Top 20 Most Iconic Monster Types of All Time

How do you deal with a monster you can’t even comprehend? Cosmic horrors can be tentacular squid-beasts from the depths of space with geometries so alien you’ll go insane just looking at them. Even living plagues that seep into our world and twist other life into their own dread likeness. The really awful ones come from somewhere outside the universe as we know it and have plans and desires that humans can’t grasp. With Cosmic horrors, the threat isn’t just getting eaten or killed. It’s discovering a reality that’s so dark and heinous that it wipes out everything you once believed. They’re popular in horror novels, but don’t show up in that many movies. Guess mind-bending madness is a bit intense for the matinee audience.

Slimy, creeping, embodiments of rot. What could be worse than worms? Well, what if they were huge? Yeah, that’s worse alright. Worms can fill every niche, from the slow horror of parasitic invasion, to the classic burrowing predator, to the simple fear of having your living flesh devoured right off your bones. They’re nothing if not versatile, but because they’re so gross, they tend to show up either in cult classics or the most hard-core horror stories. Still, in a standard adventure yarn, they’re still a great way to raise the stakes and let the audience know exactly how gruesome the stakes can get.

You know one thing people hate? Being reminded of their own mortality. And since you never really get a good look at someone’s bones unless they are in fact dead, that’s exactly what a skeleton is. A reminder that one day, that’s going to be you. Now imagine that reminder can get up and walk around. And it has some pretty strong opinions on how soon you should get around to joining its band, playing the bone tone xylophone. (Guess what! It’s today!) When you put it that way, it sort of makes sense that skeletons are the go-to level one monster for both fantasy games and Halloween parties.

Fairies? Seriously? The little ladies with the gossamer wings? Who’s afraid of Tinkerbell? Okay, maybe you’ve got a point. Fairies are more than just pixies and godmothers. They comprise dozens of different creatures from European -- especially Celtic -- folklore and they are NOT necessarily friendly. The folk tales fairies originate from seeing them kidnap babies, trapping strangers in their palaces, and making sinister Faustian bargains with cruel ironic consequences. They come from their own world, with different rules of time and space than Earth, where humans can get lost forever. That’s a pretty far cry from making children fly and godmothering puppets.

What do you get when you glue a lion, a dragon, and a goat together? Well, a sticky dragon because it’s going to eat the lion and the goat pretty quick. But! If you combine all their DNA into a monster, you get a Chimera. That’s an ancient Greek recipe, anyway, although some interpretations substitute the dragon with a snake. Chimeras are often associated with monsters composed of spare parts from real-life animals. Stick an eagle to a lion? Gryphon! Blend a human and a horse? Centaur! Alchemically combine a little girl with her beloved dog and what do you get? That’s right! Sad!

Mischievous mini-monsters with a mania for mayhem. These nasty little critters show up in every fairytale and fantasy, from “Labyrinth” to “Lord of the Rings.” They show up in more modern monster movies, too, but they tend to go by names like Gremlins or, well, critters. It’s not clear why horror writers suddenly got too embarrassed to call goblins what they are. Goblins are still going strong. Singing songs to captured dwarves, singing a different song to a captured baby, singing mocking Christmas carols to torture a mean old lady. Wow, these guys really seem to sing a lot, huh? Are we sure they’re really monsters and not just… short, ugly musical theatre students?

You’re walking in the woods when suddenly you see it. A flash of fur among the trees. A vaguely human form loping away. A hideous stench. That’s right: it’s the Florida Skunk Ape. What, you’ve never heard of the skunk ape? Well, how about Yowies? Yetis? Sasquatch? Bigfoot? Maybe even King Kong? People around the world tell stories of giant, ape-like cryptids skulking around the wilderness. Almost enough to make you wonder if they don’t belong on a list of fictional monsters. Alas, nobody has managed to snap a decent photo of one yet, despite multiple TV shows dedicated to tracking them down. Still, as long as there’s wilderness to disappear into, people are going to wonder… what else might be out there?

Has science gone too far!?!? Well, whenever your creation starts lurching around shooting death rays at people, that is officially over the line. Just ask John Connor. Heck, ask anybody from a 1950s B movie. Unless someone knows something about goblins we don’t, killer robots might be the most likely monster on this list to become a problem in the real world. No less a mind than the late Stephen Hawking warned about the very real danger of developing an AI smart enough to get ideas about taking over. Look, we’re not saying you should start worrying about every drone and Roomba right now. But it wouldn’t hurt to know where the off switch is. Just in case.

It’s tough being the little guy. When was the last time you felt bad for an ant? Well, maybe you’d change your tune if you were the one worried about getting stepped on. Colossal monsters like giants and trolls give us an opportunity to think about what it would be like if we were the ones underfoot. Bad, it turns out. It would be bad. A monster that size wouldn’t have to think twice about squishing you, tossing you, or biting you in half. Turns out most people have a fear of being scooped up and devoured by a much larger predator, which... actually seems like good instinct, yeah.

Listen, we know bugs are an important part of the ecosystem. Bees and wasps pollinate all the plants we depend on to live, mosquitoes feed everything from frogs to birds. It doesn’t mean we have to like it. And the bigger a bug gets, the harder it is to remember any of the reasons we shouldn’t -- GAH! Kill it! Get a flamethrower! When they get big enough to start reaching into monster territory, it’s almost good news. Now, instead of acting brave, you’ve got a good excuse to squeal like a squeamish 6-year-old at something with more legs than you’re entirely comfortable seeing on one animal. And then they start laying eggs.

