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.
80. Harold Gorton (George Wendt) | House (1985)
Steve Minor’s House is best described as “Evil Dead-lite,” and while that sounds like damning with faint praise, it’s actually the highest compliment I can give this movie because it actually predates Evil Dead II by two years. Everyone immediately assumes this was ripping off the sequel, but it’s clearly doing its own thing. Miner is clearly having a ball creating a non-stop barrage of ghost action. Raimi loved torturing Bruce Campbell by having him perform mini stunts like he’s a wacky toon from Toontown. Miner loves torturing the character William Katt plays by hitting him with ghosts as metaphors. Some are born from the guilt of losing his son, some manifest as the horrors of Vietnam made flesh.
But unlike Campbell, who had to face them solo, Miner at least saddles Katt with an annoyingly clingy but obviously lonely buddy played by George Wendt (forever Norm from Cheers). Wendt plays Harold Gorton, a next-door neighbor who is less “voice of reason” and more “guy who really wants to hang out, even if you’re fighting Vietnam flashbacks and interdimensional demons.” He’s the schlubby human anchor in a movie full of rubber monsters, flying tools, and portals to nowhere. He doesn’t fight ghosts, doesn’t deliver sage advice, doesn’t even contribute much to the plot, but he does give House a weirdly cozy sitcom energy in between the nightmare sequences. Harold isn’t heroic, or tragic, or even particularly useful, but he’s lovable in the most aggressively average way possible.
79. Marcus (Deon Richmond) | Hatchet (2006)
Hatchet is my favorite slasher of all time. For most, all they see is a generic slasher that was clearly made with no money but I see a love letter to the genre that has one thing on its mind: keep the blood, guts, tits and laughter flowing. Say what you want about it but there’s no denying the fact that Adam Green delivered exactly what he set out to do. The film has ultra violent kills, plenty of nudity and because of Marcus (Deon Richmond), it has jokes to spare. Every slasher needs a sacrificial lamb, but Marcus isn’t here to be carved up—he’s here to roast everyone else before the blood starts flowing. He’s the guy dragged into the swamp against his better judgment, muttering about how stupid this whole idea is while casually dropping the funniest lines in the movie.
In a film stuffed with gore, sleaze, and old-school practical effects, Marcus is the one thing grounding it in recognizable human behavior. He’s not brave. He’s not a hero. He’s just a regular dude who doesn’t want to get murdered by a backwoods monster, and watching him scramble for survival is half the fun. Everyone else is playing the victim role straight, but Marcus turns being a coward into an art form. You laugh at him, you root for him, and when the swamp mud hits the fan, he feels like the only one with common sense. Victor Crowley may be the face of Hatchet, but Marcus is its secret weapon—the guy who is simply saying out loud what the audience was thinking.
78. Charles Stoker (Matthew Goode) | Stoker (2013)
If you boil it down to its essence, Stoker is nothing more than a well made, stylish retelling of Shadow of a Doubt. Both films are about a young girl slowly starting to suspect that their uncle Charlie, someone they have a strong emotional connection to, might actually be a monster. Tackling Hitchcock takes massive balls but Park Chan-wook jumped in with the confidence of someone who just won the lottery. Because in a sense, he did. The jackpot’s name? Matthew Goode, who steals every scene he’s in. He plays Stoker like a man who’s been practicing his smile in the mirror for hours. He’s the kind of guy who floats into a room like cigarette smoke — intoxicating, toxic, and impossible to ignore.
When he first appears at his brother’s funeral, he’s all gentle hands and soft-spoken condolences, but underneath that polished veneer is a predator who knows exactly how to stalk his prey: slowly, patiently, beautifully. He’s clearly a snake in a well tailored suit but who is his target and what is his endgame? Charles isn’t a villain you can hate in good conscience. He’s too magnetic, too alluring. You know he’s dangerous (you can see the trail of blood in his wake) but you can’t look away. He’s the sophisticated uncle you never wanted but secretly hoped would show up at your birthday. And that’s the genius of Stoker: it doesn’t ask you to resist his spell. It dares you to surrender to it.
