The Most Terrifying Monster We Can Imagine

The Lich: “FALL. ” …I must have been five or six,  when, at a sleepover, a friend asked me: “what’s the scariest monster you can think of? ” My mind  raced for the answer — even back then I thought of myself as ‘the creature expert’ — but nothing  felt big enough, mean enough, scary enough.

Another friend turned to us, and whispered, do you  know what I think it is? There is a shadow lurking across cultures. An eternal struggle to depict  ultimate evil.

How can we, with our limited means of comprehension and storytelling, portray true  darkness, make fear physical? What is the face of ‘the most terrifying monster we can fathom? ’  “I’m in love with Miss Connie Francis…” There are two fundamental problems we need to  confront to determine the scariest monster: the problem of evil (1.

Evil! ) and the problem of  fear (2. Fear!

). Both abstract concepts are widely understood, but difficult to concretely visualize.  Let’s start with evil: Depicting a cruel action is simple enough, but imagining a physical embodiment  of evil itself is deceptively challenging.

For centuries, visual media has employed different  methods to try and make a figure feel like darkness incarnate — from early tricks of  light and shadow to modern VFXs. The most common shorthand is to simply copy the appearance  of. .

. the guy. You know the one.

“Of course, they’re all manner of lesser imps and demons, but  the great Satan itself is red and scaly with a bifurcated tail and he carries a hayfork. ” But if  all it took to make a convincing epitome of evil was a red cape and pointy horns, Halloween would  be a lot scarier. Just because a narrative tells you that what you’re looking at is the ‘lord of  all malice,’ doesn’t necessarily mean you believe it.

Creating a figure that viscerally personifies  evil is not just a question of visuals, but characterization — after all, ‘cruelty’ is not  an aesthetic, so much as a behavior. One of the most important landmarks in portraying wickedness  on-screen comes from ‘Night on Bald Mountain,’ an unshackled vision of demonic terror whose central  evil deity is not only a perfect foreboding silhouette, but a remarkably spiteful and sadistic  creature — using its unfathomable power to create life for the sole purpose of gleefully watching  its creations struggle to cling to their pitiful existence. The macabre circus of agony this  demon appoints itself ringleader of feels sprung to life from centuries of paintings of  the demonic inferno.

The demon of ‘Bald Mountain’ could be considered a benchmark of evil in both  characterization and appearance — its twisted psyche looming just as large as its physical form.  But notice I said ‘could be considered’ — see, it’s difficult to empirically measure evil beyond  subjective feeling. Most philosophies recognize two major categories of unkindness — ‘Moral Evil,’  which is the result of intentional actions, and ‘Natural Evil,’ which is the result of impersonal  phenomena.

And notably, most people find the former to be more evil than the later, regardless  of scale — Norman Bates from Psycho can’t level a city like Godzilla, but he nonetheless feels  crueler because of the conscious thought behind his misdeeds. Whether this is objectively true  could be a subject of boundless philosophical debate, but for the purpose of this video,  let’s just roll with it and define evil as ‘bad intentions’ multiplied by ‘cruel actions. ’ So now  we, seemingly, have the formula for determining the ‘ultimate monster’: find the entity that’s  done the worst things for the meanest reasons, and we’ve got the winner, right?

Well, no so  fast, because we’ve forgotten the second half of our quandary, the question of FEAR! And just  because something is more unethical, doesn’t inherently mean we’ll be more frightened of it.  Consider the two dark gods from Adventure Time, Hudson Abadeer and the Lich.

Hudson rules over  a plane of eternal agony — a sadistic layer-cake of nightmares seemingly designed to torment an  infinite amount of people for an infinite amount of time. It is hades and hell and, like, the  DMV all rolled into one, “okay bozos, make room, make room, make room! ” And considering that Hudson  has set the realm up this way because… he thinks it’s funny, from a philosophical standpoint he’s  just about the peak of moral evil.

In contrast, the Lich’s plan to extinguish all life is cold and  dispassionate — obviously not a nice thing to do, but his motivations are likened to that  of an unfeeling machine. Next to Hudson, he is not as traditionally immoral… and yet as  anyone who has seen this series can tell you, the Lich is far scarier. “There is only darkness  for you, and only death for your people!

” Fear is more than an equation: it is a primal, irrational  instinct. Were we beings of perfect logic, then perhaps the more ethically corrupt something  was, the more we’d quake in our boots, but that’s not how our brains work. Hudson’s domain of  fiery suffering might be less principled than the Lich’s icy oblivion — but it isn’t as  frightening.

