The Best Horror Movie Characters of All Time

There's a popular theory that attempts to explain why we love horror movies called "The Beast Within." According to this theory, there's "an unconscious, repressed part of every human is actually savage; that the veneer of civility is very thin, and beneath that is essentially a monster ... although we consciously disapprove of what the monster is doing, deep down part of us enjoys seeing the murder and mayhem the monster unleashes—because if we could, we would do that.”

That's a pretty dark way of looking at a movie genre, but it does come with the horror territory. And it also explains why we can so deeply identify with both horror movie villains and the heroes. For every survivor you're rooting for, there's also a ghost or a maniac wielding a sharp object that we understand. On its surface, the genre is a fight between good and evil, but in the best horror films those lines are blurred. Like we're looking into a horrifying mirror of our own reality.

That's where this list comes in: a rundown of the best horror characters, whether they were being chased or doing the chasing. From Georges Méliès's first depiction of the Devil in Le Manoir du diable to Ma, from the movie Ma, these are the humans, animals, ghouls, and shape-shifting interdimensional evil entities that we love.