77. The Man (John Gallagher Jr.) | Hush (2016)
He’s not an undead slasher. He’s not a supernatural ghoul. He’s not a zombie, a vampire, or an alien. He’s just a guy. And that’s exactly why he’s terrifying. The killer at the center of Hush is so non-descript, he isn’t even given a name. No backstory, no motive. He shows up to kill someone but when he realizes his target is deaf, he changes tact and decides to fuck with her instead. The film introduces him like any garden-variety home invader: hood up, crossbow in hand, a sadist ready to pick apart a vulnerable victim. But then, in one of the movie’s best sleights of hand, he removes the mask. No mystique, no aura of myth, just a smirk that says: this isn’t about fear of the unknown—it’s about fear of the inevitable. He’s opportunistic cruelty in human form.
His games aren’t elaborate, his motives aren’t tragic, and his plan isn’t grandiose. He’s there because he can be. A shark doesn’t swim in circles because it’s hungry; it swims because it’s a shark. That’s The Man. A predator who relishes control, who toys with Maddie (Kate Siegel) the way a cat plays with a mouse—stretching out the terror like taffy until he can savor the snap. What makes him linger after the credits isn’t his body count or his one-liners, but the skin-crawling banality of it all. He’s the neighbor you wouldn’t notice at the store. The coworker you wouldn’t think twice about. Strip away the hockey masks and dream demons and you’re left with him: a sadist who doesn’t need to be a monster, because being human is enough.
76. Gabi Bauer (Mia Goth) | Infinity Pool (2023)
Infinity Pool is a horror film disguised as a metaphor. Brandon Cronenberg gives us a world where privilege literally gets away with murder, and Gabi is the tour guide through that nightmare. She’s not just exploiting the system; she is the system. Wealth, power, and corruption wrapped in porcelain skin and a baby-voiced shriek. She’s annoying to the nth degree but that’s the point. There’s no one worse than someone with privilege who uses it to get away with murder. Literally. What makes Gabi terrifying isn’t that she’s unhinged. It’s that her madness has rules. She knows exactly when to laugh, when to coo, when to pull the trigger.
She’s a cult leader disguised as a playmate, a sadist who performs cruelty with theatrical glee. When James Foster (Alexander Skarsgård) stumbles into her orbit, he thinks he’s met a quirky fan of his writing, someone offering him validation he desperately craves. But what he’s really met is a viper in human skin, all smile and sing-song cadence, sharpening her fangs on his insecurities. She’s the smiling embodiment of excess gone septic, the rot at the core of those with money, and Mia Goth makes it look fun. If Infinity Pool is a descent into hell, Gabi Bauer is both the chauffeur and the demon waiting at the bottom, clapping and giggling as she watches your soul disintegrate.
75. Herzog (Ørjan Gamst) | Dead Snow (2009) & Dead Snow 2: Red vs. Dead (2014)
Dead Snow has a premise that guaranteed it a cult following. Any film that combines two ridiculous things will automatically garner attention. Such as: snakes + plane, sharks + tornado, ghost + clown, and Nazi + zombie. It’s an easy recipe for success, but unlike say Iron Sky (Nazi + Moon) or The Gingerdead Man (cookie + shit), Dead Snow did more than just smush two things together and wait for the coin to come rolling in. The film is a loving homage to the splatter films of yesterday, namely Evil Dead and much like the Evil Dead, it’s sequel is bigger and crazier in every way possible. Everything in the first is amplified in Dead Snow 2: Red vs Dead.
Now, instead of waiting the whole movie to see zombie mayhem, you get hordes of them from frame one, a handful of zombies now turn into literal armies complete with tanks, the humor is dialed up to the extreme and if the first film went through gallons of blood, this used an entire slaughterhouse. It’s bigger in every way. It made all the right decisions in terms of one-upping the original. One of the best decisions it made was beefing up the role of the main Nazi zombie, Herzog. He’s hell-bent on destroying everything in his quest to retrieve his missing arm. That’s it. That’s his entire motivation. He’s a Nazi; what more motivation does he need? All he needs to be is evil, and Herzog is definitely evil.
74. The Prowler (Farley Granger) | The Prowler (1981)
Some slasher villains get sequels. Some get cult status. And some, like the Prowler, get left in the horror attic and that’s a damn shame. Because the Prowler is one of the nastiest, meanest, and downright ugliest slashers of the early 80s, and his entire shtick revolves around the kind of grudge-holding pettiness that makes Jason Voorhees look forgiving. World War II ends. A soldier comes home, finds a Dear John letter waiting for him, and instead of drinking his weight in whiskey like a normal broken-hearted GI, he decides to bayonet his ex-girlfriend and her new beau. Fast forward 35 years, and the guy’s still mad. Still in uniform. Still accessorizing with a pitchfork like a homicidal farmer.
