Horror has no shortage of icons. Jason’s mask, Freddy’s glove, Leatherface’s chainsaw—these are stitched into the genre’s DNA, instantly recognizable even to people who’ve never watched a single scary movie. But for every marquee monster, there’s a legion of unsung killers, creeps, and creatures lurking in the shadows of cinematic history. They’re the ones who never got the action figure, the Funko Pop, or the endless sequels, but left just as deep a scar on the genre. Some are too strange, too subtle, or too niche to ever break through the mainstream; others were swallowed whole by bigger names or buried in films that never got their due. This list is for them—the freaks, the phantoms, the forgotten gems that deserve a spot at horror’s blood-soaked table. This list is a love letter to the overlooked villains, victims, and visionaries who prove that horror’s most enduring power isn’t always found in the spotlight, but in the shadows.
These are the 100 Most Underrated Characters of Horror Cinema.
20. Nick (Randy Quaid) and Lily Laemle (Mary Beth Hurt) | Parents (1989)
Every generation is obsessed with the one that came before it, with the ’80s having an intense hard-on for the ’50s. What makes Parents work so well is that it takes ’50s nostalgia and flips it on its head. It takes the familiar suburban nuclear family and warps it into a nightmarish Leave it to Beaver hellscape. Bob Balaban doesn’t get enough credit for crafting one of the best satirical black comedies of the ’80s. And boy, is it black. Nick and Lily are the picture-perfect couple straight out of a Better Homes and Gardens spread. Dad’s got the square-jawed confidence of a college football star, and mom’s got the kind of Stepford smile that only feels creepy in retrospect.
They are the embodiment of the suburban dream—only the dream is like an apple rotting from the inside. Nick (Randy Quaid) is the kind of father who believes his role isn’t to nurture but to control. He is the stereotypical nuclear father stereotype: stern, not cruel but still loving. He tells you he loves you but doesn’t hug. He’ll teach you how to play baseball but he’ll also put the belt to your ass if you disrespect your mother. Lily (Mary Beth Hurt) is an apple-pie-baking, PTA-attending, last-minute-school-project-saving supermom—a homemaker who puts any professional maid to shame. In every way, they are exactly what you picture when you picture a suburban nuclear family. Except these two are cannibals.
19. Frank Hawkes (Jack Palance), Byron “Preacher” Sutcliff (Martin Landau), and Ronald “Fatty” Elster (Erland Van Lidth) | Alone in the Dark (1982)
Most slashers have one villain. Very few have two. Alone in the Dark said “fuck it” and gave us four. And not just four psychos (John “the Bleeder” Skaggs didn’t make the cut because he disappears for a long chunk of the movie… or does he?), but Academy Award-level psychos. What separates Alone in the Dark from your typical slasher is the actors they cast as the slashers themselves. Phillip Clark (Skaggs) is an actor who means nothing to anyone and Erland Van Lidth, while a great addition to the lineup, doesn’t bring the same level of firepower as his co-stars. The film follows a group of escaped mental patients on their way to their new psychiatrist’s house on a mission of revenge because they’re convinced he killed their last doctor. He didn’t; they’re just insane.
Two of the murderous mental patients are played by Jack Palance and Martin Landau, which is way more star power than this film needs, but thank god it somehow got them because they are clearly having a blast in the roles. Frank Hawkes (Palance) is the ringleader, a Vietnam vet out of touch with reality. I don’t think there’s enough evidence to suggest he’s mentally still in the war, but he’s definitely always looking for a fight. Byron “Preacher” Sutcliff (Landau) is the kind of fire-and-brimstone lunatic who looks at the Bible and sees it as an excuse to burn down half the neighborhood.
Landau gives him this glassy-eyed, sweat-soaked mania that makes you feel like he’s seconds away from speaking in tongues while carving scripture into your ribcage. Ronald “Fatty” Elster (Van Lidth) is the muscle. A mountain of flesh with dead eyes and a brain so devoid of thought, all he can do is murder. Together, these three aren’t just escaped patients—they’re avatars of different kinds of madness. Hawkes is the mind, Preacher is the faith, Fatty is the fist. They’re like a slasher Voltron, each part amplifying the other until the screen feels too small to contain them. And the kicker? All this could’ve been avoided if they had just taken their meds.
