The Scariest Horror Movie Villains You Never Actually See
A good horror film can shock and surprise you. It can make you jump into the arms of your date, recoil from gore, or scream out loud. And those things are certainly a fun night at the movies. A great horror film, however, will delve deeper into your subconscious, find the things that terrify us as a species, and prod at those fear receptors until we begin to lose our grasp on the world around us and vanish into a miasma of terror that will last as long as a film has us under its spell.
There's something to be said for a great horror movie monster; an undying nightmare demon, the killer from a campfire story, a sadomasochist from beyond the grave, a masked mental patient who stalks babysitters ... these are movie monsters that will remain forever written onto the map of pop culture. And while Freddy, Jason, Pinhead, or Michael Myers have the capacity to scare us, such monsters can become too familiar after a while. After 12 movies, we kind of know how to deal with Michael Myers. The scariest movie monsters will be the ones you don't know how to confront. The invisible ones. The intangible ones. The monsters that exist outside your senses, yet still have the perfect capacity to do you harm. An ethereal force, perhaps. Or a malevolent billionaire who hides safely from your view.
The following list is full of monsters one cannot see or hear, but are still lurking over your shoulder, waiting to turn your body into pulp.
Death, the Final Destination (2000-2011)
There has never been a horror premise more efficient than the one employed by the five "Final Destination" movies. At the beginning of every movie, a new character has a psychic vision of an upcoming disaster wherein a dozen people die painfully and horribly. The psychic vision allows them to avoid getting on a plane/highway/roller coaster/etc., hence cheating death. Death itself, however, is a fickle entity in the films, and it resents that some people have psychic visions. To redress the balance, death will come for each of the people who avoided its plan. Not as a hooded figure with a scythe, but as ... well, everything. Small cracks appear in the floor, screws come loose, a tub is left unattended, and a long series of Rube Goldberg-like colliding knickknacks lead to someone's brutal, accidental death.
No visible monster, nothing that can be tricked or dealt with, no source of horror that can be hidden from. The whole world is out to kill you. Each time the characters think they have give death the slip ... well, there's a reason most of the movies start with a new set of characters with each installment.
The Builder(s), Cube (1997)
Vincenzo Natali's 1997 techno-horror flick "Cube" contains a mystery that is never solved. A group of strangers finds themselves locked in a surreal, technological prison of some kind. Each room is an exact cube, and each of its six sides has a hatch on it. Some of them are color-coded, and each one is marked with a number combination. One can travel freely between the cube rooms, but they move cautiously as random rooms contain deadly booby traps. The strangers must suss out why they're there and determine how the prison works. They find it contains only so many cube rooms, and that the rooms change position automatically. There will be a lot of advanced math involved, as well as inevitable insanity.
"Cube" never lets the audience know who built the prison, why people are kidnapped and trapped inside of it, or the function it serves. The characters each float theories — it's a behavior experiment, it's a billionaire's sadistic plaything — but they remain theories. By the film's end, someone has escaped ... but to where?
Nothing, The Night House (2021)
David Bruckner's "The Night House" is a psychologically rich ghost story about mourning, loss, the secrets we keep from our spouses, and the dark impulses we may posses toward violence. In the film, Rebecca Hall plays a mourning wife named Beth whose husband, Owen, recently took his own life. While wandering the woods in sadness, Beth comes upon a house on the other side of the lake. A house that is identical to hers. A house that Owen was building in secret (he was an architect). A house where he may have been luring women for affairs and/or murder. For a good deal of "The Night House," Beth has to face the fact that her dead husband may have been a serial killer, or, more insidiously, that her husband was possessed by ... something.
No points for guessing that it is the latter. The name of the demonic presence — not visible — is simply Nothing. It is nothingness. One might say it is the personification of despair. It lures people to do wicked things. Convince them that life is worth losing.
While largely not visible, a keen eye may be able to see ... something ... in the film's final shots.
Plant pheromones, The Happening (2008)
M. Night Shyamalan's "The Happening" is frequently derided for its humor and bizarre premise, but the filmmaker's R-rated cautionary tale possesses some truly chilling scenes of self-harm and plenty of levity mixed in with the dread. Mark Wahlberg plays a high school teacher who finds himself lost in the middle of a seemingly global rash of spontaneous suicides. Without warning, people dissociate and then deliberately hurt themselves. No one knows why. People flee the cities, hoping to get away from whatever the thing is, but it seems to follow them wherever it goes. For a moment, it looks like it might be mass psychosis.
As explained later in the movie, the plants of the world, under threat by humanity, have been releasing pheromones into the air that activate a death response in humans, more or less activating a death drive. This is based (very, very loosely) in real science. The sight of the winds sweeping through a field of grass has never been more frightening. "The Happening" is an underrated, perfectly amusing, frequently scary B-movie that does a lot with a little.
