A few people frequently underestimate the high quality of content available on television. Friends, How I Met Your Mother, and South Park have reigned supreme in the world of comedy for decades and will continue to do so in the future.
Similarly, the vast world of television has blessed us with some of the most awful, terrifying, emotionally draining, and soul-crushing monsters. Mulder and Scullylooked into some classic ghouls, Buffy fought some terrible demons, and Kolchak hunted the night like no one else.
The list, on the other hand, may appear to be unending. Most of the monsters shown in these and other television series, on the other hand, were not given fair credit. As is customary, Marvelous Videos takes on the task of introducing and reintroducing you to some of the most horrific and gruesome monsters to ever grace the screens of our televisions.
Peacock Family From Episode 2 Season 4 of X-Files
When the buried body of a malformed infant is discovered in a small Pennsylvania town, Agents Mulder and Scully are summoned. The baby died and choked on the mud and soil under which it was buried, indicating that it was buried alive, according to the investigation and autopsy.
The family who lives in an old house near the crime scene is suspected by the two agents. They team up with local sheriff Andy Taylor and discover that the house dates back to the Civil War, and that the Peacock family that lives inside survives without electricity or running water.
In addition, the Peacocks reproduce through incest. When the agents arrive, the Peacocks become enraged and murder Taylor and his wife. Later, Deputy Barney Paster and the agents learn that the house is resided by all males, so they may have abducted a woman and kept her in bondage in order to reproduce.
They arrive at the house to find the woman, but Paster gets decapitated by a death trap, and a battle ensues between the Peacocks and FBI agents. It’s learned that the amputee mother, Mrs. Peacock, was behind her children’s rage and crazed nature.
This episode was banned from ever being aired again because of the grim and graphic subjects it covered, including incest, inbreeding, and infanticide. Due to the successive inbreeding over the years, the Peacock family developed several genetic mutations. They stopped feeling pain and gained almost supernatural levels of strength. In one of the scenes, George Peacock had to be shot several times before he finally died.
The event was disturbing not because of the Peacock family’s terrible appearance or their might. The Peacock brothers’ reaction to the circumstance was terrifying. Because the kid was most likely a boy, they committed infanticide because they were plainly in an incestuous connection with their mother.
Despite knowing the crimes her children had committed, Mrs. Peacock was more than welcoming of them. The Peacock family exemplifies rotten moral and social standards, and the fact that Mrs. Peacock managed to flee with her eldest son makes the audience wonder about the future and continuation of their heinous crimes.
The Corpse From Episode 1 Season 5 of Are You Afraid of the Dark?
The show follows a group of young people who are members of the Midnight Society, a secret society. They meet in the dark of night at an undisclosed place deep in the woods to tell each other stories about vampires, ghosts, werewolves, aliens, and witches, among other paranormal and supernatural subjects.
Gary, the Midnight Society’s creator, introduces a new member named Stig, who is offered the opportunity to be the midnight storyteller in this episode. His story begins in 1954, when a young child named Joe goes for a swim in the school pool. Charlie, the pool’s lifeguard, lets him swim and then goes off with Joe’s older sister Cindy.
However, while Joe was swimming, an unseen force tried to drown him. The story then jumps forty years and it is now 1994. Clorice and Greta are two girls from the school’s swim team and are friends with science geek Zeke .
He crushes on Clorice, and when he finds out that their school has an unused and hidden swimming pool, he tells Clorice about it. Although Zeke knows that the pool was shut for a grim reason, he doesn’t know what it exactly was. Zeke promises Clorice to help her with academics in return for learning to swim from her.
However, things go south when the unseen entity makes its presence known and attacks the would-be couple. However, they are saved by Charlie, who has now become the school’s custodian. Charlie tells them about the pool’s history and they must figure out a way to banish the evil back.
The unseen entity was an angry spirit of someone from the cemetery upon which the swimming pool was constructed. It is believed that all the buried corpses were exhumed and buried elsewhere, but the construction workers forgot one of them.