18. The Rookie (Gingle Wang), Catherine (Sandrine Pinna), and Makoto (Chen Bolin) | Dead Talents Society (2024)
Dead Talents Agency is a Taiwanese horror comedy that came out of nowhere (another victim of Netflix getting the rights to something and then burying it for some reason) that charmed and delighted everyone who saw it but was overshadowed by Beetlejuice Beetlejuice, another stylized look at the afterlife that’s nowhere near as funny nor inventive. Unlike that film, it doesn’t let its universe do all the heavy lifting. You want to know more about this afterlife—how it operates, what the rules are, and, more importantly, more about the characters that inhabit it. Set in a fictional underworld where ghosts can linger in the mortal realm by competing to haunt humans, the film follows a rookie ghost (Wang) as she embarks on a journey to find her own uniqueness under the tutelage of a passionate agent (Chen) and a washed-up diva (Pinna).
The Rookie is as green (not literally, she didn’t die by drowning) as she is meek. She has no idea how to spook effectively and even less idea where to even begin. Others are finding luck crawling out of TVs and walking around with slit mouths but the Rookie lacks the creativity and mean-spiritedness to properly scare anyone. Enter: Makoto and Catherine—one smarmy, the other ice cold but together, they have all the tools to create the ultimate haunter. That is, of course, if The Rookie can finally get some talent. Watching this group come up with various plans, only for them all to backfire hilariously, is half the fun. The other half, is watching them bond as a team. Dead Talents Agency is a crowd pleaser filled with the most entertaining ghosts this side of The Frighteners.
17. Jannicke (Ingrid Bolsø Berdal) | Cold Prey (Franchise)
Horror fans have been clamoring for a return of the slasher for years and years and while the odd one is released every now and again, the fans want a resurgence in earnest. Every year I think “this’ll be the year it comes back” and every year I’m wrong. I thought it would happen after the release of Strangers: Prey at Night, Happy Death Day, and Halloween but nope. I thought maybe Green’s Hatchet series would kickstart it but nope, wrong again. And I really thought the Cold Prey trilogy would be the one and I should’ve known then when it didn’t happen, that it would never happen. Because if Cold Prey couldn’t do it, nothing could.
Five young Norwegians (two couples and their friend) head up to the mountains to snowboard. After one breaks his leg, the group decides to spend the night in an abandoned hotel, closed 30 years ago and since this is a horror movie, they are not alone. This is a meat and potatoes kinda slasher. There are no ’80s homages or clever twists. It’s a group of twentysomethings being hunted by a lunatic. No more, no less. It doesn’t reinvent the wheel nor does it have to. Nor does its two sequels. The first, which picks up literally right after this one, is the better version of Halloween II and the third is a prequel. The reason I thought this series would kick off a slasher resurgence is because of the main character. Jannicke is smart, resourceful and most importantly, badass. She’s the best final girl you’ve never heard of.
16. Zaffan (Zafreen Zairizal) | Tiger Stripes (2023)
Since it’s such a confusing and scary time for an adolescent girl (and boy), puberty has often been used as a metaphor for any number of things. Sometimes it’s funny like Turning Red, sometimes it’s terrifying like Ginger Snaps and Raw. Tiger Stripes is most certainly in the latter category. Zaffan, the main character at the center of things, wishes all it did was give her acne and cause her to act awkward. At first, she’s just another kid in the heat and dust of rural Malaysia—loud, mischievous, alive in the way only twelve-year-olds can be. But bodies change, and with Zaffan, the changes come with teeth. Hair sprouts where it shouldn’t, her skin itches like it wants to burst, and the whispers start. The girls who once giggled with her now look at her like she’s diseased, like she’s cursed. And maybe she is. Maybe growing up is the curse.
Zafreen Zairizal gives her this raw, feral energy that makes you forget you’re watching a performance. She stomps, she rages, she sulks—half child, half beast, never fully in control of either. And when the transformation hits full force, it isn’t played like a superpower reveal—it’s messy, it’s grotesque, it’s lonely. She doesn’t become a monster because she wants to—she becomes one because the world tells her she already is. That’s what makes Zaffan one of the most electric horror protagonists in years. She’s not the victim of a vampire or a ghost; she’s the victim of gossip, tradition, patriarchy, biology—forces that make claws seem merciful in comparison. And when she finally bares those claws, you don’t recoil. You cheer. Because she’s not the monster. She’s the truth everyone else is too scared to admit.