The entities, Bird Box (2018)
It may have been fun to play The Bird Box challenge back in 2018, an online phenomenon wherein people attempted to accomplish everyday tasks while blindfolded, but it seems there is nothing as fun in Susanne Bier's "Bird Box," a dark, post-apocalyptic movie about unseen entities that, like in "The Happening," inspire a rash of suicides. The entities, never described or filmed, are evidently so terrifying, or perhaps possess such demonic power, that they cause whoever looks at them to take their own lives. People smash their heads into walls. Others go feral and attack. Paranoia bouts. "Bird Box" came at a time when humanity was suspicious of its neighbors and may stand as a polemic of the year it was released.
"Bird Box" has clear metaphors for mass hysteria, and how people can be moved to extremes by the very thought of an outside threat, even if they have to invent it themselves. The entities may very well be imagined, as far as the audience in concerned, and moving through the world blindfolded is a potent symbol to be sure.
The Bird Box challenge, meanwhile, has mercifully come to an end.
Despair, She Dies Tomorrow (2020)
Structured like a plague movie, but far more chilling, Amy Seimetz's 2020 film "She Dies Tomorrow" follows a woman (Kate Lyn Sheil) who becomes convinced one day — just convinced — she will indeed die the following day. She won't take her own life, mind you, and she's not terminally ill or scheduled for execution. She just seems to know she will die. Her attack of sudden despair is difficult for those who live with her to process, and may be familiar to anyone who has lived with — or lived with someone who lived with — depression.
However, in a semi-supernatural twist, her fear of inevitable death appears to spread to other people, and it won't be long before groups of people, including some recognizable filmmakers and actors, have gathered to discuss that they will indeed die the following day. Life loses meaning; people enter a weirdly beatific state of sadness. What is the sadness disease? Where did it come from? Or has the world reached such a dark state that our inevitable demise is all we can think about? Certainly a fitting film for 2020.
The Nothing, The NeverEnding Story (1984)
An unusually depressive children's film, Wolfgang Petersen's "The NeverEnding Story" tells the story of a motherless boy who hides in an attic with a book, only to find that the story he is reading is very real. In the story, the queen of a fantasy country has fallen ill and the land has become victim to a grand, overwhelming nothingness simply called The Nothing. The Nothing is essentially what happens to a story once it ends, implying by extension that a human life is surrounded on all sides by nothingness. Even in a fantastical world, life is absurd. "The NeverEnding Story" is rife with feelings of entropy and decay. This is a movie wherein a depression swamp will swallow you up if you lose hope ... and it swallows a horse.
The characters in "The NeverEnding Story" are all indifferent to life, saddened that their existences will soon be erased. A massive turtle goddess loves to repeat the phrase "Not that it matters..." The Nothing is encouraged by the forces of darkness, represented by an animatronic werewolf called Gmork.
"The NeverEnding Story" is "She Dies Tomorrow" by way of "The Wizard of Oz."
The Overlook Hotel, The Shining (1980)
One can certainly see The Overlook Hotel, the central location of Stanley Kubrick's horror classic "The Shining," but one cannot properly see what dwells inside. The Overlook Hotel is indeed haunted, and Jack Torrance (Jack Nicholson) and his family certainly see some of the creatures and wraiths lurking in the hallways. But the ghosts are not the origin of evil. Something else is causing the ghosts to gather there. Some ineffable outside force has gathered ghosts around it, causing them to congregate, like in a dream, in that particular physical location.
After a while, a viewer might get the impression that the hotel itself possesses something akin to a rudimentary consciousness, and those who enter the building become occupants of its mind. Jack, Danny, and Wendy aren't seeing ghosts that walk around independently of their own volition; they are memories, dream images culled up from inside the noncorporeal synapses of the Overlook itself. They're just like pictures in a book. Only this book gets the reader literally involved.
Annabelle, the Conjuring universe (2013-present)
Annabelle, the spooky doll who first appeared in the 2013 film "The Conjuring," is arguably visible, but as it was explained in the 2014 film "Annabelle," the doll itself is not alive or possessed, but a mere conduit for things more insidious, sinister, and malignant. Annabelle is not a killer doll like Chucky, but a haunted artifact — it could be anything — being manipulated by something we cannot see.
Annabelle is based on a real-life doll — in actuality a Raggedy Ann doll — kept in the basement of real-life ghost hunters Ed and Lorraine Warren. By the Warrens' description, Annabelle is the most potently evil thing they have ever captured, and they are sure to keep it in a glass case. When the glass case opens, the evil is released ... while the doll stays in place. In "Annabelle Comes Home," a babysitter starts mucking about with all the haunted objects in the Warrens' basement, including Annabelle, and monsters are unleashed from otherworlds. That's pretty damn scary.