If Michael Myers is “The Shape,” the Prowler is “The Sulk.” It’s a ridiculous reason to motivate a slasher but his motives aren’t what make him memorable. What makes him stand out is his look (he wears army fatigues, a helmet and a camouflage mask to cover his face) and the way in which he dispatches his victims. Tom Savini’s effects work here is feral. Throats gush, skulls shatter, and the kills are almost too cruel to look at. When the Prowler stabs you, it feels like a hate crime against joy itself. He doesn’t just kill. He makes a spectacle of it. The Prowler is horror distilled into its purest, ugliest essence: a man in a mask, a weapon in his hands, and a grudge he’ll never let go. And sometimes, that’s enough.
73. Hideo Suzuki (Yô Ôizumi) | I Am a Hero (2015)
Hideo Suzuki is not a hero. He’s a failed manga assistant with delusions of grandeur, a 35-year-old man whose career stalled before it even began, and whose biggest talent is being invisible. He’s not respected by his peers, not loved by his girlfriend, and not even trusted with a pen of his own. His name literally means “hero,” but the irony is baked in: Hideo is the kind of guy who talks about destiny while hiding from responsibility, a man who could only be the star of a story if it was written by someone cruel. And then the world ends.
The virus hits, Japan collapses, and suddenly Hideo’s crippling indecision is tested by a new enemy: the ZQN, a bizarre mutation of the zombie mythos that twists the infected into grotesque reflections of who they were. If Romero’s dead were society’s working class rising from the grave, the ZQN are something stranger, funnier, and infinitely more terrifying. They’re what happens when the apocalypse has a sense of humor. And Hideo? He’s not cut out for it. He cowers. He stumbles. He lets others fight while he clutches his shotgun like a security blanket. But the beauty of I Am a Hero is that it doesn’t hand him badassery on a platter.
There’s no training montage, no easy catharsis. His growth is ugly, humiliating, and earned. Each kill another notch carved into his cowardice, each step forward weighed down by how ill-equipped he is for survival. Hideo Suzuki is the rare protagonist who embodies both sides of the zombie equation: he’s as pathetic and fragile as the world around him, but buried in that mediocrity is the stubborn will to keep moving. He’s not the hero Japan needs, or even the one it deserves—he’s the hero it’s stuck with.
72. Sully (Mark Rylance) | Bones and All (2022)
Bones and All is the weirdest love story since Sally Hawkins fucked a fish man in the Shape of Water. It’s about a pair of young cannibals who try to out run their murderous urges both literally and figuratively. They’re essentially vampires who are trying desperately to not feed but the compulsion becomes unbearable. One of the characters they run into on their journey is Sully, a fellow eater who has lived this life for so long, he feels like a ghost wearing human skin. For others, eating is survival. They do it because they need to but for Sully, it’s his identity. He is what happens when hunger metastasizes into ritual. Where other “eaters” treat their cannibalism like a compulsion, Sully treats it like ceremony.
He keeps trophies: strands of hair braided into grotesque ropes, each one a reminder, a memorial, a record of a life consumed. Others want to forget, Sully wants keepsakes. Sully isn’t just another predator in Bones and All. He’s the future that every eater dreads becoming. A man so consumed by hunger that there’s nothing left but the performance of civility and the promise of violence. A monster whose politeness is more terrifying than any snarl. And in the end, he proves what the film has been whispering the whole time: love might make us human, but hunger makes us monsters.
71. Paul White (David Keith) | White of the Eye (1987)
Donald Cammell, the director of White of the Eye, took his art very seriously. He fought tooth and nail against the studios on every movie and was so despondent after they locked him out of the edit of his last film, that he took a gun and shot himself in the head. It took him 45 minutes to become brain dead, and during that time, he talked his wife into getting him a mirror so he could watch himself die. That’s a man who truly gave no fucks, and that intensity is in every frame of this movie. He wanted to make the definitive film about a secret serial killer living a double life and while it isn’t the best of the genre, it definitely has one of the best performances of a serial killer no one talks about.
David Keith is one of those “that guy” actors you’ve seen a million times but doesn’t have that standout performance you can point to if someone asked what he’s been in. An Officer and a Gentleman is probably his more recognizable work but it definitely should be this. He’s as good at pretending to be human as Terry O’Quinn is in The Stepfather or Dylan McDermott is in Clovehitch Killer but is ten times the crazy. Once the mask slips and he’s caught, he pulls a 180 into crazy town and never stops.