15. Geoffrey Radcliffe (Vincent Price) | The Invisible Man Returns (1940)
The greatest thing about Vincent Price is—even when you can’t see him, you can hear him. That honey-dipped, velvet-wrapped voice is unmistakably his and has been permanently burned onto the minds of everyone who has seen an older horror movie or listened to Thriller. Everyone knows his voice, which makes him perfect for The Invisible Man Returns. It’s Price before he was Vincent Price™. Before the pencil mustache and the camp and the legacy. Here, he’s still the matinee idol type, playing Geoffrey Radcliffe: a wrongfully accused man who takes a shortcut through hell. Freshly convicted of a murder he didn’t commit, Geoffrey doesn’t wait for justice to crawl its way through the courts—he takes the serum. The same one that drove Jack Griffin (Claude Rains) into megalomaniacal madness in the first film. It’s a gamble: freedom at the cost of his mind.
And that’s where Price shines—not as a cackling lunatic, but as a man desperately clinging to his humanity as it slips, inch by inch, into the abyss. Unlike Griffin, Geoffrey isn’t seduced by invisibility; he’s cursed by it. The serum isn’t an excuse to conquer the world, it’s a ticking clock strapped to his sanity. You watch him go from desperate fugitive to something unrecognizable, and the tragedy is baked right in—he never wanted power, only justice. But in Universal horror, justice always comes with a body count. Price plays it with surprising restraint. Even when he’s only a voice, you can hear the sorrow, the fear and then the inevitable madness. Price is cinema’s best over actor, which makes this the perfect role for him. No matter how big he gets, it’s still believable because we already saw what it did to Rains.
14. The Driller Killer (Atanas Ilitch) | Slumber Party Massacre II (1987)
The Driller Killer from Slumber Party Massacre II feels like the human embodiment of a cocaine-fueled fever dream—the out-of-control rockabilly love child of Freddy Krueger. Atanas Ilitch plays him like a lounge lizard who crashed a prom; no one wants him there, but he’s going to sing anyway. And if you don’t listen, well, he also brought with him a Frankenstein’s monster of a murder weapon: half guitar, half power drill, all phallic nightmare. He doesn’t stalk or lurk like your standard-issue horror villain, he croons. He seduces his victims with greasy charisma, breaking into impromptu rockabilly numbers before skewering them mid-riff. He’s camp turned deadly, a leather-clad specter who exists somewhere between dream logic and MTV.
And unlike his predecessors, he’s less interested in scaring his prey than performing for them. Death is just the encore. But as ridiculous as he looks, he represents a very real fear. He’s trauma manifest. There’s a reason his murder weapon is a deadly phallus. There’s a reason he’s a ridiculous singer in the first place. He represents the fear the main character has of men. The fear of the drill that terrorized her in the first movie, the fear of being violated.
Since she’s now in a band, he also represents her fear of being bad at music and all the anxieties that come with that. It was a bold swing, making the slasher look like Andrew Dice Clay in Elvis cosplay, but it paid off big time. The killer from the first is a non-descript, creepy-looking dude you’d have to Google to refresh your memory on what he even looks like, but there’s The Driller Killer in this? There’s no forgetting him. He is proof that sometimes a sequel doesn’t need to outdo the original—it just needs to crank the amp to eleven, let the blood splatter in rhythm and take a chance on crazy.
13. Leon (Oliver Reed) | The Curse of the Werewolf (1961)
Hammer only made one werewolf movie, but they made it count. And they did it by unleashing Oliver Reed in his first starring role. A performance so raw and feral it feels like his audition reel to play Wolverine. Leon isn’t just another Universal knockoff with a full moon allergy. He’s cursed from birth, literally: the unwanted child of a mute servant girl and a sadistic nobleman, born on Christmas Day (a blasphemy, according to the film’s mythology). From the moment he draws breath, he’s marked for damnation. His life isn’t about whether he’ll become a monster, but when. That inevitability bleeds through Reed’s performance. Every smile feels strained, every moment of tenderness carries the shadow of the beast clawing beneath his skin.
