The 10 Worst Horror Movie Villains Ranked

When a horror movie villain is good, they can make even the worst movies watchable if not enjoyable. When they’re great, they can become some of the biggest entertainment icons in film history. But when they’re bad? Oh, bother…

From cliched ghost children to cheap cash-grab-creatures using intellectual property in the public domain, the last few decades have introduced some truly horrific (in the bad way) additions to the genre that prove not every ghoul is cut out for the silver scream. We braved popular blockbusters, maligned remakes, and indie cult classics, scrutinizing the headlining monsters and murderers of each to assess their originality, design, and how they support their respective stories overall. We found a few truly terrible films were nearly rescued by an antagonist that met these standards with flying colors (our compliments to young Brahms). 

On the other hand, when they failed to do so, the film couldn’t be totally saved, even a unique gimmick — like, for example, haunted computers and cellphones. Suffice it to say, the foes we’ve ultimately settled on are truly the 10 worst horror movie villains of all time.

In crafting this ranking, we tried as much as possible to take into consideration things like campiness, cult acceptance, and the general artistic intention of the filmmakers involved. Even so, it was hard for us to leave the Evil Bong off our final list, if for no other reason than that she might be the strangest (and dumbest) killer object in horror movie history.

For the uninitiated, Eebee the Evil Bong (voiced by Michele Mais) is exactly what she sounds like: a cursed smoking device that kills those who use it through marijuana-induced hallucinations. Creator Charles Band is fully aware that this franchise is ridiculous, and he makes each entry to inspire laughs rather than genuine scares. Still, it’s perhaps the aim to make something “so bad it’s good” that makes Eebee significantly less endearing than her equally ludicrous peers in more earnest films.

As actor Johnathon Schaech described it to RealTV, “Prom Night” is “about a guy who is madly in love with a woman, and she left him, and he’s fighting to get her back.” While obviously ironic, this mindset appears to be how Schaech approached the role of Richard Fenton, the killer who stalks prom-goers in the 2008 reboot. The “That Thing You Do!” star took the role very seriously, desiring to ground him in reality by studying thrillers and pulling inspiration from books about Ted Bundy. His primary goal was seemingly to portray Richard as something other than a simple monster.

Although the slasher subgenre benefits from solid character writing like films of any other kind, it doesn’t lend itself well to such understated villains. Despite Schaech’s committed portrayal, Richard is a boring and often unbelievable foe who’s too predictable to be exciting and too contrived and cartoonishly written to be as chilling as someone real like Bundy.

As Hollywood raided its IP toy chest to find which action figures, dolls, and board games it can turn into bankable blockbuster franchises, Universal Pictures found “Ouija.” The 2014 film uses the board from the Hasbro game to tell a bland ghost story that follows tired horror movie tropes to the letter. This includes shoehorning a creepy little kid into the plot as the film’s antagonist, even if the filmmakers seemingly don’t have an idea of how to make them stand out from the sea of similar horror villains that came before them. For “Ouija,” this character archetype is represented by Doris Zander (Sierra Heuermann and Sunny May Allison), a young girl who likes to sew mouths shut. The film attempts to conceal her transparent evilness as long as possible, but the twist can be seen coming from a mile away for anyone unfortunate enough to be paying close attention to the plot.

All that being said, don’t let the Doris of “Ouija” scare you away from giving its prequel a chance. When we first heard about “Ouija: Origin of Evil” we were total skeptics, but our fears were mostly quelled as soon as the first trailer was released. These days, it’s no surprise that director Mike Flanagan would deliver a horror hit even from the backfoot, creating a more terrifying and atmospheric follow-up that makes much better use of Doris, now played by Lulu Wilson. 

“He was great,” Wilson said in an interview with Rama’s Screen. “…[S]ometimes when you’re shooting a scene, it’s not scary, but he made it so it feels like you’re really in the moment. You’re really living in this house and I’m really possessed and it made it feel so real.” Wilson and Flanagan almost redeem Doris through their work in “Origin of Evil,” but the “twist” of “Ouija” is still too by-the-letters to forgive.

There are cases in which an otherwise decent horror movie (at least by the fluctuating and uniquely objective standards of the horror genre) features a surprisingly underwhelming villain. Indeed, one could soundly argue that the 2014 film “Unfriended” is an underappreciated gem that successfully launched a modern artistic movement in the form of the screenlife subgenre. Producer and pioneer Timur Bekmambetov had been obsessed with the idea of telling a story entirely on the screen of a computer before developing “Unfriended,” only settling on the idea of exploring this through the horror genre after consulting director Leo Gabriadze and writer Nelson Greaves.

