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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