And when it finally comes out? It’s glorious. Hammer’s makeup team crafted a snout, fur, and fangs that make Leon one of the most striking werewolves ever put on screen. But it’s Reed who sells it. He doesn’t just shuffle in rubber appliances—he lunges, he thrashes, he snarls like an apex predator that’s been caged too long. The tragedy is baked into the terror: Leon doesn’t want this, but his blood demands it. Where Lugosi’s Dracula was seductive and Cushing’s Van Helsing was clinical, Reed’s Leon is pure anguish. He’s a man doomed to be feared by the very people he longs to love. A gothic martyr with claws, tearing through the Spanish countryside not out of malice, but because he was never given a chance at peace.
12. The Man (Herk Harvey) | Carnival of Souls (1962)
Carnival of Souls might be the most important film of the ’60s. Without it, the zombie genre wouldn’t exist (it was a direct inspiration on Night of the Living Dead) and who knows how many other dread-inducing thrillers took their cues from the persistent threat of The Man. He silently pursues like the entity in It Follows. He’s unrelenting like death in Final Destination. And his look—a chalk-white corpse in a black suit—can be seen in everything from Slenderman to The Tall Man from Phantasm. The Man is less a character and more an omen. He doesn’t speak, doesn’t bleed, doesn’t explain himself. He just is. He appears in reflections, at the foot of stairs, and in the corner of the frame like your subconscious having a panic attack. Played by director Herk Harvey himself, The Man is both the cheapest and most effective scare in the film. No makeup wizardry.
No elaborate set piece. Just a face drained of life, framed in shadow, staring directly into you. He’s the embodiment of the film’s dream logic—impossible to define, impossible to escape. Sometimes he’s smiling like he knows something you don’t, sometimes he’s just standing there, unblinking, an anchor dragging Mary (and us) closer to the grave. And when he finally reveals what he’s been hinting at all along, it hits like a whisper from the void: you’ve been dead this whole time, sweetheart. The Man is the Reaper rebranded for the 1960s. No skeleton face or sickle, just a scary-looking face and an oppressive omnipresence that won’t stop.
11. Drayton “The Cook” Sawyer (Jim Siedow) | The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (Franchise)
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre series produced so many memorable wackjobs that I had to limit how many made the 500 Greatest Horror Characters list. Edward “Tex” Sawyer (Viggo Mortensen) from Leatherface: Texas Chainsaw Massacre III, Vilmer (Matthew McConaughey) from Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation, and Sheriff Hoyt (R. Lee Ermey) from the ’03 remake and its prequel all could’ve made the cut. They’re all the best individual elements of their respective movies; scene-stealing and scenery chewing their way to the end credits. And that’s just the main baddies. An argument could be made for any number of eclectic weirdos that pop up throughout the series. The most regrettable cut I had to make was Drayton “The Cook” Sawyer.
He’s not as insane as the Hitchhiker or Chop Top, and he’s definitely not as iconic as Leatherface, but he offers a great counterbalance to all the madness. He looks kind of like Lloyd Kaufman if he sold cars instead of being a low-rent director. He has that same oily persona and fake smile. He’s the middle ground between “batshit feral” and “Sunday dinner civilized,” a barbecue-slinging huckster who knows exactly how to market human flesh to gullible Texans looking for the “best meat in the county.”
His brothers might have to catch ’em (and by them, I mean people), but it’s the Cook who packages it up, slaps a bow on it, and sells it to the world. He’s capitalism with a broom handle — smacking his brothers for going too far while still pocketing the profits. He may not draw the most blood, but without Drayton there’d be no system, no family “business,” no justification for the slaughterhouse they’ve built out of their home. He’s the most human monster in the clan — which perversely makes him the scariest. Because Leatherface might kill you, but Drayton will feed you to your neighbors, smiling the whole time.
10. David (Tim Roth) | Resurrection (2022)
The 2020 remake of The Invisible Man was praised for using the premise to turn gaslighting, abuse and trauma into a literal, physical nightmare. Elizabeth Moss is tormented by her ex but no one believes her because he’s invisible. It’s a great update on the story but there was a far better version of it (minus the invisible man) that came out not but two years later. Resurrection follows Margaret (Rebecca Hall) as she tries to maintain control of her life when an abusive ex-boyfriend named David (Tim Roth) re-appears in her vicinity. David doesn’t enter Resurrection—he slithers in. He’s less a man and more a parasite in human skin, a phantom ex who materializes like a bad dream with perfect timing.