Because Dungeons and Dachshunds just didn’t have the same ring. No, if there’s one name that comes to mind when you think of fantastic beasts, it’s the Dragon. They’re kind of the perfect monster in a lot of ways. Teeth like swords? Check. Wings like a hurricane? Check. The worst imaginable case of deadly bad breath? That’s a big ol’ check. Frankly, the only reason they aren’t higher up this list is that they’re so darn cool, people start to forget they’re even monsters. Gone are the days when we only thought of a dragon as something a knight faced down with his noble steed and lance. In fact, these days, dragons are just as likely to be the steeds themselves.

This is it. The worst it can get. The absolute maximum amount of evil theoretically possible. Except for Hellboy. He’s cool. The rest of these guys, though, they’re pretty rough. Fallen angels or the natural-born denizens of pandemonium, they’ve dedicated themselves to making sure you join them in Hell. Or Robot Hell, as the case may be. You know you’ve got it made as an icon of evil when there’s one of you standing on every cartoon character’s shoulder as the literal embodiment of their darkest desires. You probably shouldn’t trust anyone with red horns and a pitchfork (Again, except Hellboy, he’s cool). But just to be safe, also don’t sign any contracts where the ink is your own blood.

Ever swim out into deep water and had that sudden, sinking sense of dread about what might be lurking below? The ocean covers more than 2 thirds of the earth to an average depth of almost 3 kilometers. That’s a lot of room underneath you for something big and hungry. In fiction, there’s the Loch Ness Monster, dozens of sea serpents, the Kraken… the Kraken again. Man, these movies really love the Kraken, eh? It’s not just about the fictional sea monsters, either. From mercifully extinct giant-toothed lizard-whales to the very much alive colossal squid, a lot of our scariest sea monsters are either real, or they used to be. So, show of hands… who wants to go for a swim?

You disturbed a 5,000-year-old tomb, plundered its treasures, and opened all the sarcophagi. What did you think you were going to get? A prize? A pat on the back? No! You get the mummy’s curse! And frankly, you should have known better. Maybe a horror movie archaeologist wasn’t the best career path. Western culture has been telling stories about vengeful mummies rising from their tombs since they started digging them out of their tombs. For a while, people were burning them to power trains and unwrapping them to entertain guests at parties. Then they started showing up in stories with plagues of beetles and sand storms. Weird. Almost like people knew all that corpse desecration was wrong on some level.

You thought giants were bad. Kaiju aren’t just manifestations of our fear of bigger predators. They’re stand-ins for nuclear devastation, climate change, etc. Forces so big an individual human doesn’t stand a chance of fighting back. There’s something special about Kaiju, though. Unlike a lot of the other monsters on this list, Godzilla didn’t stay a bad guy. These days, he and other Kaiju like Gamera are also known for protecting us puny humans. You just can’t stay mad at a giant rocket turtle or a nuclear laser lizard who is willing to put it all on the line to defend humankind. Even if they do still step on a lot of our cities in the process, you gotta admit. Kaiju kinda rule.

Planets like Earth are rare. With all our fresh water, mineral wealth, and vast resources, it’s easy to see why an alien species would want what we have. Don’t take our word for it, though. Just check out any science fiction from the past century. Ever since H. G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds,” there’s been one monster that’s held a special grip on the modern human heart. Invaders from space. With their flying saucers and death rays, the scariest part of an alien threat is that we might not even be advanced enough to fight back.

What’s your zombie plan? Hold up in your local shopping center? Strike out into the wilderness to get away from the bigger hoards? Head down to the Winchester, have a pint, and wait for the whole thing to blow over? That last one might not work out so great, but that’s the fun of zombies. They challenge us to figure out what we’d do to survive the end of the world. Clear, simple goals and an obvious weakness (the brain) make Zombies the perfect enemy to hone our inner armchair generals. Sure, maybe they devoured everyone else in town, but you’re smarter, right? You’ll be fine! As long as you don’t get bit.

Whether they’re inhabiting a haunted doll to stab at you in the night or just floating around loose, there’s something about the intangibility of a specter that really freaks us out. If they can be invisible and walk through walls, then they could be anywhere. Just a jump scare waiting to happen. Or maybe it’s got more to do with what they say about death. It’s not exactly comforting to think that all our lives are going to end one day. But ghosts invite a chilling question… what if whatever comes next is worse? Ghosts tap into our guilt and grief about the past, too. If death isn’t the end, maybe we’ll never be free of what we did to wrong people in this life.

The brains of a human, the savage ferocity of a beast. It doesn’t take much to figure out what deep-seated fear werewolves trigger in the human mind. We’ve been wondering since the iron age what the animal inside us might be capable of. Lots of snarling around forests at night and savagely attacking villagers and livestock, it turns out. Werewolves also seem to spend a lot of time-fighting vampires for some reason. That’s weird, isn’t it? You never hear about a centuries-long war between mummies and sea monsters. Maybe it’s because werewolves and vampires are both ancient representations of unrestrained desire. There’s a lot of room for comparison there. And when you compare monsters, it’s just bad form not to have them fight.

Vampires. Nosferatu. The terror that stalks the night. Okay, that last one might have been Batman, but still. The definitive monster that latched on and sunk its teeth into our culture to drink up all our attention like some kind of… well, we can’t think of a good analogy. You get the picture. In recent years, vampires have gone from creepy, predatory nightmares to creepy, predatory love interests. But they still stand for what they always have. The dark appetites inside us all which will take over every part of our lives if we let them. Take us over and suck the life out of everyone around us just to slake our thirst.