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What is your favorite type of horror movie antagonist?
Zombies, aliens, kaiju, regular humans (like ghostface), super humans (like Freddie or Jason) demons, vampires, ghosts, or something else I haven't mentioned. What's your favorite type of villian for horror movies?
I've always been partial to zombies, as I think they're the perfect mix of horrifying and unstoppable yet benign enough to not make the main characters feel hopelessly unable to do anything. I guess I find the idea that given the right choices I can make it out alive more interesting than the idea of a ghost/demon where you're just entirely at the mercy of magical powers that you can't do anything against.
But maybe that feeling of complete powerlessness is what some people are looking for in a horror movie.
My favourite type of antagonist is one seeped in mystery. What's driving them? How the fuck do I stop this thing? Bonus points if we don't get all the answers.
The best of all time has to be Alien from Alien. There's something so satisfying about a hyper intelligent and efficient hunter with which you have no hopes of communication. Like the shark from Jaws but even more capable, you're only getting out of this alive through a combination of wits, luck, and sheer determination.
-Honourable mention-
He's not from a horror movie, but he might as well be: Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men.
Another runner up would be the thing from John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing. That movie is a masterpiece.
Yes the 'thing' definitely has a place on the mysterious antagonists list.
I like a good mysterious villian, but only assuming you don't figure out what I'd going on by the end. I am a huge coward and in general don't like horror but I do feel like horror movies tend to have some of the more interesting plot lines, or at least plot ideas. I feel like because often the main point of them isn't the story (but rather the scary) they can do a bit more out there or convoluted plots and get away with it. But that's only satisfying if I feel like by the end things have wrapped up enough for the story to make coherent sense.
Have you seen "It Follows"?
No, but I've heard about it. Worth checking out?
Absolutely!
I've always been a fan of Lovecraftian styles of horror antagonists. The more my mind is bent, the better. The most recent movie I saw that scratched this itch was Annihilation. Those scenes with the bear and that lighthouse bit were just fantastic!
If anyone wants another recommendation, Color Out of Space with Nicolas Cage is a great rendition of the old Lovecraft story.
"The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown"
"The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of the infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far."
Lovecraftian horror is something special, as it explores that deep type of horror where you truly are powerless against the antagonist. What ineffable horror resides in the unfathomable void of space, time, and our minds..
Color Out of Space was quite engaging and bizarre. I second the recommendation.
YES! I feel like I'm the only one that has heard/seen that movie. It's such an anomaly! Lovecraft's story + Nicholas Cage of all people. It's not supposed to work, but it's genuinely an enjoyable movie. More-so if you have an interest in cosmic horror. Cage's performance is also unexpectedly good.
Humans for sure. You expect the zombie to try to eat you, the ghost to haunt you, the monster to rip you apart.
When a human snaps, loses all empathy and is driven by pure hate with murderous intentions, that is scary. And it's scary because it can and does happen in real life.
I don't have to fear a vampire, they don't exist. Humans are the real monsters.
Haha, see I've always been the opposite with real threats vs the imagined. The plausible threats aren't scary because I already live in a world where they exist and I know the odds are very low I ever come across them, and if I do, I have an idea of what to do. Say I'm walking alone in the woods late at night, I'm not afraid of a bear attacking me or being murdered, which are on some level rational fears. But I am afraid of ghosts and goblins and aliens appearing, because I'd have no idea what to do in that case.
That's certainly an interesting take! I'd say if it were a real (for the sake of argument) fear, that you could visit a bookstore, many of which will offer spell books that can teach you how to ward off ghosts/poltergeists etc.
Getting bludgeoned from behind by a maniac you never saw can happen.
A ghost harming you cannot happen.
I guess it boils down to suspension of disbelief, and the film/story's ability to achieve that.
Either way, happy haunting!
I have to disagree - humans aren't scary, because we all know what to do about it. You can run from them, fight them, reason with them, etc.