When we meet him, he’s not loud, not manic, not even physically imposing—he’s polite, calm, soft-spoken. But that’s the trap. That’s how the devil sells you the contract. He doesn’t roar, he whispers. And Tim Roth, with his weathered, deceptively gentle demeanor, makes David the kind of villain who chills you by being so ordinary. Why he’s suddenly back in her life and what he wants from her, I won’t reveal but the scene where she explains her past relationship with him to a disturbed co-worker, is bone chilling. David admitted to doing something to their son that’s unimaginable but whatever you think he’s admitting to doing, you’re wrong.
It’s not that kind of movie. His game is far more unpredictable and menacing. He’s toying with her in the weirdest, most fucked up way possible. He’s far beyond a mere gas lighter, he is a psychological terrorist who is feeding off her madness like a leech. What makes David terrifying isn’t what he does, but what he represents. He’s the personification of trauma that never lets you go, a nightmare that smiles while it devours you. His presence infects every scene he’s in, turning the film into an emotional hostage situation. It’s by far the biggest monster Roth has ever played and that’s saying something.
9. Paul Beaumont / HE (Lon Chaney) | He Who Gets Slapped (1924)
After a series of betrayals that both end with him being slapped in the face and being laughed at, a disgraced inventor rebrands himself as a clown with a unique gimmick: that of a living punching bag for every clown in the troupe to slap. After years of being ‘HE who gets slapped’, the clown falls in love with another circus performer but predictably (this is a tale of revenge after all) his love is threatened by the same person who drove him to the circus in the first place. Far darker than most films of that era, He Who Gets Slapped is shockingly violent for a film that came out almost 100 years ago. It’s a nasty tale of revenge that has a plot that’s more effective at half the length than Joker. Not only is it one of the most underappreciated films of the silent age, but it might have the best performance of that decade.
Lon Chaney gives a tour de force performance as misery personified. The man built a career out of tragic freaks and broken souls, but HE is different. There’s no monstrous makeup, no grotesque deformity. His mask here is pure emotion: wide, painted grin on his face, despair eating him alive behind the eyes. Beaumont becomes a grotesque reflection of his own downfall—mocked for sport, laughed at for his pain, trapped in a cycle where the thing that destroyed him is now the thing that defines him. It’s arguable if the film is even technically horror and not just a dark thriller but if HE was the main antagonist, there would be no question. It’s a horror film from the point of view of the eventual monster. He’s not just a clown who gets slapped. He’s the reason clowns are still terrifying a hundred years later
8. Countess Marya Zaleska (Gloria Holden) | Dracula’s Daughter (1936)
I can only imagine what the public reception to Dracula’s Daughter was. Modern horror fans still bitch about the fact that Jason Voorhees and Michael Myers didn’t show up in Friday the 13th: A New Beginning and Halloween III: Season of the Witch respectfully and both are over 40 years old at this point. Not only is Dracula nowhere to be found in Dracula’s Daughter, it follows a character we’ve never met before and it’s a somber melodrama with lesbian undertones. Audiences must’ve stormed out in frustration, with only the most progressive critics getting it. This is Universal dipping its toes into psychological horror, and Marya Zaleska is the experiment: a vampire who doesn’t revel in evil but suffers under it.
She burns her father’s body, plays haunting piano pieces, and stares off into the void with the air of someone who’s already rehearsing her own funeral. Every scene with her is a war between dignity and damnation. She wants love, freedom, peace—anything but this—but the moment a victim walks in, her eyes light up like a starving addict spotting a fix. It was a bold direction for a sequel but it works because it shows the ugly side of immortality. We only see Dracula as a monster, never a reclusive victim. The curse doesn’t affect him as much because he has no issue with murder but for his daughter? She’s trapped in a life she doesn’t want.
Seeing both sides of the same coin makes this a great companion piece but what elevates it is the subtext. The infamous scene where she “paints” Lili, the young model, isn’t subtext so much as text—1936 audiences didn’t know what to call it, but modern viewers do. Zaleska is one of horror’s first queer-coded monsters: her longing for companionship, her attraction wrapped in menace, her tragedy rooted in desire she isn’t allowed to have. Universal may have meant it as a scandalous quirk, but Holden plays it with such aching sincerity that the Countess becomes something else: a vampire who’s more human than the humans hunting her.