This wasn’t necessarily a bad move on paper (or screen?), but the limitations of Bekmambetov’s filmmaking principles constrain the potential of the film’s ghostly antagonist Laura Barns (known also by her screen name, billie227). Played by Heather Sossaman, Laura is a largely unseen but no less vengeful spirit haunting the Skype call of her former classmates, some of whom bear responsibility for her tragic (and hauntingly viral) death by suicide. Her presence manifests through the actions of others, as she forces them to do horrific things on camera for their friends to see.

While this does create a few terrifying and unexpectedly composed scenes, the rules of screenlife prevent Laura’s presence from ever escalating in a satisfying way, making each of her kills feel like the director hitting the same key on a keyboard. The filmmakers seemingly felt this as well, as they end the film by breaking the defining rule of screenlife — that all action takes place on a screen — for a jump scare that sees Laura appear in a character’s room. In hindsight, it makes sense that Bekmambetov was able to better explore screenlife through thrillers like “Searching” and “Profile,” rather than a genre like horror which often demands a compelling villain to drive its action.

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Leading up to the release of the 2017 film “Wish Upon,” comparisons were already being made between it and the “Final Destination” franchise. In both projects, a group of characters are stalked by a mostly invisible villain — a Yaogui spirit in “Wish Upon” and Death itself in the latter — who kills their victims in ways that make the death appear accidental. The difference between them comes down to the specifics of the deaths in these films and the creative philosophies of the filmmakers behind them.

Speaking to Desde Hollywood about his jump from cinematography to film directing, “Wish Upon” filmmaker John R. Leonetti explained that his naturalistic approach to image composition would lend itself well to horror storytelling. “In order to scare people, you have to make it believable,” he said. This might be true, but it betrays a misunderstanding of what films like “Wish Upon” and “Final Destination” should be. Both share an equal lack of dramatic credibility, compelling writing, and an imposing on-screen antagonist, but the latter makes up for this greatly by sentencing its characters to deaths so creative in their execution (no pun intended) that they can elicit all manner of reactions from shock and horror to outright laughter.

The Yaogui of “Wish Upon” has no such creativity, instead reducing its accidents to more “believable” mishaps that feel less realistic than they do slapstick (in one death, an old man bonks his head too hard on a faucet trying to sit up; in another a woman’s comically long ponytail gets stuck in a garbage disposal — somehow snapping her neck, because bone is weaker than hair in this universe). Even an invisible villain has the potential to be memorable through their actions, but expecting the Yaogui to achieve half of what “Final Destination” does is wishful thinking.

To some extent, it’s kind of always too late to make a movie about a viral phenomenon like the “Slender Man” urban legend. A film studio will never be faster than the internet. The ultra low-budget independent YouTube web series “Marble Hornets” had already successfully dramatized the character’s abstract horror for millions online, so much so that their subject had arguably run out of mystique by the time they got the budget to make and theatrically release a feature film in 2015. By 2017, it wouldn’t have taken eight pages to explain the climate — the writing was already on the wall that Slender Man was a dead fad.

That wouldn’t stop The Weinstein Company and STX Entertainment from barrelling forward with “The Bye Bye Man,” an adaptation of a short story by Robert Damon Schneck that pretty much turns his work into a blatant Slender Man knock-off. They even cast Doug Jones — who had previously played Slender Man in “Always Watching” — as the titular villain, though they may have been hoping that the legendary creature-feature performer would be able to imbue the character with spookiness surely missing from the film’s plodding screenplay. Both he and director Stacy Title were intrigued by the psychological nature of the Bye Bye Man’s torture, as he infects the minds of those who speak and/or think of him and forces them to hallucinate in ways that compel them to harm others and themselves.

Sadly, the unimaginative depiction of this concept results in the Bye Bye Man essentially outsourcing everything that could be scary or threatening about himself to other characters (usually by way of some horrendous CGI). He’s given little to do beyond stand in dark corners and occasionally teleport around to beg for a jump scare from the audience. If you’re looking for a boogeyman villain to enjoy, you’d be better off giving “The Empty Man” a chance and waving “The Bye Bye Man” a swift farewell.

Jeff Wadlow has an interesting reputation as a filmmaker. Though he burst onto the scene with “Never Back Down” – one of the best (if admittedly only) MMA movies ever made — he has staked a claim as writer-director for some bafflingly empty horror movies in the action and horror genres. Shortly after the Disney-Fox deal trashed his “X-Force” trilogy (probably a good thing, considering how “Bloodshot” turned out), Wadlow was given the keys to “Fantasy Island,” a feature film prequel to the ’70s-’80s TV series. It starred Lucy Hale of “Pretty Little Liars” fame, who had also previously worked with Wadlow on “Truth or Dare.” The 2018 horror flick turned out to be a new low for production company Blumhouse, but it apparently earned Wadlow Hale’s unwavering loyalty. “Jeff is the hardest working man in Hollywood,” she told Brief Take in 2020. “I’m just indebted to him because [he’s] given me not only one but two shots at taking on characters I’ve never played before.”

