Top 10 Most Actually-Scary Demons in Pop Culture History
It’s October now, and the demons are out in force. We’ve all (presumably) chosen our costumes, and we’re all ready to celebrate the equinox with candy and pumpkin-flavored soda. Most importantly for the geek set, we have planned our attack of the Dario Argento retrospective at the local arthouse, decided which of the William Castle films we want to see (“The Tingler” with Percepto is a must), and are now resolute in sitting and watching all of the “Halloween” movies in a row.
While the slashers and beasties are always a sure bet come horror season, I’ve always kind of admired the Demon as a monster. Your zombies and vampires are all well and good, but when a Demon shows up in a movie, you know you’re in for some serious Satanic stuff. No mere creature hellbent on rending you into a pile of quivering viscera, the Demon was an agent of Satan himself; a being physically composed of all things foul and evil. They have scary faces, wicked, unshakable intentions, and, I bet, breath that could knock over a train. There are silly demons to be sure (Jason Lee, anyone?), but there are some flipping terrifying ones as well.
In that spirit, here is a list of the ten scariest demons from popular culture.
10. Black Roses
from “Black Roses” (1988)
Mill’s Basin is a sleepy little town where the parents are all squares, and the teenagers are desperate for some subversive entertainment. Imagine the teens’ glee when the world’s most popular metal band, Black Roses, decides to play there. Black Roses (composed of members from real-life metal band King Kobra) would play nice, calm, unoffensive rock ballads for the parents, and then earsplitting demonic black metal for the teens.Black Roses, it turns out, were actually a band of demons who were using the power of their metal to transform the teenagers into long-necked killer monsters.
“Black Roses” is essentially a dated scare film for adults, that posited that the demonic messages in their childrens’ heavy metal records were actually, well, demonic. While the premise is hokey, and the film only holds up as an endlessly fascinating piece of propaganda, the demons themselves are actually terrifying. There is a scene in which a teenage girl, under the demons’ influence, tries seducing her father. When he rebuffs her, she begins to sprout big, chunky, scary teeth. Pretty soon, her topless body has a long-necked creature face.
I saw this film as a kid, and the sight of a topless woman with a stretchy monster head gave me nightmares.
9. Azazel
from “Fallen” (1998)
What is a demon but a fallen angel? What does a fallen angel look like? Like everyone, it turns out. In Gregory Hoblit’s underrated 1998 thriller, “Fallen,” a cop (Denzel Washington) oversees the execution of a serial killer (Elias Koteas) he apprehended, only to find that, soon thereafter, other murders begin occurring with the dead killer’s exact MO. After some investigation, our hero learns that the dead killer is actually an ancient demon named Azazel who can transfer itself from person to person merely by touch. This is a particular problem when Denzel tries shooting a person he knows to be possessed, and finds that Azazel can merrily float into another person nearby.
This transference also makes for one of the scariest chase scenes in the movies: The film’ heroine (Embeth Davidtz) is being pursued down the block by Azazel, who is merely transferring itself through a crowd. The thought of a bodiless, playful killer that can hide itself inside any person you know… well, I don’t know about you, but that scares me a lot.
8. Darkness
from “Legend” (1985)
Ridley Scott’s 1985 fantasy film is kind of a confusing affair, rife with many different ancient stories and mythologies, all mixed into a clunky miasma of weirdness and overwrought melodrama. But the film’s images, if taken individually, are stunning and gorgeous and, in the case of Tim Curry’s heavy metal demon Darkness, utterly terrifying.
Tim Curry is a fantastic actor, who, with his used-car-salesman-from-Hell voice, wicked grin, and alchemical screen presence, adds character to any project merely by appearing on screen. Dress Curry in an eight-foot tall demon suit, complete with red skin, satyr hoofs, and three-foot-wide blackened horns, and you have a legitimate movie icon that will blow the terrified pants off of any child unfortunate enough to be viewing, and leave a nightmarish stamp in the imaginations of the adults.
“Legend” doesn’t really hold up over time. Darkness, however, is one for the ages.
7. Angela Franklin
from “Night of the Demons” (1988)
As a teenager, I was never invited to these parties, but the movies informed me (indeed, assured me) that my peers were always gathering in abandoned barns, warehouses, disused mental asylums, and creepy old houses for purposes of drinking copious amounts of beer and fucking. I always envied those teens who were living lives of unsupervised hedonistic abandon. That is, until I realized that the sexually active, alcoholic teens who were so cool at school were also secretly being picked off, one-by-one, by some horrid night beast.