That we might find a frigid, calculating evil more menacing than a firestorm  of cruelty is not a recent psychological phenomenon. In Dante’s Inferno, a 14th century  narrative poem, the very heart of hell is cold, a vast frozen realm robbed of passion and light —  its agonies slow and carefully-measured. You see this idea echoed in the book series ‘A Song of  Ice and Fire,’ where the most terrifying threat to the realm aren’t the fires of human conflict  but the icy machinations of the enigmatic Others, beings whose rotting fingers are steadily creeping  across the world’s throat.

In the adaptation ‘Game of Thrones,’ the Others are ruled by the demonic  Night King, a figure who, after eight seasons of ominous build up and compounding mysteries,  was revealed to be a… stupid and uncalculating bad-guy. Some would argue this was a terrible  decision — by which I mean me; I’m arguing it was terrible — but before the curtain lifted to reveal  a generic villain, there was something gripping about the Night King’s glacial maneuverings, a  terrifying sense of an intelligence colder and more callous than any human consciousness.  Monstrous evil envisioned not as a raging brute but a subtle intellect has, to me, always  been the more disturbing interpretation.

‘The Witcher’ series pushes this concept to the extreme  with Gaunter O’Dimm — a nightmarish figure who, despite possessing near-infinite power, at first  seems unassuming and even forgettable in this world of titanic dragons and giants. O’Dimm  is an egoless and patient malice, content to make the world his plaything through the smallest  contracts and adjustments. He may very well be the Devil of this realm — after all, ol’ pointy-horns  is often shown working through manipulative deals and temptations.

The Strange Man of the game  ‘Red Dead: Redemption’ operates under similar principles — he’s an all-knowing chronicle  of sins and taker of souls, who nonetheless describes himself as an accountant, completing  his grim task with the utmost calm. As is the case in the Witcher, whether the Strange Man is  the Devil itself or some other being is wisely left up to interpretation. Unlike the Night King,  these entities retain their unknowable gravitas, never lifting the veil upon their true nature,  “What are you?

” “Do you really wish to know? ” “Yes. ” “No, Geralt, you don’t.

” Despite only  ever revealing a small glimpse of their power, both figures feel hopelessly beyond the scope  of the player’s influence, forces that can be neither slain, halted, nor understood. “Damn you! ”  “Yes.

Many have. ” That the most menacing monster may well be a secretive, subtle figure might  seem counter-intuitive — surely the greater the scale of on-screen horror, the greater the  impact? Yet as I’ve discussed in past videos, beyond a certain threshold of destruction, it  is increasingly difficult to take devastation seriously.

A villain blowing up the universe is,  generally, less scary than a villain blowing up a building, because our minds can much more easily  quantify the latter. Out of every villain in the Avatar series, the least menacing is probably  Vaatu from Legend of Korra — even though he’s an all-powerful embodiment of darkness. Though  the stakes have theoretically never been higher, there is something about the dark spirit that  is impossible to take seriously — and it’s not just the fact that he looks like an evil kite. 

Whenever a threat is so massive it’s difficult to mentally encompass, it ironically makes the  stakes seem smaller — villainy on a cosmic scale, perhaps unsurprisingly, struggles to be intimately  scary. So perhaps the most terrifying monster would be a hushed whisper of cruelty, an evil so  understated that it sinks into your bones before you feel the first discomfort. Such a nightmare  stalks the bleak landscapes of the Polish film ‘Diabeł’ — a man cloaked in black known simply  as ‘The Stranger’ who urges the lead character to indulge in his darkest impulses.

What makes  this depiction of evil unforgettable is how The Stranger seems almost feeble throughout most of  the narrative, showing fear and weakness like any mortal human would. Despite the fact that he  reveals his true cold malice in the first scene, despite the fact that the film’s title literally  translates to ‘The Devil’ — The Stranger is such an unassuming and delicate instrument of darkness  you find yourself second guessing your first instinct to his true identity. “Could it beeeee…?

”  But with a hypothetical as extreme as ‘The Scariest Monster,’ one understandably might want a  portrayal that is both subtle and almighty — equal parts personal and gargantuan. At a glance,  the principal antagonist of the manga Fullmetal Alchemist certainly has the gargantuan side down,  considering his plan is to — spoiler alert — eat god, and become a new kind of divine patriarch.  ‘Father’ — and that’s his official name, not ‘Thou Father,’ simply Father, is exactly the kind of  villain that on paper sounds too big to instill proper stakes — and yet as the name suggests,  Father simultaneously embodies one of the most familiar and disquieting terrors: that of a cruel  parent.