Since that day, anyone who entered the water and disturbed the spirit’s eternal resting place has been drowned. After all, why not? We’d all be irritated if someone came in and woke us up from our slumber.
In the end, it was Zeke and Clorice’s quick thinking that managed to permanently eradicate The Corpse. They sprayed magnetite on it, and because magnetite plus water produce a powerful exothermic explosion, The Corpse began to evaporate into oblivion.
Kurt Barlow from Salem’s Lot (1979)
The plot of Salem’s Lot is centred on a vampire outbreak in the little hamlet of Jerusalem’s Lot. Ben Mears grew raised in Jerusalem’s Lot neighbourhood and later moved out to pursue a career as a writer. Years later, he returned to his hometown to write a book on the abandoned house where a hitman named HubertMarsten had previously lived.
He learns, however, that Austrian antique dealer Kurt Barlow and his associate Straker had bought the property under the guise of opening an antique shop. Barlow is actually an ancient and powerful vampire who hides inside the home. Straker assists Barlow in carrying out malicious crimes, and as a result of Barlow’s bloodlust, residents of the town are converted.
Salem’s Lot is a mini-series based on Stephen King’s novel of the same name. The adaptation remains largely grounded in its source but takes a few creative liberties for cinematic purposes.
For instance, in the book, Barlow was portrayed like a usual human in his appearance, but the mini-series shows him resembling Count Orlok from Nosferatu. Barlow’s appearance is enough to send chills down anyone’s spines. His pale and bluish-gray skin reeks of the evil supernatural, and his bright yellow eyes remind us of our imagination of the Devil himself.
But the scariest facial feature has to be his punctuated and elongated frontal teeth that are so large that Barlow can not even close his mouth.
Contrary to the book, Barlow is unable to speak, and even when he dies, he only makes incomprehensible sounds. The inability to talk makes him further dangerous because even the slightest possibility of reasoning with him goes down the drain, making Barlow an unstoppable force of evil who’s hell-bent on spreading his kind. Furthermore, Barlow has superpowers like telekinesis. He could throw open gates, give a rough shake to an entire house and move his own coffin.
Barlow’s portrayal of vampires will go down in history as one of the most terrifying in both fiction and film. Only greats like Count Dracula can compare to him.
The Haunted Mask From Goosebumps
The Haunted Mask was created by a shop owner who had an ugly face and has never loved himself because of it. He studied biology and was able to make a magnificent live mask out of human flesh, which he believed would help him gain acceptance in his social circle. The Mask, on the other hand, was more sentient than he had anticipated.
It turned horrific as soon as he put it on, with green skin, malformed facial features, and fangs in place of teeth. He fought to remove it, and in the end, he had to slice it out with a knife.
He tried numerous other masks after the first one failed, but the effect remained the same. Finally, he realized that the mask was reflecting upon his inner personality, which was still ugly because he lacked love for himself and hence wasn’t happy. The man locked away his creations in a room and called them The Unloved.
Later he opened an antique gift shop. His store is visited by a young schoolgirl named Carly, who is bullied and scared by two boys named Chuck and Steve. She decided to exact her revenge by stealing the mask and bringing it home.
However, once her objective was achieved, she struggled to take off the mask as it had now become a part of her face. She rushed to the shop owner, who told her that only an article that was made out of love had the power to remove the vizard from her face.
The Haunted Mask first featured in a series premiere episode of the 1995 TV show Goosebumps, which was based on a series of novellas by R. L. Stine. The Haunted Mask, interestingly enough, is a sentient artefact that feeds on ill intentions and nasty impulses.
It is able to detect undesirable features deep within a person’s heart and mind, which it wants to exploit in order to accomplish its black magic. Carly’s conscience had been weakened by the bullying, and all she wanted was vengeance at whatever cost. In exchange for inhabiting her body, the Haunted Mask saw this as an opportunity to give her what she desired.