“Night of the Demons” does little to vary from the usual formula of teen slashers; it’s scary, but merely competent. But the film’s villainess, Angela Franklin (Mimi Kinkaid) is a truly terrifying invention. Angela is a human character who is possessed by a demon. However, rather than just going on a frenzy, and murdering her friends with blunt or sharpened objects, she dances and seduces all of them, making them all think that everything is o.k. She spreads her evil into her friends, and mutates their bodies, leading to one of the most unusual special effects scenes in history: a topless teen girl spreads lipstick on her chest, and then, surreally, pushes the tube of lipstick into her nipple, where it vanishes.
The killers in slasher movies are always scary because you never know their motive. Angela’s motive is particularly opaque, and, hence, incredibly more sinister.
6. The “Night of the Demon” Creature
from “Night of the Demon” (1957)
Jacques Tourneur’s classic monster flick, out of the Val Lewton camp, is one of those creepy, dread-inducing affairs that, like “Cat People” before it, got most of its creep mileage out of not showing the creature. This not only makes the monster scarier in our minds, but usually makes for a monster money shot to stay burned into our minds for time immemorial.
Dana Andrews plays an American professor attending a Black Arts symposium in London, where he chooses to investigate the so-called supernatural death of a wicked cult leader. His investigations leads to a gibbering Bedlamite, and ancient tome in an unknown language, and mysterious bits of cursed parchment appearing on his belongings. It’s not long before he intuits that a legitimate demon is following him around, wreaking havoc.
Lewton was a masterful producer of film, and while he wasn’t so pleased to work on monster film, gave it his all, hiring talented directors and actors, and actually coming up with good conceits and stories to go along with them (his “I Walked with a Zombie” is, famously, the same story as Jane Eyre). What’s more, he actually put effort into making a nice-looking monster for this demon film. It only appears briefly, but, momma, what a scary creature.
5. The Various Demons and Imps of Jack T. Chick
from Chick Publications (1960 – present)
Jack T. chick practices a particularly vitriolic and utterly bizarro version of Christianity that posits, in the simplest possible terms, that God and Satan are in constant direct conflict over how many souls they can claim, and it’s up to you, dear reader, to memorize your King James Bible (no other version will do), abstain from drugs, wild sex, rude behavior, vanity and Halloween, and guide as many souls as you can into heaven without the aid of those wicked Jews, homosexuals, Catholics, Masons, or bikers before one of those naughty demons tempt you into trick-or-treating, and claim you forever.
Jack Chick expresses his views in an urgent series of small comic books, that he has been writing for the past 50 years. I would often find these Chuck tracts littering the ground behind the Rose Parade on New Year’s Day in Pasadena, CA. They featured oversimplified moral dilemmas in which someone was tempted by a demon (to be mean to friends, to sacrifice a cat, to be gay), and they were guided away from the demon by some dully pious do-gooder. Since Heaven and Hell featured so heavily in these tracts, dead children were a regular occurrence.
I am a more laidback churchgoer, so I can’t really jibe with Chick’s self-righteous, hateful version of Christianity, but I can say that the demons he drew were actually, very often, scary little imps. While his message was about extreme piety and the teachings of Christ, he clearly had a lot of fun drawing the monsters and demons and creatures in Hell. There is one panel, I recall, of Satan, relaxing in a flaming cave, watching an episode of “Bewitched,” pleased that witchcraft was spreading on Earth. I love that drawing. All the monsters were creepy and silly and fun and, yes, even scary.
4. The Engineer
from “Hellraiser (1987)
“Hellraiser” is one of my favorite horror movies. I love the fleshy coneits, the intimate story, and the copious amounts of blood. “Hellraiser,” and its sequel, “Hellbound: Hellraiser II” have always looked exactly the way I want horror films to look, and the monsters are monster that shaped my imagination. The story involves a wicked woman (Claire Higgins), who kills men to feed to her skinless incubus ex-lover, under the nose of her callow American husband Larry (Andrew Robinson). Larry’s twentysomething American daughter (Ashley Laurence) is living in London, and will eventually be the one to catch wise.
Also floating around these proceedings is a magical puzzle box that can summon a group of leather-clad, supernatural S&M demons called cenobites. The cenobites are iconic movie monsters for the ages, and the lead cenobite (Doug Bradley) became so popular, that he appears in all seven of “Hellraiser’s” sequels, under the new nickname of Pinhead (so named after the nails sticking out of his scalp).