Father was once a more child-like being who violently rebelled against his creators when  they sought to control him: a twisted relationship Father continues with his own children, whom he  regards as little more than disposable material— perpetuating a cycle of divine misery recognizable  to anyone familiar with classical mythology. Intergenerational violence across pantheons  holds particular relevance for devilish figures, who tend to be once-angelic figures cast down  due to conflict with their creators. Father echoes such narrative traditions not just in  his conflict with his makers and his children, but in his disturbing resemblance to the actual  biological father of the main characters — a figure who abandoned them at a young age.

To the  protagonists, Father therefore represents a threat both impossibly cosmic and uncomfortably personal,  a paradoxical nightmare that successfully embodies opposing extremes of monster-hood. The horrors of  familial dysfunction are an effective method for grounding a larger terror in more intimate dread.  In many respects, all the gruesome deities in the realms of Elden Ring are the product of a broken  family-unit, each pantheon member wronged by at least one other in some sickening manner — and  made all the more terrifying for it.

Elden Ring features such a malicious cosmology that it’s  at first difficult to identify which figure is the zenith of cruelty — with promising candidates  including the God-Devouring Serpent of Blasphemy, Mohg the Lord of Blood, the Loathsome Dung Eater,  and other insanely named fellows. But it is the ‘Shadow of the Erdtree DLC’ that offers the most  obvious candidate for a demonic frontrunner, in the borderline-Luciferian ‘Messmer  the Impaler. ’ A violent god-child whose name is unfortunately quite apt, Messmer  seems this world’s prince of darkness, complete with an unsubtle serpent motif — and yet  he, too, is ultimately a victim of divine parental mistreatment.

It’s implied that Messmer is but a  tool for his creator deity — a tool discarded to rust after outliving his usefulness. For Messmer,  like all his broken siblings, is rotting — the entire divine household slowly dimming away,  succumbing to a cold deterioration which even the mightiest evil figures seem weak in the face  of. That the apex of darkness might be in any way vulnerable — to the whims of a parent or the slow  decay of time — may seem like a novel concept, but classical mythologies have long held that there  are forces more frightening than any manifestation of evil.

In Greek mythology, the ultimate monster  is arguably Typhon, the father of all foul creatures — yet his story ends with him taken by  the frigid hands of the underworld, trapped beyond the veil for all eternity. A similar fate befalls  Chronos, greatest of the Titans and OG terrible godly parent — yet his time in the sun eventually  runs out, as it might for the lowliest mortal. Even the strongest evil may cower when faced with  an ending.

The Lich of Adventure Time, one of the first monsters I remember shivering at the sight  of, seems to tremble himself when faced with the true finality of death. In a universe where he  succeeds in annihilating all living things, The Lich is left broken and despondent — frightened  by the meaningless of the oblivion that awaits us all. “I strove to be your vassal on the physical  plane.

To extinguish all life. And in my universe, this I achieved! …But it gave me no satisfaction.

”  Every monster discussed so far could be considered an agent of the same force: they are all bringers  of death, dispensers of endings — but they aren’t death itself. Death, with a capital ‘D,’ shall  we say — is a concept that’s been personified numerous ways across cultures, sometimes as merely  a messenger or middle-man. But there’s another way of imagining Death that’s more chilling than  perhaps any conventional ‘ultimate monstrosity.

’ “Who are you? ” “I am Death. ” “Have you come for  me?

” “I have long walked by your side. ” Ingmar Bergman’s 1957 masterpiece ‘The Seventh  Seal’ tells the story of a knight who returns home from the Crusades to find his  home overwhelmed with the Bubonic Plague, and at the crossroads of war and illness, Death  itself waits for him. Seeking to delay his fate, the knight challenges Death to a chess match, all  the while begging Death to answer questions about the nature of life, evil, and bereavement. 

Yet death offers no comfort — its uncaring void swallowing all cries for meaning screamed  into the dark. Death in ‘The Seventh Seal’ does not even seem to be a deity in the traditional  sense, just a rule of the universe, a steady hand that closes the book on every story. “Then  life is a senseless horror.

