’s something implacably frightening about Myers from his very first scene, when we’re introduced to him via a point-of-view shot as he murders his teenage sister – and he turns out to be just six years old.
From that point, it’s difficult to view Myers (or The Shape, as the credits refer to his adult form) as anything but a lost, overgrown child, forever wandering the streets of his home town of Haddonfield. He’s a ghostly shape made flesh, and while later versions variously made that body supernaturally powerful, freakishly strong or informed by scarred-childhood cliches, it’s the manifestation of evil in a kindergarten-aged shape that I’ve found increasingly upsetting as I get older (and have a kid of my own). Jesse Hassenger
Hugo – Dead of Night
Hugo is the final boss of Ealing’s 1945 portmanteau horror Dead of Night, the uncanny psychopath in the film’s last and most terrifying tale. Michael Redgrave gives a spine-tingling performance as both the unfortunate ventriloquist Maxwell Frere and his scheming dummy Hugo, whose risqué banter gets them both in trouble, and who appears to be conniving to leave him for another voice-thrower. Hugo’s clacking mouth may be forced into a grin but it has teeth – he draws blood when he bites his owner’s hand. His glassy eyes and raspy voice are inhumanly creepy as they are, but more so when we see the same expression on Maxwell’s face and hear the same scratchy sounds emerge from his mouth. Ultimately, this nightmarish film leaves us guessing, panic-stricken, whether it is more terrifying for a dummy to come alive and drive you to murder, or to lose your mind so much that you believe something so improbable. Pamela Hutchinson
Stuart – Hostel: Part II
While the setting of the Hostel franchise may seem the fanciful stuff of exploitation-flick daydreams – an all-inclusive Slovak resort where guests can inflict whatever torments they so please on abducted human captives – its clientele is nonetheless chillingly plausible. The second installment follows a pair of grown bros finally bumped off the waiting list as they prep for a more intense indulgence of experience than a coke-fueled Vegas weekend; writer-director Eli Roth introduces them in the classic active/passive dynamic movie friendships always assume, only to reverse it when push comes to stab. Once the theretofore apprehensive Stuart (imbued with lifelike ambivalence by Broadway treasure Roger Bart) has his quarry at his mercy, a dormant bloodlust rushes out of a decent family man to show its true face. Eased by a safe space that affords him both a position of power as well as social sanctioning, he’s free to release the torrents of bile even he might not have realized he was holding back, his hunger for violence sharpening itself into hatred for his wife. That outwardly ordinary people may harbor unconscionable cruelty and spend their lives waiting for an opportunity to rationalize its expression is a horrifying notion, all the more so for how the past year of geopolitics has proven this diagnosis correct and common. Charles Bramesco
The Entity – It Follows
It’s easy to temporarily get away from “the entity” in It Follows. It’s also ultimately impossible, unless you have sexual contact with another person, in which case the curse passes like a dead venereal disease. In David Robert Mitchell’s instant cult-horror classic, the supernatural “it” of the title moves with the slow, relentless pace of an old-school zombie but it can never be distracted from its target. Like death itself, the entity carries with it the terror of inevitability: there’s no stopping it and it will track you down to the end of the earth, no GPS required. That the characters can only save themselves by condemning another person makes it a morally taxing villain, too, and the fact that no one else can see it coming leaves victims to a lonely, gruesome fate. Scott Tobias
Rose the Hat – Doctor Sleep
It was hard to know what to make of Mike Flanagan’s 2019 horror Doctor Sleep, a film that was half-sequel to Stephen King’s The Shining and half-sequel to Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation of it, a fascinating yet ungainly case of awkwardly serving one too many masters (a recent watch of the three-hour director’s cut proved to be far more fulfilling). But one thing was frighteningly undeniable. As Rose the Hat, the film’s chief antagonist, Rebecca Ferguson was a true villain for the ages, a bewitching swirl of sensuality, pragmatism, malevolence and the dress sense of a boho Willy Wonka. She leads a travelling band, or cult, of misfits, whose survival rests on consuming the souls of murdered psychic children. In the film’s most terrifying scene, she leads an attack on Jacob Tremblay’s young baseball player, who cries out to no avail as she inflicts more and more pain to better the taste of his “steam” (it reportedly led to tears on set and even caused King to tap out). It’s a bold, boundary-pushing death, and an always self-possessed Ferguson goes all the way with it, embodying the sort of eerie, indefinable evil that haunted our childhood nightmares and still has the ability to haunt us still. Benjamin Lee