But I will not focus on the cenobites here, choosing instead to examine a monster that terrified me much more upon my first viewing of “Hellraiser” on TV back in the early 1990s. There is a scene in which Laurence is idly playing with the magical puzzle box in a hospital room, and unwittingly, solves it. Before her, the wall opens. She peers into the opening, and sees a darkened corridor ahead of her. Cautiously, she enters the opening. The corridor is long; it seems endless. She sees a figure ahead of her. She leans close to make out what it is. It is a living this. It’s hanging upsidedown in the corridor. It’s hind legs cling to either wall, and its large, beastly head dangles down near the floor. It lurches toward our heroine, reaching with creepy claws.
This upsidedown monster, who I later learned was called The Engineer in the screenplay, gave me a sick, wrenching feeling in my gut, and, I found, was a lot scarier than the relatively human-looking cenobites.
3. The Nightmare
By John Henry Fuseli (1741 – 1825)
Eighteenth century European painting may not be a usual subject in the pages of Geekscape, but I have little doubt that most of Geekscape’s readers are unfamiliar with this painting.
John Henry Fuseli was born in Switzerland, and moved to England at age 20. He learned how to paint from his father, a famous landscapist, and was a big fan of William Shakespeare. In 1779, he was commissioned to paint a scene from “A Midsummer Night’s Dream,” and a career was born, painting darkened scenes of fairies, imps, and other magical creatures. His works are dark and astonishing.
But, most notably and famously, he painted two paintings in 1781, both called “The Nightmare.” It featured a white clad woman, prostrate in sleepy agony, with a demonic imp resting on her chest. The imp’s horse, wild-eyed and ghostly, looks on. This is base don the old myth that nightmares were caused by crouching beasts, who would sit on your chest in such a fashion.
This imp causes nightmares in more than one way, as I had nightmares about it. The image of the grinning little monster was enough to send me into cold sweats. To this day, I find the image to be startling and wickedly scary. When I think of demons, I usually think of that little guy.
2. The Devil
from “The Exorcist” (1973)
And where would a list of demons be without the ultimate embodiment of all evil, Satan himself? And what better place to find Satan, than inside the innocent body of your twleve-year-old daughter?
I don’t think I need to recount the story and famous images from what is still, to this day, one of the scariest films of all time, only to say that the deep demonic voice (Mercedes McCambridge) grumbling from deep within the previously delicate, pre-sexual body Regan MacNeil (Linda Blair) explores the fears we all have of change, of sexuality, of losing control of our loved ones, and of the presence of evil in everyday life.
“The Exorcist” is quiet and terrifying, mostly thanks to William Friedkin’s surprisingly mellow direction, and the team of actors and effects wizards who made a demonically-possessed little girl seems palpable, real, and scary.
(Do not – I repeat – Do NOT try to tell me that the demon possessing Regan is actually and ancient African demon named Pazuzu. “The Exorcist II: The Heretic” doesn’t count. That demon is The Devil).
1. That Fucking Clown
from “Poltergeist” (1982)
Tobe Hooper’s “Poltergeist” was released in 1982, back before there was a PG-13 rating, and, since it bore the imprimatur of Stephen Spielberg, many parents felt it was perfectly o.k. to bring their young children to it. Surely, they thought, the man responsible for making “E.T.” wouldn’t scare the younguns too badly.
What followed those thoughts was the traumatizing ruination of a generation. Wicked ghosts, a giant carnivorous tree, creepy electrical surges, closets spouting monster mouths, outright monsters, a guy pulling off his own face, JoBeth Williams swimming in a muddy bog with moving skeletons. This PG-rated film was, for children, the single most horrifying thing imaginable.
And, worst of the lot – and I’m sure you remember this thing – there was Robbie’s clown toy. The clown toy was already scary at the film’s outset, before the demons and monsters started showing up. Robbie would have to creepy across the room, and throw a jacket over the clown just so he could get to sleep at night. The image of the horrifying clown was already a promise for death and bloody hurt.
But then, Tobe Hooper delivered on that promise, and had that creepy monster spring to life late in the film, and try to strangle poor Robbie in his bed. I think I can pinpoint the single moment that thousands of children were, suddenly and violently, emotionally crippled. I certainly was. To this day, in my 30s, I still feel a pang of fear when I see that horrible abomination. You do to. That fucking clown has ripped so much to shreds.
Witney Seibold is a fearful little boy living in the body of a thirtysomething man in his apartment in Los Angeles. He sees many movies, reads many books, and constantly revisits the horror films that gave him nightmares as a child. He is also something of a writer, having written nearly 700 reviews for his old newspaper, and his thriving personal ‘blog, Three Cheers for Darkened Years. You can read his lengthy essays on classics film, his Series Project analyses, and his astute, professional reviews at http://witneyman.wordpress.com
