Intro –
- From creepy enemies in games that aren’t made for horror to full on nightmare fuel that will haunt you for the rest of your life, we count 15 monsters that will dye your pants a shade of brown.
15 – The Flood – Halo Series,
- In a game about a big burly dude with a holographic naked lady killing aliens it was a pleasant surprise to find the Flood hidden in the game and by pleasant I of course mean unnerving and as creepy as my uncle’s ball sack.
- The Flood don’t just have a grotesque look that breathes fresh air into the stagnation that is zombies, but they also have the benefit of being an organism that ended a civilisation much greater than ours.
- Of course none of this is more than Chief can handle, even on legendary difficulty they’re far from the hardest enemies to kill, thus detracting significantly from their overall scariness.
14 – Gaping Dragon – Dark Souls,
- Dragons are the bread and butter of fantasy, but this abomination with way too many teeth had me tempted to turn the console off and take a walk outside.
- But when that moment passed I quickly realised that the boss was actually one of the easiest bosses in the game thanks to its slow and predictable move-set.
- Which is a total shame since the artists did such a good job of crafting an enemy that can only be described as horrifying.
13 – Head Crabs – Half Life Series,
- STD puns aside, these things are creepy, alien in the best kind of way and have a fast enough speed that you really don’t want to have to deal with them.
- Not only that but the moans humans make when they’re being controlled by them can be heard to say ‘Help me’ when reversed in an audio editing program, giving the not so subtle indication that their victims are very much conscious of the pain and horror they’re going through.
12 – Clickers – The Last of Us,
- Originality in horror goes a long way and while a fungus controlling a person is creepy, if you don’t do it right they’re just going to feel like any other zombie/infected.
- Which is pretty much the case for all the other fungal enemies in this game except for the clicker, they’re quick, basically invincible, deformed and most importantly: blind.
- To make up for this they make clicking noises to use echolocation like a bat does, which makes for a cool and creepy way to add stealth and is also surprisingly believable as some blind people actually use this to find their way.
11 – Slender Man – Slender,
- To be honest, Slender isn’t a very good game, but the mythos of the internet created Slender Man carried it to reach enough notoriety for let’s players to make the creator a bunch of money.
- And let’s face it, the story behind him is cool, the character is creepy, mysterious and one of the last things you’d want to meet in a forest at night.
- If they used the version with the much cooler tentacles old slendy would be much higher on the list and closer to my heart.
10 – Necromorphs – Dead Space,
- Dead Space has a bit too much action to be a real survival horror game, but luckily the atmosphere and design makes it plenty creepy enough, this is aided heavily by the bloodied corpses made of car crash corpses and children’s screams.
- And when I say car crash corpses I’m not going for a random descriptor, the creators of the game actually used photos of mangled bodies from the wreckage of automobile accidents as study and reference material.
- Either these guys went home disturbed and needed therapy or they were already fucked up to begin with, but the net result is a disgusting and macabre enemy that fits the mood perfectly.
9 – Animatronics – Five Nights at Freddy series,
- When you get right down to it, it doesn’t make much sense to give the supposedly for children’s amusement animatronics several rows of razor sharp teeth, unless your idea of amusement is stuffing corpses of children into your robotics.
- The first game didn’t make the furry robots very creepy and without the jump scares they wouldn’t have actually been frightening for anyone but those with a phobia.
- However, later entries in the series really upped the pissed-pants factor by making them more dilapidated and hellish looking to the point where you might as well give them visible brains.
8 – Lickers – Resident Evil Series,
- Speaking of visible brains, these guys will tear yours out through your nose and wear them as a hat, well not really but they do actually have brains on the outside.
- Also no eyes, but they don’t seem to have any difficulty finding you; maybe their tongues have little eyes on them.
- Either way since Resident Evil 2 is a game where even a slow moving zombie can hand your ass to you and there’s limited saves the lickers will make you sweat whenever you notice them before they notice you.