Paul White is a man in constant rehearsal, forever shifting between roles: attentive husband, protective father, charming neighbor, and secret butcher. One minute he’s tender with his wife and daughter, the next he’s gutting women in their homes, bathing in the perversity of ritualistic slaughter. He isn’t killing out of necessity or rage—he’s doing it because it makes him feel alive. Because it completes him in a way that love or family never could. Everything in his life is a cover to protect his murderous urges and that makes him far scarier than Freddy or Jason. Because it’s real.
70. Megan (Jennifer Cooke) | Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986)
Most of the ladies in the Friday the 13th series are usually running around screaming their heads off, looking for a place to hide or some big, strong man to save them. Not this little spitfire who is looking for a bad boy and a good time… fighting Jason. Get your mind out of the gutters. She isn’t the typical final girl. Megan has definitely made some questionable choices, but has a good heart. She is willing to take on her sheriff dad, break out the “bad guy”, take on Jason, and save the children, all while having a good time in her sweet 1975 Chevrolet Camaro. It is hard not to fall in love with Megan as Jennifer Cooke gives us one of the best characters from this franchise.
—Vincent Kane
69. Dr. Caligari (Madeleine Reynal) | Dr. Caligari (1989)
Dr. Caligari is not your grandfather’s Caligari. Gone is the somnambulist puppet master from the 1920s expressionist nightmare and in his place stands a neon-drenched, latex-clad descendant, reimagined as a sex-obsessed psychotherapist with a taste for madness. Played with a deliciously deranged flourish by Madeleine Reynal, this Caligari doesn’t lurk in shadows, she bathes in eye popping dayglow and equally outlandish set design. The film is a lo-fi asylum freak show, and Caligari is its ringleader. She seduces patients, manipulates identities, and conducts experiments that feel less like medical practice and more like performance art. Her weapon isn’t a scalpel—it’s sex. Her lab is a stage where repression is peeled back to reveal raw, ugly, beautiful impulses. Reynal leans into every line like she’s savoring poison, each gesture performed with the confidence of someone who knows sanity is overrated. Dr. Caligari is the film distilled into flesh: bizarre, erotic, and unashamedly insane. A villain, a seductress, a dominatrix philosopher, a prophet of the surreal. And when she looks into the camera, grinning like she already knows your darkest secret, you believe she does.
68. Captain Kazan (Telly Savalas) | Horror Express (1972)
By the time Captain Kazan shows up in Horror Express, the film is already a delirious stew of murder, pseudoscience, and cosmic terror. There’s a prehistoric alien parasite on a Trans-Siberian train, Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing are playing dueling scientists, and corpses are piling up like luggage. And then (more than halfway through) Telly Savalas struts in like he wandered onto the wrong set and decided to stay anyway. Imagine if Bruce Willis pops up out of nowhere in the last act of The Thing and then takes over the rest of the story. That’s how awesomely jarring Savalas’s appearance in this is. He plays a swaggering Cossack officer with a whip, an ego the size of Russia, and the temperament of a man who drinks gasoline for breakfast.
He doesn’t ask questions; he makes declarations. He doesn’t investigate the murders; he declares himself judge, jury, and executioner. Shit is clearly wrong on this train, and without hesitation, he takes the reins and immediately starts getting shit done. The film was smart enough to know that science and investigations can only get you so far. Sometimes you need brute force action to take on a Lovecraft-inspired cosmic evil.
Sometimes you need a chaotic wildcard that the alien can’t outplay. The movie was good without the Savalas character and honestly, doesn’t need it but thank God they decided to throw a wild third act pivot by including him. What makes him unforgettable isn’t his role in the plot—it’s his refusal to fit the plot. He doesn’t belong in a gothic sci-fi horror mystery, and that’s exactly why he works. He’s a human non sequitur, a cameo that hijacks the film and briefly transforms it into something louder, stranger, and way more fun.
