Scariest Horror Monsters

[fOx]

This is a thread about the scariest monster designs you've ever seen in a film or video game. The ones that really set your teeth on edge, for whatever reason, and stayed with you. Extra points if its a more obscure example.

I'll start with a monster from ocarina of time. Despite playing it as a teenager, and having played several resident evil games, i found Dead Hand to be fucking terrifying. It's a great, unsettling design that doesn't get much attention.

 

[twistedmic]

I've always been unsettled by the Xenomorph Queen, particularly the one from Aliens.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

The inevitability of mortality.

Try dodge-rolling past that.

 

[Gordon_4]

I've always been unsettled by the Xenomorph Queen, particularly the one from Aliens.

I’ll co-sign this but also mention Geiger’s OG design from Alien. That ************, then and now, is terrifying.

 

[tippy2k2]

They're not obscure at all (probably one of the best known monsters ever) but The Thing. John Carpenter and company are damn good at what they do and The Thing is arguably his best movie. The creature designs are wonderful as well as the suspense that the movie has throughout as no one knows who is "infected" by The Thing and who is actually a human. The movie is a damn masterpiece.

Now for a bit more obscure but not necessarily super scary looking (which is why I went with The Thing first), The Slugs from Slither.

Maybe this is just a "me" problem but I find creatures that you don't see coming to be of the scarier variety (see The Thing above). These little fuckers crawl around like giant slugs and then jump themselves down your throat to take control of you. Once it has control of you, it either uses you to get control of more people or it takes you to "The Host", which is basically a giant blob monster creature thing that assimilates infected people (Think Stranger Things S3 for a more modern example).

 

[Baffle]

Pan's Labyrinth.

I had a terrible dream about a beetle god the other day. Was horrific. Buzzed when it talked (and didn't say nice things). Shot it with my blood gun. Didn't work. Did not enjoy. Got up early for work.

 

[Xprimentyl]

The Pale Man from Pan's Labyrinth. *shiver* Having seen the movie several times, it's still the one scene that invariably makes me anxious.

 

[Casual Shinji]

The demons from Jacob's Ladder.

 

[Breakdown]

The giant spider from Krull. It's transparent, so you can its insides. And it jumps up and down on the web when it's pissed off. It's horrible.

 

[Wintermute]

Video game and movie monsters in particular rarely have an effect on me. For me it's the simple stuff, things that look human, which is why I hate the splicers in Bioshock, specially the "statues" in Fort Frolic. Or the cenobites, or the "monster" in It Follows or Lights Out, or Scarlett Johansson in Under The Skin because you know you'd follow your dick and die too.

 

[CaitSeith]

The inevitability of mortality.

Try dodge-rolling past that.

Forced immortality; as your flesh and mind decays and rots, your conciousness refuses to die.

 

[The Rogue Wolf]

Forced immortality; as your flesh and mind decays and rots, your conciousness refuses to die.

I'd like to see them in a "versus"-type movie.

 

[Asita]

Honestly, it's really not much for design, but it feels wrong to have a thread on horror monsters without mentioning the classic of "Bruce" from Jaws. Granted, the shark prop itself wasn't even good when it was released, but that itself directly contributed to exactly what makes the shark so terrifying: See, the original plan was to have the shark more front and center, but between the shark props looking bad and malfunctioning so often, the crew ended up feeling obliged to shoot the movie so that the shark was usually only hinted at, and that makes it so much more effective. In any shot showing the water, the shark can be anywhere. It can swim in, rack up a body count right in front of you, and leave without you ever seeing it. And not because it has some invisibility trick like the Yaujta from Predator, just because visibility in the ocean sucks and will naturally obscure a shark from us. This presentation effectively changed it from a popcorn monster movie to a film that more or less turned almost an entire generation thallasophobic.

 

[09philj]

The entity from It Follows, the thing that made a person walking scary.

 

[Baffle]

When I was a kid it was Vigo from Ghostbusters 2. Now that I'm an adult it's lulls in conversation when the TV isn't on.

 

[XsjadoBlayde]

I don't know, I find it difficult to be scared by fictional creatures. Used to do a lot of horror drawing myself trying to find the limit of what can be the most disturbing images to the human mind, so maybe that has something to do with it. But really, it's people that scare me. People and the systems they support and happily contribute to. It's all far more insidious, the facade of a smile, the illusion of a feeling human as they rip away everything you hold dear, gaslighting you and your loved ones so you become the enemy while they run off with all the riches as you suffer the violent backlash of the brainwashed evangelical, laying further groundwork for the for demise of humanity, where the universe will become unobserved, unrecorded and unappreciated as if there was nothing at all.

 

[BrawlMan]

• G Virus & The Malformation of G.
• Eve
• The Thing (John Carpenter)
• Eye Worm Zombie (Lucio Fulci's Zombie)
• Johan Libert. The old Nazis/Neo Nazis and Czechoslovakian government that jump started him to the horrible person he is. They fucked up a lot of kids to make the perfect Aryan Soldiers
• Junko Enoshima
• Lickers
• Nemesis and Mr. X
• The Scissorman
• The Deadites

 

[Casual Shinji]

Okay, so here's a bit of an odd one; the shadow devils from Ghost. The kinda disturbing grunts and moans are the thing that really gets me. It also hit me quite hard when I saw it first at, like, age 9, since I thought it was just going to be a romance movie with some ghosts or something. Which it was, but I wasn't expecting demons from Hell pulling doomed souls screaming into the underworld.

 

[fOx]

Okay, so here's a bit of an odd one; the shadow devils from Ghost. The kinda disturbing grunts and moans are the thing that really gets me. It also hit me quite hard when I saw it first at, like, age 9, since I thought it was just going to be a romance movie with some ghosts or something. Which it was, but I wasn't expecting demons from Hell pulling doomed souls screaming into the underworld.

funnily enough, i think that film shared the same writer as jacobs ladder

 

[Worgen]