What do you do about a ghost? A mummy's curse? You can't run because they'll eat your dreams, you can't fight it because every wound you put on the mummy appears on yourself instead, you can't reason with it because every time it talks your brain starts to melt...
That's only if you're in a story. You cannot reason with an axe to the skull that you never saw coming.
A curse or ghost are only a threat if you are in a fictional story that includes them.
We all have our disbelief suspended in different ways though.
Edited for spelling.
Well yeah, I was going off of horror movie logic where the monster has to be real or there's no movie.
First of all I do find it gently frustrating that movies stick to a very well worn path of ghosts / zombies / vampires / serial killers. The ghosts are going to make your life miserable until you understand the horror that happened to them; the zombies are going to infect someone close to you and you're going to have to kill that person; vampires are going to look all glamorous but what are you giving up to get that etc etc. It'd be great if films could branch out a bit more.
I really like Predator (the first one), Predators, and Prey. I loved Alien (and here there are two evil enemies, the alien and the corporation). I like the monsters in these films because they're largely coherent and have some rules around them that we discover as the film moves on.
I like films where the enemy is nature - Against the Ice and Artic are examples.
Films where the enemy is the situation (people stuck up an antenna tower, people stuck in the sea off a boat, people stuck on a chair lift on a snowy wolf-infested mountain, etc etc) are enjoyable fun.
Sharks are great - there's a long list of great (and not so great) shark films. One I enjoyed recently was the Australian Bait
I loved the first Tremors. Tremors is interesting because the monster was great, that first movie is really fun, and they spent years trying to recreate it and got a bunch of terrible follow-up films. And so I think that I don't really care about the monster, I care more about the cast and crew.
I didn’t think I would see a reference to Frozen (2010) in this thread.
Definitely agree that the old rehashed monster tropes are tired and have no depth left to them, but as a dungeonmaster I can tell you there are SO MANY MORE ways to play a monster than just on its face!
Half of the villains I put in my games are standard stereotypical monsters with some kind of spin on them. It makes everything fresh and fun in a very new kind of way.
I really like the "inner demons" kind of antagonist. Hereditary did that quite well (up to a point before it became supernatural), and the Babadook really did a number on me as well. Having struggled with intrusive thoughts and a lot of mental health in the past, it's the horror of what people can do to themselves (and others) that really gets to and stays with me.
I'm going to jump on the human bandwagon. Don't get me wrong, Predator and Alien are awesome enemies of the human race, but we are awful!
Silence of the Lambs, Se7en, The Usual Suspects, are awesome. Even The Boy keeps you really on your toes.
I find actual people scarier than anything else. Jack is the scariest thing in The Shining and still would be even if there were no supernatural reasons behind his behaviour.
Like everyone else in Gen X, I love zombies, but they're not really horrifying at all. They're just a thought exercise.
Zombies are rough now, because the fun of it was "would you betray your own humanity or morality for selfish reasons? Would you sacrifice a family member? Would you betray your community?"
and after a harrowing pandemic irl where the answer was a resounding YES, it's not a very fun thought experiment anymore. People will screw each other over and lose all empathy for things far more petty than food or shelter or a space on a rescue vehicle.
See I always watched zombie movies and thought they were unrealistic how quickly people turned into heartless bastards, but I will say the pandemic made me feel like maybe they weren't so far off the mark.
But also the fun of zombie movies for me has always been like the pepper survival side of things. I'm like a very low key pepper and I always enjoy the thought of like how would I handle it if the world suddenly stopped. I like the scavenging and jerry rigging and creeping around out of sight more than the run and gun down mobs of zombies.
That's a good point. The answer was unfortunately "we will physically fight each other to hoard toilet paper".
I think the fun of it with the earlier zombie stuff, like the original Romero films, was more "can we survive? If so, how?"
I love the swelling relentlessness of zombie hordes. They keep coming, like a countdown until there is either critical mass and destruction or a distraction that safely relieves the tension.