67. Bill Crowley (Christopher Lloyd) | I Am Not a Serial Killer (2016)
Christopher Lloyd is 77 years old in this movie. That’s a sentence that should stop you cold, because the man has been Doc Brown, Uncle Fester, and Judge Doom—he could’ve coasted on those roles for eternity. But instead, he pops up in this quiet little horror-drama and delivers one of the most unsettling performances of his career. Bill Crowley is the worst type of monster imaginable: the friendly neighbor with a dark secret. He’s the old man who shovels your driveway, who waves when you pass by, who sits quietly with his wife in the diner booth every Sunday. He’s the kind of man people describe as “salt of the earth.” Which makes the truth (that he’s been murdering people to sustain the thing inside him) all the more disturbing.
For the first half of the film, he’s nothing more than background color, a kindly presence. But the longer you watch, the more the mask slips. Lloyd doesn’t play him with grand theatrics—there’s no cackling, no sinister one-liners. He plays him with tired eyes, a frail frame, and a sadness that cuts through the horror. You almost pity him. Almost. Some are put off by the revelation that Bill Crowley is a literal monster and not a figurative one (despite the film’s title straight up telling you), while others find the twist to be refreshing. Regardless of where you land, there’s no denying the fact that Lloyd absolutely crushes it as a ghoul with a smile. Lloyd in this is proof positive that every actor should go evil at least once, even if they’re old as fuck when they do it.
66. Sgt. Bedlam, Hellcop (C.J. Graham) | Highway to Hell (1991)
Imagine Robocop dipped in tar, fused with a Cenobite, and then given the jurisdiction of every highway that runs through damnation itself. That’s Hellcop—a leather-clad fascist of the infernal DMV, pulling over unlucky sinners for the crime of existing. His face looks like it was stapled together by a drunk taxidermist, his shades hide the absence of anything resembling empathy, and his badge might as well read: YOU’RE SCREWED. If that sounds ridiculous, that’s the point. Highway to Hell is a horror comedy that feels like the distant cousin of Monkeybone but with less kiddy humor and more dated, cringe humor.
Everything is heightened for comedic effect. The Hellcop, played by C.J. Graham (who once donned the hockey mask in Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives), plays it straight, which adds to the comedy. He’s a bureaucratic demon just following orders. When he kidnaps the main character’s girlfriend for Satan’s arranged marriage program, it’s not out of lust, hunger or revenge. It’s paperwork. It’s his job. He’s the HR department of Hell with a shotgun. Highway to Hell may not have the cult reputation of Evil Dead II or Hellraiser, but with Sgt. Bedlam patrolling its cracked asphalt, it’s got an eternal enforcer who deserves his own spin-off. A cop so bad, even Hell couldn’t fire him.
65. Toby D’Amato (Tom Villard) | Popcorn (1991)
Every slasher needs a gimmick. Freddy had his claws, Jason had his mask, and Toby D’Amato had… the movies. Not the Friday night crowd pleasers most line up for, but the schlocky, bug-eyed, rubber-suited oddities of the past. He’s less a killer and more a frustrated auteur who thinks murder is just another special effect. Tom Villard plays Toby with the energy of a theater kid who never got the part he wanted. He’s theatrical in every way. Which is to say, over the top, dramatic and campy. If Jim Carrey played Eric Binford in Fade to Black, it would be similar to what Villard is doing here. He hides behind elaborate disguises (melting faces, fake accents, prosthetic teeth) like Lon Chaney got tired of silent films and decided to start stabbing coeds instead.
For Toby, the mask isn’t just camouflage. It’s the performance. It’s the art. What makes him stand out from the slasher pack is the motive. He doesn’t kill for revenge, lust, or because he’s the vessel of some ancient curse. He kills because the world didn’t recognize his genius. His student film was dismissed, mocked, buried. So now he’s staging his comeback in blood, turning a midnight movie marathon into his personal director’s cut. If Jason is the silent strongman and Freddy is the wisecracking boogeyman, Toby D’Amato is the art-school dropout who thought he could do it better. And for one glorious, blood-spattered night at the movies, he did.
64. Patricia Bradley (Dee Wallace) | The Frighteners (1996)
Calling Dee Wallace the “most underrated actress of horror” sounds wrong since everyone loves her but when’s the last time you’ve ever heard anyone list her among the best scream queens? Or the best actors in the genre? I think since she predominantly played mother roles and since most associate the genre with teens, people automatically skip over her when thinking about the heavy hitters of horror. The Frighteners is further proof of this. This should’ve opened the door to more villain roles but it just didn’t happen and I don’t know why. This is her and director Peter Jackson weaponizing her wholesale image for terrifying means.
