Horror cinema is filled with iconic characters. The criteria for a great horror movie character isn’t exactly clear. They can be a “final girl,” like Laurie Strode or Sally Hardesty. They can be a protagonist who is turned into an antagonist by demonic forces, like Jack Torrance or Regan MacNeil.
They can be a terrifying villain, like Freddy Krueger or Michael Myers or Leatherface or Jason Voorhees or Norman Bates (this is clearly the most common type). The 2010s have brought a new wave of thought-provoking, beautifully made horror movies, and a bunch of iconic new characters have come with them. So, here are The 10 Best New Horror Movie Characters Of The Decade, Ranked.
The Crypt Creeper (Gerald’s Game)
In filmmaking, trends come and go. There used to be a lot of westerns before they went out of style. Now, there’s an abundance of superhero movies and they’ll eventually go out of style. But one thing we can always count on staying popular is film adaptations of Stephen King stories.
Gerald’s Game opens with a married couple heading to a cabin in the woods to rekindle the spark in their romance. The husband handcuffs the wife to the bed, and then promptly dies of a heart attack, leaving his wife chained up in the middle of nowhere. Over the next few days, she gets terrorized by “Moonlight Man,” or “the Crypt Creeper.”
Ed and Lorraine Warren (The Conjuring franchise)
James Wan’s The Conjuring launched the first successful cinematic universe since Marvel’s. The mainline series revolves around the paranormal investigations carried out by Ed and Lorraine Warren. They have a museum filled with potential spin-offs in their house, and a history of potential sequels in their actual lives.
The Warrens are a real-life couple who exorcized demons and un-haunted haunted houses for decades. Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga have brought the characters to the screen in spectacular fashion. Horror fans will keep watching Conjuring movies for years. The third movie, currently in post-production, will see the duo tackle a werewolf in the ‘80s.
The Blind Man (Don’t Breathe)
One of the greatest horror directors to emerge in the past decade is Fede Álvarez. The “home invasion” thriller has been done to death, but Álvarez put a fresh spin on it with his movie Don’t Breathe by making the people breaking into the house the protagonists and making the guy who lives in the house the antagonist.
At first, a couple of crooks think that breaking into an old blind man’s house and robbing him will be easy. However, before too long, the Blind Man shows them how sharp his other senses are when he starts shooting at them. And what they find in his basement is truly horrifying. It ruined turkey basters for millions of moviegoers.
Regan Abbott (A Quiet Place)
John Krasinski successfully shook his “Jim Halpert” persona when he directed, co-wrote, and starred as Lee Abbott in the masterfully made horror-thriller A Quiet Place. It’s set in a post-apocalyptic world filled with bloodthirsty aliens that respond to sound. Anyone who makes a peep is seconds away from being violently ravaged.
In a movie where no one can make a sound, Lee’s deaf daughter Regan (played by actually deaf actress Millicent Simmonds) is the most important character. Her hearing aid is the key to saving the day. A Quiet Place isn’t literally a silent movie, but Krasinski did find plenty of terror in a lack of sound.
Black Phillip (The Witch)
Robert Eggers’ bleak, haunting chiller The Witch – or, The VVitch, as it was stylized on all the posters – was so effective that it made a goat scary. At the beginning of the movie, a New England family gets kicked out of their village due to religious persecution and they end up living in a farmhouse in the middle of nowhere.
One day, their baby is abducted outside some nearby woods during a game of peekaboo, and it becomes ominously apparent that the family is being terrorized by a witch. Black Phillip is the instantly iconic goat featured in the movie.
Him (mother!)
In the closing credits for Darren Aronofsky’s polarizing horror opus mother!, Javier Bardem’s character “Him” is the only name with a capitalized letter in it. Even the title, mother!, is all in lower case. As a cinematic critique of the patriarchy told through a Biblical allegory, mother! was a lot for some mainstream viewers to take in.
But there’s a niche of arthouse buffs – including Martin Scorsese – that loved it. The case could be made that the movie’s most interesting character is really the house, but Javier Bardem’s brooding, wistful, hot-tempered pastiche of the Christian God is a close second.
Chris Washington (Get Out)
The 2010s have brought a wave of visionary auteurs bringing top-caliber filmmaking craft to the generally schlocky horror genre to pioneer so-called “elevated horror” – from Robert Eggers to Ari Astor – but arguably, the sharpest new voice to emerge in horror cinema in the past decade is Jordan Peele. His directorial debut, Get Out, will be talked about for years to come.
Its lead protagonist, Chris Washington, is that rare horror protagonist that the director actually bothers to make you care about. Over the course of Get Out, we delve deep into Chris’ psyche. Chris is a subversion of the archetypal horror protagonist: he’s smart, he notices when something’s up, and he desperately wants to leave the scary place.
Pennywise (It)
Pennywise the Dancing Clown isn’t technically a “new” horror character, because Stephen King published the novel that It is based on in 1986 and Tim Curry first brought him to the screen in a TV miniseries that aired in 1990.
However, in Andy Muschietti’s 2017 film adaptation and its 2019 sequel, Bill Skarsgård made the role of Pennywise his own. He did a fantastic job of flitting between regular clowning and sinister villainy. All he had to do was straighten his smile and intensify his eyes and he’d go from goofy to terrifying. And he can actually do that thing with his eyes in real life.
Annie Graham (Hereditary)
A lot of fans felt that the Academy snubbed Toni Collette last year when they didn’t give her a Best Actress nod for her turn as Annie Graham in Hereditary. Termed this generation’s The Exorcist by critics who praised it, Hereditary is one of the greatest horror films in recent memory.
While there are pagan cults and demonic forces at play, the real horror is the downfall of the family unit. Annie loses her mother, then she loses her daughter, and then she and her surviving family members get targeted by a supernatural cult. She really gets put through the ringer in this movie.
Red (Us)
The shocking plot twist at the end of Us reveals that Adelaide was really a Tethered clone who swapped herself out and stole a spot in the real world, so Red was the real human. Jordan Peele wanted us to question the concept of “the good guys” and “the bad guys” in fictional stories, but it goes even deeper than that.
Red joins a long line of villains who are really victims (Erik Killmonger, Roy Batty, Gollum, King Kong, Angelina Jolie’s recent incarnation of Maleficent etc.). Red might be the antagonist in Us, because she organized the nationwide massacre of surface-dwelling humans, but from her perspective, she was in the right.