To your point that the pandemic ruins the tension of the human to human relationships in zombie movies, I think that in a way there is more opportunity for redemption. Prior to the pandemic there may have been more satisfaction in the dysfunction of group dynamics, now there may be satisfaction in the overcoming of dysfunction and hardship.
Just a thought, though.
I actually don't really like scary that much though, which I know is dumb when talking about horror movies. But that's actually a big part of why I like them. They're just a little bit scary but not enough to keep me up at night, which is about all I can handle.
I don't think it's dumb at all. There are a lot of movies I love that I tend to forget are horror - stuff like The Fly and The Thing and Alien and Midsomer. I guess there's sort of a surfeit of invention in them that is very watchable.
The novelty and the unease or revulsion are kind of at a manageable level. Is that what draws you to horror, too?
In terms of pure monster bashing, I love the idea of desire demons. Charismatic vampires, Faustian demons, psychopathic billionaires. I want to see those objectively bad choices and think "Yeh. That'd probably get me too."
But also, and it's hard for me to put into words, I've been getting into horror where reality itself is out to get the characters. Think Twilight Zone, Annihilation, Color out of Space or even the book House of Leaves; where fundamental rules have shifted right under the characters and they need to figure things out. There could be some material threat like a monster or killer, but in the end they are fighting against their own ignorance and assumptions.
The relatable and existential variety. American Werewolf in London's villain, for example, is the beast within, and it compels protagonist David Kessler to confront his human guilt and come to terms with their mutual mortality.
I enjoy movies that spend a lot of time building up suspence before revealing the monster. Nothing is scarier than your own imagination running wild. The downside is that when you finally see the villain, it is easy to be dissapointed.
Stephen King is the master of this, both the build up and the let down part, e.g. The Langoliers and It (1990).
For me, it's the ones that can affect the protagonist's ability to correctly discern their reality. Sometimes it's facilitated by mental instability, like The Babadook, and other times it's an actual malevolent entity, like Oculus. But either way, that idea that the characters (and by extension myself, as the viewer) can't be certain whether something is real or not, or perhaps aren't fully in conscious of themselves, is just so unsettling to me. How can you stop something that you can't even accurately perceive?
I remember as a teenager seeing an episode of Criminal Minds where this dude snapped one day and killed some woman that cut him off in traffic, then for the rest of the episode he's upset because his wife and daughter won't talk to him for some reason and have locked themselves in their rooms. Then at the end of the episode it's revealed that he had a psychotic break after killing the first woman, during which he came home to kill his wife and daughter as well, with absolutely no recollection of it after the fact. So the whole time that he thought they were just ignoring him, they had actually been dead. That episode messed me up pretty bad.
I recently rewatched the 1992 remake of Night of the Living Dead, and firmly beleive the way zombies are protrayed in that movie is the pinicle of the genre (for me at least.) Fast, almost invincible zombies are too monsterous-like. NotLD 1992 zombies are wedged just firmly enough in the uncanney valley to be aethetically unsettling and imposing. Like the original, they are slow but can tear down a house in large numbers, and never stop moving. The remake has some pretty great makeup/costume design to make the zombies look like walking corpses rather than sleepy humans. I think slow zombies also give films the room to breathe and tell human stories, rather than having characters just be running for their life for 2 hours. Theres just something scary to me about knowing that these slow, once human things, will never stop hunting you down and the longer you wait around, the more of a threat they become.
Mysterious slasher. Any other horror movie villain feels like an action movie
I don't like gore, so I pretty much don't like horror. Clearly a lot of core horror fans love the gore, expect the gore, and like someone at a concert where the band doesn't play their favorite song they'll be kind of upset if they don't get the gore.
But, once upon a time, someone more or less tricked/forced me into watching 28 Days Later with them. We were hanging out, the movie was background. But I started paying more attention. Because it was getting interesting.
Then it got to the scene where they get attacked in Jim's house, and after fighting the infected off Selene stands over her two fellows (Jim and Mark) with a machete demanding to know if they'd been wounded by the rage zombies. And when Mark said "wait" and she immediately hacks him down, I started watching the movie exclusively.