Watching her twist it into sadism is like watching a Norman Rockwell painting slit its own throat. There’s something deeply unnerving about her brand of evil: it isn’t flamboyant or theatrical, it’s domestic. She kills not because of trauma or possession, but because she loves it. Because she wants to. She’s so horny for murder that she teams up with the ghost of her murderous boyfriend (Jake Busey) to resume the spree they started decades earlier. It’s not at all the role you’d expect from the mom from E.T. but that’s why it’s so great. And why she more than earns the title of the most underrated. I haven’t seen Jamie Lee Curtis or Neve Campbell do anything this crazy, just saying.
63. Sara (Laura Galán) | Piggy (2022)
Sara doesn’t start Piggy as a monster. She starts as the meal. The prey. The girl whose body becomes an easy target, her weight weaponized against her by the same pack of hyenas who call themselves classmates. The nickname (Piggy) isn’t just cruelty, it’s a brand. Burned into her skin deeper than any bruise. She’s bullied, humiliated, stripped of dignity, and left to wallow in a loneliness that makes every summer day feel like a death sentence. And then fate, or maybe something darker, drops a wolf in her lap. A stranger. A killer. A man who looks at her not with pity or disgust but recognition. When he takes her tormentors (caged them like squealing livestock) Sara becomes the hinge on which the entire film swings.
Her silence is complicity. Her indecision, power. She isn’t a Final Girl. She isn’t a villain. She’s both. She’s neither. She’s a girl carrying the weight of cruelty on her back, and when she finally shrugs it off, the sound echoes like thunder. She doesn’t suddenly help the serial killer, this isn’t a love story between predator and prey. She isn’t evil, she’s just been bullied to the point where the suffering of awful people leaves her apathetic. Sara isn’t the kind of character who makes horror fun. She’s the kind who makes horror honest. And honesty hurts.
62. Philip (Sean Harris) | Possum (2018)
A disgraced children’s puppeteer returns to his childhood home and is forced to confront his wicked stepfather and the secrets that have tortured him his entire life. Outside of a small handful of scenes involving the puppeteer trying to get rid of his puppet and the final ten minutes, that one sentence plot synopsis is literally all that happens in this film. In terms of plot, more things happen from scene to scene in any of the Friday the 13th films and each of those has the exact same storyline: guy with machete kills promiscuous teens.
But Possum isn’t the type of film you watch for the story. It’s a mood piece—every element is designed to fill you with as much dread and despair as possible. It’s also an actor showcase. Sean Harris doesn’t play him so much as exorcise him—every mumbled line, every downward glance, every twitch of his skeletal frame feels like a confession he’s too afraid to voice. He looks like a skeleton trying to crawl out of its own skin. He’s pale, gaunt, jittering with the kind of nervous energy that makes you want to avert your eyes. He skulks through the desolate husk of his childhood home like a man allergic to daylight, clutching a leather bag that twitches with secrets.
Philip isn’t a hero. He isn’t even an antihero. He’s a wound in the shape of a man, limping through a world that would rather not look at him. Harris makes him unforgettable precisely because he’s so hard to endure. Possum is a horror movie whose frights come from the thought of being alone with its main character for an extended period of time and wondering “how much of his life could I take before going insane?”
61. The Cherub (David Boreanaz) | Valentine (2001)
Remember the comedy Multiplicity? Where an overworked Michael Keaton clones himself in order to spend more time with his family, but then the clone clones himself, and then that clone gets a clone? Valentine is what would happen if the clone of I Know What You Did Last Summer, which itself is a clone of Scream, got a clone, and it came out all wrong like the third Keaton clone in that movie. You know the one. It has all the right elements—a holiday-themed killer, a solid motivation for the killer, a good cast, and a fantastic mask—but it just can’t pull it together. And that last element is important because Valentine has one of the greatest masks in the genre. It’s so good, I’m surprised studio execs didn’t bankroll sequels to make sure it entered the zeitgeist. The Cherub Killer has all the makings of a B-level slasher icon but it never happened. We should see more of him at Halloween, MacFarlane toys should’ve added him to their Movie Maniacs line, and we should already be getting a gritty reboot about now. Get the Soska Sisters on the phone; they seem to be the only ones to know how to get gold (See No Evil 2) out of shit (See No Evil).
100-81 | 60-41
Who are some of your favorite underrated horror movie characters? Maybe they will show up later in the list!
