Unexpected nightmares: The scariest enemies in un-scary games

Sometimes, horror is all about the incongruity. Take the Waterwraith from Pikmin 2, a game that doesn’t lack for giant, Pikmin-munching predators. But at least those big beasts are animals—not even the game itself seems to know what the hell this human-shaped hell on wheels actually is, besides dangerous. Which brings in the other reason the Waterwraith stands out from the pack: It refuses to stay in its own boss arena, instead pursuing hapless Captain Olimar and his adorable, brightly colored charges throughout the floors of its dungeon. Pursuit by an implacable force is an elemental, awful feeling, one that series like Resident Evil and Dead Space have milked for some of their most panic-inducing set pieces. To face the same phenomenon when you’re playing the colorful cartoon game about the funny little plant guys is an unexpected bridge into a galaxy of fear.

Video game enemies tend to be things that you have to fight or avoid because they’ll hurt you, but sometimes they’re just scary people who follow you forever like creepy stalkers—to the point where you have no choice but to lock them in a freezer for your own safety. Winston the butler, who shows up in Tomb Raider 2’s training level (set in Lara Croft’s sprawling mansion), is like this. He follows Lara around as she practices her cartwheel flips, always ready to bring her anything she may need. Except he doesn’t do or say anything. He just silently follows. Never stopping. Never slowing. Never leaving Lara’s side. He’s always there, quietly creeping up on you. He can’t hurt you, but that’s never really the problem with creepy silent stalkers. The problem is when you turn around and they’re right there, being a creep. Luckily, you can stop him by tricking him into following Lara into a freezer and closing the door before he can leave. But that means he’s just standing in there waiting for you. Forever.

In Milla Vodello’s mind, the party never stops. Disco might be dead, but not in the mental landscape of Psychonauts’ resident levitation teacher, who runs a 24/7 dance party inside her own brain, serving as the ideal environment for the youngsters of Whispering Rock Psychic Summer Camp to get in their floating reps. And if the unending music also drowns out the cries of “Milla, why did you let us die?” from that one dark, awful little room in the corner, well, so much the better, right?For a game where every single character has mental baggage (literally, you have to find little tags to get it all sorted out), the freewheeling Milla might have the darkest, and the darkest representation of it: a burning room filled with Nightmares, tucked far away from the party, where the psychic screams of the kids who died in the orphanage she used to run are still echoing to this day. Finding your way into this unhappy little cranny is Psychonauts’ first real suggestion that crawling into the minds of others might not always be the safest or most pleasant of pastimes. Sure, Milla’s got her Nightmares—strange, demonic creatures that represent her trauma—locked safely away. But the sibilant whispers and sudden cessation of the thumping music is a moment of outright horror and misery in a game that’s previously been little more than goofy mental fun. (In fact, it’s almost a relief when you actually have to fight a few later on, because at least you’re overcoming the screaming horror that the powerful Ms. Vodello can’t.)

The Dead Hand is easily one of the most unnerving enemies in all of Dark Souls, looking like an amorphous blob of pale skin covered in red bloody splotches and with big jaws of awful human teeth. It… wait, this guy isn’t from Dark Souls? He’s from Zelda?! What was Nintendo thinking here? Dead Hand looks like something birthed from a creepypasta that lures children into the woods so it can grab them and kill them with its Infinite Hands. Oh, right, we haven’t even mentioned the Infinite Hands: Dead Hand is surrounded by rows of long, skinny arms that reach up out of the ground and grab Link with their red claws, and not only are they immensely creepy on their own, but they also cannot be killed. That means the hands are always reaching up, looking for little children to grab so the Dead Hand can slide over and give them a mighty chomp. Some creepypastas wish they were this messed up.

“Things that move when they shouldn’t move” is another classic category of horror creations, and when those things are the literal sun and stars in the sky, it can be hard not to shriek in panic when they come, specifically, for you. That’s the nasty brilliance of the extremely pissed-off sun that first starts attacking Mario and Luigi in the desert world of Super Mario Bros. 3 (and later repeats its trick in the black-skied strangeness of the game’s final run of levels). But this implacable solar asshole isn’t the only creepy inanimate pursuer in the early annals of the Mario series. Players of Super Mario Bros. 2 were already perfectly familiar with Phanto, the unkillable, ever-smiling mask that would chase you down any time you tried to take a key from its vault. (The fact that you had to initiate the pursuit, while a legion of Phantos watched you silently from the walls before grabbing the key, only made it worse.) And then there’s that game’s nastiest horror touch: A bird-headed exit door—exactly like every other bird door you’ve used to exit levels throughout the game—that suddenly begins attacking you out of nowhere right before the game’s final level. Who says you can’t execute a jump-scare in 8-bit graphics?

How do you make giant spider monsters palatable to people who are viscerally repulsed by the awful many-legged things? Not this way, that’s for sure. Grounded is a game where you play as a kid who has been shrunk to the size of an insect and must survive in a yard full of deadly bugs——which naturally means fighting off a number of big spiders that want to grab you, web you up, and suck out your organs. Grounded cleverly tries to throw a bone to spider-haters with an that lets you determine just how creepy-crawly you want your spiders to be. But the problem is that they’re just as creepy with the slider turned all the way down as they are when it’s cranked to the max—just in a different way. An crawling at you is one thing, but a featureless gray blob with big red eyes that does everything a spider does but has eight invisible legs is just as scary. Imagine holding an unpainted Funko Pop and then having someone tell you it was actually a spider. You’d be scared out of your mind. (And don’t listen to those people who tell you that spiders are actually friends who keep worse bugs out of your house. They’re still spiders.)

Who would have suspected a game that starts you out fighting sassy crows and New Age Retro Hippies of ending with your mutilated tween heroes facing off against a Lovecraftian nightmare from far beyond the stars? Then again, Nintendo’s satirical RPG underdog Earthbound never met a convention it didn’t try to buck. By the time Ness and company finally reach Giygas—the malevolent “mastermind” behind the alien invasion of Earthbound’s Earth—they’ve already had to sacrifice their childhoods, their hard-earned resources, and even their organic bodies to make their way to his time-locked lair. And what greets them when they get there? A mass of writhing, abstract flesh with Ness’ own (abandoned) face staring out of its single, embryonic eye. There’s not even a recognizable speech or confrontation: As Giygas’ last remaining minion, Pokey, points out, the being’s mind has been utterly destroyed by its own power, leaving nothing but a howling void (one reportedly inspired by an upsetting movie scene that designer Shigesato Itoi glimpsed when he was a little kid), with no more comprehensible desire than the death of every living thing in the universe. No wonder the game’s only recourse at this point is to have your heroes throw down their weapons, fall to their knees, and beg for divine intervention to save them from the beast.