Lizzie From Season 01 Episode 07 Of Tales from the Darkside
Tales From The Dark Side was a horror anthology television show that aired on ABC in 1983. Each episode included a horror story centred on supernatural and paranormal events and beings, with dark humour and satire thrown in for good measure.
GailAynsley, a young girl, rents a room in her college professor’s residence in the episode Inside The Closet. Gail stumbles onto a little closet and begins to hear strange noises coming from it.
Finally, one memorable night, Gail discovered a monster creature inside, consumed with wrath, much to her dismay and despair. She was killed and taken into the closet by the beast. It is revealed that Dr. Fenner, the professor, served as the father to this monster, who is only known as Lizzie.
The monster was never called Lizzie on the show, but the puppet that was used to depict her was named Lizzie, therefore conforming to her name. Now, Lizzie appeared for a very brief interval on the screen, but her appearance and strength made her a favorite among the many monstrosities that the show depicted.
Lizzie was humanoid but considerably smaller than humans, and she looked like a hair-less chimpanzee. Her pale white skin, fanged mouth, bright eyes, and clawed hands gave her a grotesque and scary appearance that quenched every gorehound’s thirst for the absurd. Like other primates, she was powerful, despite her smaller stature. She clawed Gail with her sharp fingers and manhandled her as if Gail was a toy.
The Werewolf – Werewolf TV Series
Young Eric Cord and Ted shared a room. However, Cord’s life was turned upside down when Ted revealed that he was a werewolf that hunted and preyed on humans. Ted was losing his conscience at an alarming rate whenever he transformed, and when he couldn’t stand it any more, he requested Cord to shoot him with a few silver bullets.
Cord, on the other hand, was a sceptic who didn’t accept Ted’s claim. Ted was at a loss for what to do, so he requested Cord to tie him up and wait till midnight. Cord became a full-fledged and furious werewolf at midnight.
Cord managed to shoot his werewolf friend but was bitten and infected before he could do so. The only way to reverse the curse was to find and kill Janos Skorzeny, the powerful and ancient werewolf who started the bloodline.
However, this was not going to be easy because the cops were hunting Cord for Ted’s murder. Furthermore, it’s later revealed that Skorzeny was not the one who started the bloodline, but a 2000-year-old lycan named Nicolas Remy.
With the exception of Skorzeny, all of the show’s werewolves were immune to disease and aging. Nicholas Remy was two thousand years old but looked like a young man. However, they could be harmed in their human form.
For instance, in the episode titled A World of Difference, a gunshot seemingly kills Eric, but he resurrects in the werewolf form at the morgue. This reflects the fact that no human weapon can kill the werewolves; in fact, they have a heightened healing factor. The episode titled King of the Road shows Hank having his throat slit, but he too resurrects later through transformation.
The wolves depicted in the show were ferocious and hideous. They grew to be 8 feet tall with extended arms that let them to run at fast speeds on all fours. The utilisation of effective special effects to cinematize the transformation from human to werewolf form was one component that substantially enhanced the fear. Frank Lupo(0.48 to 0.50) accomplished an excellent job as series creator, but the show was not renewed for a second season.
The Weeping Angels – Doctor Who
The adventures of a Time Lord dubbed the Doctor are the focus of Doctor Who. The Time Lords are a race of aliens who possess the ability to bend time and are the keepers of time travel technology. The Doctor went wild and used a time machine called the TARDIS to flee his home planet of Gallifrey.
When he arrives on Earth, he collaborates with mankind to stop bad forces from altering the course of history or causing harm to human civilisation. When the Doctor is mortally wounded, he regenerates and reanimates with a completely different identity, appearance, and even gender.
The Weeping Angels were introduced in the 2007 episode named Blink, and they made several cameo appearances in later entries. Although Doctor Who describes the Weeping angels as the most malevolent and deadliest of all living creatures of the universe, he also says that they are the only psychopaths that kill without injuring anyone.