7. The Charro (Dagoberto Rodríguez) | The Rider of the Skulls (1965)
If Batman traded Gotham for the Mexican countryside, swapped the cape for a sombrero, and fought monsters instead of mobsters, you’d end up with El Charro de las Calaveras—the skull-faced gunslinger who drifts from village to village dispensing supernatural justice. A pulp figure carved out of mariachi myth and midnight cinema, The Charro is exactly the type of character that should’ve received a million no-budget sequels, but unfortunately, no one saw Riders of the Skull then, and no one has heard of it now. And when I say no budget, think Ed Wood. This movie was made for less than pennies.
The headless horseman is just a dude riding a horse with a coat pulled up over his head. The werewolf is a dude with a papier-mache head covered in fur. The zombie is a guy with mud (and a smidge of blood) on his face. There are cheap skeleton masks aplenty and if there were any vampires, they’d just be guys in cloaks with obvious plastic fangs. But that extreme DIY spirit is part of the charm. They had no money but they still had the desire to make something. Something involving monsters, specifically.
They could’ve worked within their means and just shot a two-person, My Dinner With Andre type movie where the camera barely moves and it’s one location, but no. They wanted to make a monster movie, damn it, and I respect it. The film is rough, stitched together from what feels like three TV episodes duct-taped into a feature, but The Charro and the cheap-o monsters he fights, elevate the budget. It’s Power Rangers-level fun starring a more badass-looking Zorro fighting the cheapest-looking monsters you’ve seen outside of a David “The Rock” Nelson movie. This should have more sequels than Blade and Underworld, and should have a bigger cultural impact than Buffy the Vampire Slayer.
6. Metaluna Mutant (Jeff Morrow) | This Island Earth (1955)
If the 1950s had a mascot, it wouldn’t be James Dean or Marilyn Monroe—it’d be a bug-eyed alien with claws the size of Thanksgiving turkeys. No alien from that era embodies the beautiful, goofy majesty of mid-century sci-fi quite like the Metaluna Mutant. The 1950s and 60s were the “golden age” of retrofuturism because of their stylized view of what was to come. Jetpacks, moving sidewalks or transportation tubes, walking eyes, colonies on the moon and Mars—that era had a very particular idea of what the future held. Tech wasn’t the only thing it had its eye one, it also predicted every type of alien imaginable. Some were giant metallic robots, while others were apes with fish bowls on their heads. There were flying saucers and interplanetary kaijus. Every type of alien you could think of and the best, by far, was the Metaluna Mutant.
No other alien had a design as good, period. His look is iconic. He has arms that look like they were borrowed from a praying mantis on steroids, eyes that look like goggles with protruding pupils, a face that looks like a melted lobster and a swollen cranium that screams “extra brains; a look that has been ripped off countless times. The only reason he isn’t thought of or mentioned alongside the other Universal monsters is the fact that he never received a sequel. He showed up alongside them in promotional material here and there but like The Phantom, eventually faded from the public consciousness.
Which is a shame because he deserved a series. He’s a helluva lot better than a slow walking corpse wrapped in bandages and that dude has like 7 sequels. But despite being robbed a franchise, he endures. Not because of screen time (which is criminally short) but because of that design. He’s a monster that feels at once silly and sublime, the kind of design that lived forever on lunchboxes, model kits, and MST3K punchlines. The film itself is creaky, earnest, and about as subtle as a spaceship crash, but when the Metaluna Mutant stomps on screen, suddenly you understand why we still romanticize this era: because sometimes a rubber suit can be transcendent.
5. Baron Samedi (Don Pedro Colley) | Sugar Hill (1974)
If pimps, pushers, and polyester were the lifeblood of ‘70s exploitation, Baron Samedi was its sinister grin. A skeletal jester in a top hat, a trickster god in a three-piece suit, and a carnival barker for the dead, Don Pedro Colley as Baron Samedi doesn’t just steal scenes—he devours them like they’re made of Turkish delight. Unlike most horror heavies, Samedi doesn’t kill simply to kill. He’s not mindless, nor is he a walking metaphor exacting revenge. he’s the immortal middleman between voodoo justice and human cruelty. When Sugar Hill calls him to raise her army of the dead against the mobsters who killed her man, Samedi does do with murderous glee. He cackles, struts, and mugs directly at the camera like he’s letting us know just how powerful he is.