Because it was just ... it was zombies. Selene had explained, very carefully, you've got about twelve seconds from infection to conversion, and after conversion (as we'd seen several times) you're an insane goes-to-eleven killing machine. She didn't wait, she didn't dither or whine or wonder, she just did the logical thing.
I became a zombie fan that night. Still not into horror, but almost anything involving zombies (movie, book, show) I'll give a shot because if they put a little effort in, zombies promote some interesting story around survival and logic and needs-must sort of threads that are just fascinating to me. It's not the zombies themselves (which are usually depicted with the requisite levels of gore) that I like; it's what the zombies force into the story.
Unlike the typical serial killer or supernatural whatever that a lot of horror will bring to execute the violence that brings the gore, zombies act as a lever to force decisions and consequences. At least in the zombie stories I gravitate to. They throw characters together who have to figure out how to adapt to the changing morality of a situation that's not normal anymore. They have to reevaluate the importance of things that used to be unquestionable.
Like Selene and Mark. "Wait." No, waiting means you turn and eat me. Fuck wait; kill. Because I want to live. The violence, the gore, of her hacking him apart was a byproduct; the interesting part was the decision involved. Maybe I like zombies because when I cover the screen with my hand to avoid seeing the colored corn syrup and prop body parts splattering everywhere there was still a point to the scene that I get.
Zombies are just fascinating. Fast or slow, doesn't matter; they both accomplish interesting things in a story. Fast ones just make it harder to break the action; meaning, makes it harder for the characters to get into an action bit and be able to break off so the next scenes can happen. Fast ones are typically more dangerous, so it's harder to write a break in that works; slow zombies give lots more options to break off.
However, on the other hand, slow ones offer very interesting and unique scenes you can't get with fast zombies. Like the big crowd that you flee; that's an ominous sort of fun you can't really get with fast zombies. Slow ones, that can be a thing that doesn't just kill the characters inevitably. With fast crowd, it's less likely you can believably get away so that's less often going to be a scene because it becomes silly. But with slow ones, you can do something like what happens with Shaun from Shaun of the Dead where he looks out and then says "oh lots" without instantly dying.
Basically, I like story over gore. Zombies create tons of story. Monsters usually don't. Something like Aliens is interesting because the xenos aren't there to just kill; they're part of a story. A lot of horror focuses on the gore without any structure beyond what's necessary to make it understandable why this character in this scene is the one being hacked up this time. Aliens has several story threads, and one of them is very zombie-like when the landing party survivors retreat to the base and barricade themselves while planning for how they might be able to hold out for rescue.
More zombies. Just as long as they're used to do interesting things.
While I loved Freddy and to a lesser extent Jason as a kid, I'm going to go with two categories. Evil AI and the vague option of "demons". For evil AI, I am thinking of HAL, agents from The Matrix, Samaritan (from Person of Interest), and Shodan (from the System Shock games). I felt like most of them they gave a frightening sense of all-knowing awareness that was scary and drives paranoia. For the demons, I am having a hard time putting to words what was so appealing about them, but I really loved the first two Hellraiser movies, particularly the cenobytes lead by Pinhead. I also really liked the movie Fallen (1998) with the demon Azazel as the antagonist.
I'm not into horror movies but I'd prefer antagonists manufactured by people (government or corporate higher ups) wanting some kind of super weapon or through accident by meddling in things they don't fully understand. Sort of like Akira or Jurassic Park though horror rather than sci-fi.
I don't like horror involving cosmic entities or the supernatural because it allows the writers to not have to think about stuff like backstory or the metaphysical laws that the entity has to follow, since the creatures are effectively gods they can do nearly anything. This is why I don't like Junji Ito's works despite his incredible talent as an artist.
I don't like zombies either, though this is because I think they're played out and also kind of absurd. Their bodies are rapidly decaying due to being dead. Just wait a couple of days and the threat should be over. I'm fine with zombies in games like Terraria or Minecraft; ghouls in fallout and draugr in skyrim are fine too.