This contradictory description lies in the way they murder their victims. The Angels simply send their target back in timebefore their birth and then feed on the time energy that the person might have lived on. Naturally, such a person might lead a happy and comfortable life in the past if they had the required ingenuity and smartness.
Their usual appearance is that of a human, but if they close in on their victim, they become grotesque and beastly with fanged teeth and clawed hands. Interestingly, if someone watches them, the Weeping Angels become statues, and in this state, they are extremely difficult to kill.
The Weeping Angels receive their name from the fact that they hide their faces to avoid looking at each other because doing so would cause them to become bound in statue form forever. They may even take over someone’s natural memories and send people from the past via touch.
Larry and Sally are warned by Doctor Who that if the Weeping Angels prevail, they will unleash a torrent of catastrophe. These ancient monsters are terrifying not because of their appearance, but because of how they act. Even if the trauma isn’t physical, one doesn’t want to be trapped in the past; it’s a special type of prison.
Gentlemen from Season 04 Episode 10 of Buffy The Vampire Slayer
Buffy, the Vampire Slayer is a television series that follows the exploits of Buffy Summers, a teenage girl who becomes the chosen one, or The Slayer. Slayers are responsible with pursuing and fighting supernatural beings such as demons and vampires. Despite her desire to live a normal life, Buffy quickly grows fond of the responsibilities she is handed.
In the episode Hush, Buffy dreams about a young girl holding a weird box and singing a cryptic song about a group called The Gentlemen. Buffy calls her friend Giles to inform him about the girl and The Gentlemen. However, as night fell, the entire town lost its ability to speak, as if it was plagued by widespread laryngitis.
The ability to speak took the form of white wisps and flew into the very box that Buffy had seen in her dream, and the box was in possession of ghoul-like skeletal figures who wore grins on their metallic teeth and perfect black suits on their bodies.
The next morning, Buffy realizes that she has lost her ability to speak, and Giles explains that The Gentlemen have attacked the town. They are demonic entities who steal people’s voices and seek to get seven hearts, and the only weapon against them is the human voice itself.
Consider the ramifications if your entire city lost its capacity to communicate verbally. Other forms of communication would still be possible, but your city would devolve into chaos and anarchy.
As a result, The Gentlemen flourished in such situations; they would enclose all voices in a box and proceed to carve out people’s hearts with grace and politeness. They were tall, bald, and well-dressed demons from folklore, with the human voice as their only vulnerability. Furthermore, The Gentlemen never walked; instead, they hovered roughly a foot above the ground.
In Hush, series creator Joss Whedon struck down the notion that the show was only doing good because of the dialogues. He created a set of monsters who didn’t speak among and didn’t even let anyone else talk, yet they managed to scare the hell out of viewers. In fact, the crew of the show used to get intimidated by the appearance of The Gentlemen.
The Gentlemen have echoes of other well-known creatures such as Nosferatu and the Cenobites from the Hellraiser anthology if you look closely. Even the most ardent horror lovers will be terrified by such a combination.
The Thing From The Grave – Tales From The Crypt
Tales From The Crypt is a horror anthology series in which a skeleton tells audience members scary stories. All of the stories are standalone and do not follow the serialisation requirements.
Photographer Devlin is concerned about model Stacy’s treatment by her fiancé and manager Mitch in “The Thing from the Grave.” He’s a violent guy who assaults Stacy physically, but when Devlin intervenes, he’s threatened. Devlin, on the other hand, is anxious for her safety and offers her the keys to his apartment in case things go out of hand. Stacy runs to Devlin’s apartment one night, where they make love.
Devlin swears to keep her safe no matter what happens. However, Mitch had been spying on them the entire time and tricks Devlin into coming to his cabin in the woods, where he shoots the latter and buries his body in a grave.
Mitch then takes Stacy to the same cabin where he plans to rape her, but Stacy’s cries for help resurrect an undead Devlin, who comes to keep his promise toher. The reanimated Devlin impalesMitch using a shovel and throws him into the same grave before burying himself along with his stillalive murderer.