He’s Candyman by way of Pumpkinhead but stronger than both. He’s both terrifying and hilarious, a god who treats vengeance like it’s showbiz. While Sugar Hill commands the zombies, it’s Samedi who gives the film its soul (and its swagger). He’s death, yes—but death with panache, death with a Cheshire grin. Baron Samedi is the rare horror character who’s less a villain and more an agent of chaotic justice. He’s equal parts ghoul, clown, and king, walking the razor’s edge between menace and camp. In a film bursting with voodoo-drenched style, it’s Samedi who lingers in the mind—a cackling reminder that sometimes the scariest thing isn’t death itself, but how much fun it seems to be having.
4. Michio Sofu (Eiji Funakoshi) and Aki Shima (Mako Midori) | Blind Beast (1969)
A blind sculptor with mommy issues baked into his DNA, Sofu doesn’t just create art—he kidnaps it. His masterpiece isn’t marble or bronze; it’s flesh, and the unlucky muse is Aki Shima, a fashion model whose beauty makes her both goddess and guinea pig in his twisted studio. And what a studio it is. Imagine if Salvador Dalí tripped on acid in the world’s creepiest sex dungeon: walls made of breasts, torsos jutting out like grotesque reliefs, limbs everywhere, a cathedral of obsession built for worship and desecration. In the middle of this fleshy funhouse, Sofu insists on “sculpting” Aki—not with clay, but with bondage and captivity. What makes Blind Beast more disturbing than the usual kidnap-and-torture setup is how Aki shifts. At first, she’s the victim: terrified, resisting, struggling to hold on to her dignity and sanity. But as the film goes on, the lines blur.
Sofu’s madness infects her, his obsession becomes hers, and their relationship transforms into a grotesque duet of desire and destruction. By the end, captor and captive have collapsed into one feverish act of violence and ecstasy—a finale that’s as shocking as it is inevitable. Eiji Funakoshi plays Sofu with an unnerving calm, as if his psychosis were simply a fact of life, while Mako Midori gives Aki a tragic arc that makes her less a damsel in distress and more a co-author of the horror. Together, they’re not just characters; they’re the embodiment of the film’s thesis—that art, love, and madness all share the same bed, and sometimes, they strangle each other in it. If Beauty and the Beast is captor / captive fetish porn for future furries, Blind Beast is that fetish for those who think 50 Shades of Grey was a joke and that Secretary didn’t go far enough. It is psychosexual smut for perverted intellectuals.
3. The Yokai | Yokai Monsters (Trilogy)
Born out of Japanese folklore and thrown headfirst into Daiei’s technicolor fever dream of a trilogy (100 Monsters, Spook Warfare, Along with Ghosts), the Yokai aren’t just creatures—they’re a carnival. An army of living myths, each with their own bizarre design: umbrella demons with one eye and tongues the length of neckties, faceless women, long-necked contortionists, walls that sprout eyes, child-sized tricksters, and things that look like they crawled out of The Krofft Brothers acid trip. They’re equal parts spooky and silly, never quite scary but always unforgettable, like a ghost story told by a child high on pixy sticks.
What separates the Yokai from their Western cousins (your Frankensteins and Draculas) is how alive they feel. They’re not cursed by God or stitched together in a lab; they’re spirits of rivers, alleys, and shadows, embodiments of every strange creak in the night. They’re mischief first, menace second. When they fight, it’s like a circus gone feral, a parade of folklore oddities banding together against demons, samurai, or anyone dumb enough to mess with them.
The trilogy itself is a mixed bag: part horror, part kids’ movie, part history lesson, part lunacy. But the Yokai are the glue—and the glitter. The Yokai aren’t monsters you fear. They’re monsters you remember—faces etched into your brain because no one else looks like them, no one else moves like them, and no one else could get away with making a hopping umbrella one of the most enduring icons of Japanese horror.
2. Ygor (Bela Lugosi) | Son of Frankenstein (1939) & The Ghost of Frankenstein (1942)
One of the great Mandela Effects of horror is the fact that the character of Igor never appeared in any Universal monster movie. I know you’re picturing him right now—a hunch-backed laboratory assistant with one eye bigger than the other, probably sounding like Peter Lorre when saying shit like “yes master” or “coming master.” But that character doesn’t exist in any movie from that time. Frankenstein’s assistant in the first movie was named Fritz (Dwight Frye) and while he did have a hunchback, he certainly didn’t look like Marty Feldman from Young Frankenstein. Charles Bronson plays a mute henchman named Igor in the 1953 House of Wax remake but he doesn’t have a hunchback. J. Carrol Naish did play a hunchbacked assistant to a mad scientist in House of Frankenstein but his name is Daniel, not Igor. The closest any character comes to the character you’re picturing is Ygor in the third and fourth entries of the Frankenstein franchise.