The second shot she’s referring to is Melanie Cole in “Fantasy Island,” a woman who is revealed to have orchestrated the film’s events to avenge the death of a man she barely knew. Why is she willing to sentence several strangers to fantastical deaths for a random guy? Because she’s crazy in the way women often are in movies carelessly written by dudes, and for some reason, she fell in love with someone who she had only met once. On the night their first real “date” was scheduled, the man died in a fire she blames on the rest of the cast. As far as character motivations go, Melanie’s couldn’t get much lamer, and having this reveal be the end point of a truly soulless slog like “Fantasy Island” just adds insult to injury.

It brings us no joy to include the product of a low-budget, independent film like “Winnie-the-Pooh: Blood and Honey.” Seeing this project through, even as a humorless bloodbath, surely took a massive amount of effort and filmmaking skill. That said, much of “Blood and Honey” belies the unfortunate and arguably cynical motivations for embarking on this production in the first place, as made unavoidably offensive by its titular villain.

“Blood and Honey” was born from the copyright to the original “Winnie-the-Pooh” stories (not the Disney films, notably) fell into the public domain, which would allow any enterprising filmmaker to instantly give their product brand recognition by way of a little bit of free intellectual property. This would be all fine and good if the creative minds behind “Blood and Honey” genuinely had an interesting take on Pooh and his friends beyond slapping his name on a poster for a cheap cash grab. Given that Pooh ultimately winds up looking like a guy in a cheap Halloween mask and is plopped into a generic slasher (which visually rips off so many modern horror films it’s almost dizzying), it’s hard to make an argument for the purity of the film’s intentions.

We will give credit where it’s due and acknowledge that Pooh does get a massive physical upgrade for the sequel, with the filmmakers seemingly using their increased budget to hire talent capable of executing the human-animal hybrid look they were after. This makeover only amounts to a skilled polishing of the first film’s honey-soaked refuse. With no personality, backstory, or even gimmick to commend, the Winnie-the-Pooh of “Blood and Honey” is annoyingly bland. Unfortunately for us, he’s inspired a slew of public domain cash grab villains just like him.

The American remake of the cult Japanese horror film “One Missed Call” has always deserved recognition for being one of the worst horror remakes of all time. When we first saw it back in 2008, we could tell it was in for a rough reception from the critical community. But while its boring plot, lack of stakes, awful characters, and dull kills have received plenty of well-deserved venom over the 15-plus years since its release, the film’s villain rarely gets counted among its deadly missteps.

Ellie Layton (dutifully played by future “Modern Family” star Ariel Winter) is a dead child-psychopath who kills people by calling them, leaving a voicemail recording of their death, and then… somehow seemingly orchestrating some lame, “Wish Upon”-level “Final Destination” deaths. This is all because she was accidentally killed by her mother who locked her in a room without her asthma inhaler after she was caught literally torturing her sister. All of Ellie’s victims vomit candy after they die because Ellie used to give her sister candy after she was finished — the kind of dark and disturbing detail that could be interesting if the film did anything more to develop Ellie as a character. In the absence of such development, Ellie is a Frankenstein of cliches carrying a film that we’ll happily leave on read.

An update of the Bloody Mary urban legend for the internet age, “Smiley” is a supposedly online-fluent horror movie that tackles cyberbullying in the same way your boomer uncle might if he was also pathologically obsessed with remaking “Scream.” This sad fact is embodied by the film’s masked killer, a horror villain so thoughtless in creation and execution that not even the young people involved with the film can justify it.

Talking about “Smiley,” star Caitlin Gerard told AMC:

“There’s an amount of anonymity involved in internet bullying that kind of distances the attacker from the victim… which is kind of what ‘Smiley’ talks about. There is the anonymity behind who Smiley is, and that’s what Ashley [Gerard’s character] gets in trouble with. She can’t figure it out, she wants to figure it out so badly but can’t. And, you know, [cyberbullying] is a very serious issue because it’s not blatant, it’s not at school being pushed around. It’s done in this subtle, kind of hidden way that makes it really difficult to… talk about in a physical sense when it’s happening in this viral world.” 

Gerard’s perspective is compelling, credible, and at completely odds with anything that happens in “Smiley.” The film either lacks the interest or intellect required to engage with cyberbullying in a way that could be scary, so it reverses the unique dynamic Gerard describes to turn a virtual issue into a boring knock-off of the “Scream” killer. They even steal the twist of Smiley being more than one person, insultingly casting them as a collective affiliated with the real hacker-activist group Anonymous. 

Had anyone involved with “Smiley” done research into their subject beyond, presumably, reading the Wikipedia pages for Anonymous and 4chan, they would have found their premise immediately stumped by the fact that the former group is largely concerned with hacking corporations and governments — not, y’know, doing real-life murders for pranks. For showing such obvious, arrogant disdain for creative originality and reality at large, the Smiley Killers are by far the worst horror movie villains of all time.