The show used to air on HBO, which allowed it to be free of cable censoring laws. The Thing from the Grave, or Devlin’s reanimated zombie corpse, stood out among the other monsters because of its grotesquely disfigured and Thanatomorphosed body, maggot-ridden eyes, superhuman strength, and, most importantly, his good heart, which not only cared for Stacy but literally brought him back from the dead to save her. This dead man turned out to be a true keeper in the twenty-first century, when partnerships rarely last more than a year.
Demon In Lace from Episode 16 of Kolchak: The Night Stalker
Kolchak: The Night Stalker recounts the exploits of Carl Kolchak, a news reporter who investigates strange deaths and crimes. His cases frequently have aspects of the unexplained, supernatural, and science fiction.
Naturally, cops would either ignore these cases or lack the motivation, intent, vision, and resources needed to conduct an investigation. In the sixteenth episode, dubbed Demon In Lace, we encounter an elderly succubus who seduces and kills young men by giving them heart attacks.
The succubus did so to maintain her youth and vigor. She had been surviving this way for several millennia, but now that her life force was draining, she revealed her hideous true form.
Kolchak is a fairly underrated series and has been swept under the rug since it first aired in 1974. However, it blended genres like crime, horror, and occult detective, and it’s not hard to figure out that it has had a strong influence on future hits like The X Files.
This one and the next episodeLegacy of Terror, were combined together and released as a television movie titled The Demon and The Mummy. The concept of the succubus was highly appreciated, so much so that episode 19, titled The Youth Killer, had a similar synopsis.
Zuni Fetish Doll – Trilogy of Terror (1975 Television Film)
Trilogy of Terror is a television movie, not a show. However, the Zuni Fetish Doll made the list because it is one of the most terrifying monsters to have appeared on television. The Zuni doll appears in the narrative Amelia, named for the title woman, in the film’s anthology of three horror stories.
Amelia was a young, self-sufficient woman who lived alone in a little apartment. She had lately purchased a fetish doll that resembled an aboriginal warrior, we hear. She got a note with the figurine that stated that the doll carried the ghost of a genuine soldier known only as ‘He Who Kills.’
Naturally, Amelia was unconcerned about it. However, as is a staple in horror films and shows, the chain that served as the entrapment fell off, unleashing the spirit in the house to wreak havoc.
Amelia tried to run away, but the fanged teethed entity chased her through her apartment. She attempted various things to destroy the doll before finally trapping it in her oven. Assuming that the doll was dead, Amelia opened the oven, but an unseen force took her over, giving her fanged teeth.
The fetish doll was smart, quick, and determined despite its little stature. Amelia eventually succumbed to its violent, nasty, and homicidal nature. While the first two chapters in the Trilogy of Terror may be underwhelming, the third instalment, which stars Karen Black as Amelia and the Zuni Fetish Doll, more than makes up for it.
What makes it so horrifying and terrifying is that it turns Amelia’s house into a hunting ground, plunging the poor girl into a pit of claustrophobia and terror. The Zuni Fetish Doll clearly influenced other horror anthologies featuring evil puppets like Child’s Play.
Graboid – Tremors TV Series
Tremors 3: Back to Perfection is the sequel to the 2001 film Tremors 3. The show depicts the happenings in Perfection Valley, as well as the struggles of those who try to coexist with El Blanco, an albino Graboid.
To oversimplify these ancient species, we could say Graboids are desert sharks. They’re giant elongated cylinder-shaped sandworms with radically altered bodies. They can reach a length of thirty feet and a diameter of six feet, weighing between ten and twenty tonnes.
As they live underground, they are sans eyes. Their head resembles an armored beak, and the mouth opens in a flower-like fashion. It consists of two sets of jaws and has mandibles on each side. Furthermore, they have three long tentacles that can grow up to ten feet. These tentacles are used to grab the prey, and that’s how the creatures got their name.