By the time Lugosi stepped into the role, his star was already fading. The studio that made him immortal with Dracula had been using him as a glorified boogeyman-for-hire, trotting him out for mad scientists, henchmen, and gypsy curses. But Ygor wasn’t just another paycheck gig. He wasn’t even supposed to exist. He was written as a background ghoul to shuffle props and grunt menacingly. What Lugosi gave instead was a fully realized monster in his own right. Ygor isn’t the stereotypical hunchback in a lab coat. He’s a wild-eyed, broken-necked shepherd with a beard like a decaying scarecrow, teeth that look like they could chip stone, and a wheezing laugh that sounds like a death rattle. Hung for grave robbing, his neck snapped but his body somehow clung to life, he’s less a man than a revenant.
A human revenant, still moving through sheer spite. What makes him so enduring isn’t just the grotesque image, it’s the cunning. Unlike most of Universal’s henchmen, Ygor isn’t loyal, or pathetic, or tragic. He’s a schemer. He doesn’t serve Frankenstein—he manipulates him. He doesn’t worship the Monster—he controls him. Lugosi plays him with a slyness that borders on Shakespearean villainy, twisting every line into something halfway between a threat and a taunt. Where Karloff’s Monster was a blunt weapon, Ygor was the hand guiding it. Not only does he use the creature to his own ends, his ultimate scheme is so insane, it justifies the existence of the sequels. He wants to put his own brain into the Monster’s body. It’s a plan so evil, so self-serving, that it feels like the natural culmination of his existence. He’s not content with survival—he wants domination. Igor ended up being a pop culture icon despite being an amalgamation of various different characters, whereas Ygor faded into obscurity even though he’s the best version of that character. Ygor deserves to sit alongside the other heavy hitters of the Universal pantheon.
1. Ezra Cobb (Roberts Blossom) | Deranged (1974)
Loosely based on the story of Ed Gein, Deranged separates itself from other “adaptations” by sticking closer to the truth. Instead of sensationalizing the story by turning him into a chainsaw-wielding lunatic or upping his kill count, it just presents the story as it is, no embellishments. Gein was crazy enough that you don’t need that X factor, that additional element to make his story scarier. He dug up corpses to use their skin as a suit and then decided to kill a couple of people to make that suit slightly better. The only thing you need to properly tell that story, is an actor you can convincingly believe was born wrong and they hit the jackpot with Roberts Blossom. The actor somehow always looked 80 years old, even when he was 40. That creepy old man with the snow shovel in Home Alone? That’s Blossom and he looks almost the same in Deranged, minus the beard. He has that same sunken face and dead eyes that a number of serial killers have. He easily could’ve played Albert Fish or Eric Edgar Cooke (aka “The Night Caller”) but decided to set his sights on The Butcher of Plainfield.
When his domineering, religious-obsessed mother dies, Ezra is left with nothing but her voice echoing in his skull. He’s not violent at first. He’s not even particularly menacing. He’s just broken. So broken that he digs her up, dresses her, props her in a chair, and keeps talking to her as if she never left. That might’ve been enough for a disturbing little character study, but the rot goes deeper. Soon he’s raiding graveyards for company, building furniture out of corpses, and trying to make friends the only way his warped brain knows how—by turning people into dolls he can keep forever.
Blossom plays him without a shred of irony. No wink, no parody, no “isn’t this creepy?” nudge. He sells Ezra as a real man, with real sadness in his watery eyes and a cracked, almost childlike laugh. He’s unsettling because he feels plausible. Because you have met this man before, at the hardware store or standing alone at church. The kind of guy who tells you one too many stories about his mother and doesn’t blink quite enough when you talk to him. The Texas Chainsaw Massacre will forever be the best film to take from the Gein legend but Deranged has one thing it’s lacking—a performance as good as Blossom. He didn’t just play Ezra Cobb—he was Ezra Cobb. Fragile, pathetic, and horrifying all at once. A walking, talking cautionary tale about what happens when you love something so much you can’t bury it, even when you’re supposed to.
40-21 | Greatest Horror Characters
What are some of your favorite overlooked horror movie characters who didn’t make the list? Share them with us down in the comments!
