/Answers: Our Favorite Horror Movie Villains

One, two, Freddy's coming for you. Three, four, better lock your door...Out of all of the nursery rhymes from my childhood, I remember that one above all others. Equal parts catchy and spine tingling, the ominous warning, delivered frightfully by angelic children, solidified Freddy's boogeyman status. Having seen A Nightmare on Elm Street at way too young of an age thanks to my big brothers, most nights I wanted to hold my eyelids open like some sort of spastic cartoon character. Anything to keep away those creepy extending arms and the head-splitting sounds of his dragging knives. On the nights that I was unlucky enough to fall asleep, Freddy Kruger was the star of some of my worst nightmares. Supernatural horror doesn't usually haunt me after the credits roll, but Freddy created a fear that I was never able to shake.Five, Six, grab your crucifix. Seven, eight, gonna stay up late.

That all being said, I also kind of really love Freddy. Don't get me wrong, he is terrfiying, but you can't deny that vicious wit and sense of humor. However, you also can't deny that he is child murderer and a pervert. I can never decide whether I watch A Nightmare on Elm Street because I think Freddy is cool or because I just don't feel like sleeping that night, but I do know that when it comes to the slasher movie kings, Freddy takes the bloody cake (he won't have any trouble cutting it, either). Unlike his former adversary, Jason, who was an innocent child and a victim in his own right, Freddy was a terrible person even before he was a terrible ghoul. There is literally nothing admirable, relatable, or in anyway shape or form morally sound in Freddy Krueger. When you are talking about a through and through villain, Freddy Krueger's rap sheet is about as long and ghastly as they come.

Nine, ten, never sleep again.Where Jason murdered innocent teenagers with the indifference of a shark, Freddy teased and toyed with his victims. It was upsetting psychological torture and his own screwed-up form of foreplay. Freddy has a way of making you feel outraged, disgusted, and horrified. He was the kind of villain that triggers that guilty and curious side of you that watches serial killer true crime documentaries, and you don't know whether to say "cool," or be terrified of the Amazon guy ringing your doorbell. When I think of all of the things that make Freddy Freddy, it makes me sick to my stomach, but that doesn't stop me from dramatically holding my hand up to my face whenever I get my nails done and saying, "THIS IS GOD," as dramatically as possible. Freddy Krueger is sick-fascination at its finest.

For my money, there's no better horror villain than Michael Myers. Before Rob Zombie tried to give him a typical serial killer origin story, Michael Myers was a ruthless killing machine motivated by his desire to kill his younger sister, Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis). However, this was a revelation that we didn't even learn about until Halloween II. Therefore, in the original Halloween, the white-masked madman is nothing more than a senseless killer with no rhyme or reason driving his knife into his various victims.

Making Michael Myers even more terrifying is that before the idea of the invincible slasher became a horror trope, this was a killer who took several bullets to the body, only to disappear and return to kill over and over again. Eventually his mythology would expand to include connections to the occult and Samhain. But in that first Halloween, Michael Myers was an unstoppable killer who proved that the Boogeyman was real, and that continues to be terrifying to this day.

The most frightening thing about Norman Bates is how harmless he appears at first. Played by Anthony Perkins with a disarming likability, Norman Bates is introduced in Psycho not as an obvious villain, but as a pathetic victim subject to the whims of his demanding, unseen mother. He is not even the focus of Psycho when Marion Bates first stumbles upon his hidden motel, his presence nearly invisible until the moment when he spies on Marion undressing through his peep hole. From there the dread builds, as you're forced to question just how innocent Norman is when his "mother" murders Marion and the pursuant detective, while he begrudgingly hides the bodies.

Alfred Hitchcock is called the master of suspense for a reason, swinging the POV from the poor Marion to Norman for much of the second half of the film, whose motivations and actions only become more opaque the more time we spend with him. Hitchcock manipulates this confusion wonderfully, making you at first sympathize with Norman while teasing an aura of dread and distrust around the character — until that famous final reveal.

It's such a potent reveal that Norman is the killer because you have spent so much time with him, but rather than betrayal, the audience feels a sort of cathartic relief. Those hints that Norman wasn't what he seemed came true, and you weren't a terrible person for distrusting a person who only seemed victim of circumstance. No, the betrayal was that Hitchcock made you feel for a murderous, twisted villain — and that is the most terrifying thing of all.

Jason Voorhees. The name itself should mean something to anyone with even a passing interest in horror. When I first came upon the man who terrorized lusty and lascivious teens who seemed to care more about getting it on than they were with self-preservation (to say nothing of the impact the character had on what it meant to be deep within the woods in the same way Jaws redefined that hair-on-the-back-of-your-neck feeling when you went too far into the ocean), the guy was already showing up in his sixth movie. The year was 1986, I was 11 and already the series had gotten a little goofy. Sure, there were some quality kills in Jason Lives, but for the guy I'm seeing at the heart of this series, who truly embodied evil incarnate, you need to stick with parts one through four. Jason had a slow start out of the gate, but like any great maniac, it would only be dialed in with subsequent installments.

It's hard to put into simple terms why he was such a great antagonist but I would be remiss if I didn't recommend the nearly 7 hour (!) documentary Crystal Lake Memories: The Complete History of Friday the 13th as the quintessential companion piece that can help cement why Jason's ranking as the ultimate killing machine was not only thoroughly well-deserved but, conversely, why that image has been sullied by the shallow installments that had our guy traipsing all over New York or space or even in a head-to-head battle against Freddy Krueger that I never bothered to watch. It's those initial films which have genuine terror in their core. Sure, Part Three seems to have had been devised first as a 3-D gimmick first, a horror movie second, but that one still can hang with the best simply for the inventive ways it knocked off the movie's teens. Jason has seen himself be reshaped and envisioned in all sorts of ways through pop culture, but no one can change how those initial movies crafted fun jump scares while slowly killing everyone off and eventually finishing in a crescendo of blood that would end not with closure, but with that faint whiff that Jason would come back. Because Jason always comes back.