No man can live faced with death, knowing everything’s nothingness. ”  Perhaps it’s unsurprising that Death has been imagined as the ultimate villain — after all,  fear of death is likely the most fundamental fear we possess. Our abject horror towards cessation  has led us to monster-ify numerous figures associated with the concept.

Most adaptations  of Greek Mythology make Hades out to be the bad guy closely aligned with demonic imagery,  despite the fact that original-recipe Hades was a pretty alright dude compared to his siblings —  and also wasn’t even the god of death. But it’s hard to imagine a keeper of fallen souls to be  anything other than evil, or, at the very least, absolutely terrifying. In the film ‘Puss in Boots:  The Last Wish,’ Death is far more intimidating than you might expect from a movie about a talking  cat — a lupine hunter that revels in the terror of its prey.

This incarnation of death has a vengeful  quality, gleefully overstepping the bounds of its station to reap lives it deems unworthy. That  Death might relish its task is a discomforting concept mirrored in ‘The Seventh Seal,’ as despite  its unknowable persona, that incarnation, too, seems to find grim amusement in playing  with people’s hopes for escape. In fact, while Death in ‘Puss in Boots’ at least somewhat  follows a code of honor, Death in ‘The Seventh Seal’ is eager to cheat if it means winning the  grand game against the living.

It is the monster at the end of all things. It has no reason to play  fair. But Death need not be an active villain to chill you to the bone.

In Alan Holly’s brilliant  animated short film ‘Coda,’ Death is a quiet, gentle figure that appears after a man’s sudden  passing. Unlike most personifications, they seek to comfort the confused soul, even walking with  them through their memories as a way of easing their passage. And yet Death in ‘Coda’ is no less  existentially daunting, a force that cannot be outrun or dissuaded.

“Are you going to kill me?  No. You’re already dead.

” Whether death comes in gentle or with tremendous force, it is the great  unifying certainty, the end credits for all who walk the Earth. What monster could hold a candle  to such perfect darkness? The difficulty with making assertions about ‘The Most Terrifying  Monster we can Fathom’ … is that it’s almost impossible to escape the pattern of “Yeah, but?

”  Yeah, the prince of the underworld might be the obvious winner of the scariest guy competition,  but are they really as unsetting as an intimate malice? Yeah, an intimate malice might more easily  get under your skin, but is it as existentially powerful as Death itself? Yeah, Death from ‘The  Seventh Seal’ might be the creepiest performance of all time, but doesn’t he also kinda look like  he’s got a sock on his head?

For any monster you might envision, it seems someone else will  always come up with one they consider scarier. I feel like ‘The Legend of Zelda’ series  has been stuck in this pattern for a while, entertainingly trying to introduce bigger and  darker versions of the biggest, darkest evil. This escalation has actually followed an arc  similar to the structure of this video, going from more classically devilish figures  like Ganondorf and Demise, to the latest entry featuring a manifestation of silent entropy known  as Null.

Despite appearing in one of the lighter titles tonally, Null is one of the most foreboding  entities in the series, a primordial void of death and decay. But whether or not such a force is more  menacing than the other dark gods of the series, ultimately comes down to individual inclination.  I personally find a cosmic void to be scarier than anything that might slither out of it, but someone  else may very reasonably find a more physical embodiment of evil the pinnacle of monstrosity. 

In many ways, defining ultimate evil is a question of whether or not fire a corporeal nightmare  haunts you more than a dreamless abyss. And it’s a question I don’t think has a universal answer  —fear is a slippery, evolving thing, so surely true darkness would have many facets. Surely the  most terrifying monster could wear multiple faces.

“Do I know you? ” “I hope so. I seem to know you.

”  Reflecting on the apex of terror is a somewhat masochistic exercise, but I think there’s a  primal value in entertaining such monstrous extremes. Since our earliest days of sitting  around a fire, we’ve told tales of what stalks in the night — familiarizing ourselves with the  grimmest possible hypotheticals. Every generation has reflected on the hyperbole of the ultimate  monster, and perhaps that’s as it should be.

For when one pushes the boundaries of comfortability,  the shadows of the world can ironically seem a little less ominous. I didn’t have an answer to  my friend’s question, all those years ago. And when my other friend whispered: ‘do you know what  I think it is?

’ I wasn’t certain what he would say — but even back then my mind went to images  of demons and death, those familiar monsters that have been with us since the beginning. My friend  smiled and said: ‘Actually, the scariest monster… is your butt. ’ Ricky, if you’re watching this,  I think you’re the worst.

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