The Villains That Horror Fans Find Strangely Endearing

Who's your favorite horror villain? Which demonic entity do you have a soft spot for? Which crazed killer do you feel you'd like personally if you met him, as long as he didn't hack you to pieces? This is the question posed in a recent thread on r/horror, the largest subreddit for fans of the horror genre.

User EmilioEarhart posed the question "Which horror villain do you like the most?" "To be clear, I'm not asking who you think is the best, or scariest, villain," they elaborated. "I'm wondering, who is it that, despite their evil or wickedness or whatever, you can't help but enjoy?"

EmilioEarhart cited an expert for the prompt: "Roger Ebert, when discussing The Devil's Rejects, said that one of the things he appreciated about the film was that he felt a contradictory affinity for the members of the Firefly family," the depraved backwoods killers from Rob Zombie's horror trilogy. "They're awful, terrible characters — but you just can't help but find them, in a very strange way, endearing."

"So: which psycho killer, evil piece of sh*t is your favorite, and why?" Horror fans chimed in with their picks, which we've collected here. (We would like to add our affinity for Hannibal Lecter. He's so intelligent and insightful! We stan a sophisticated psycho!)

LWMolver shouted out Mick Taylor (John Jarratt), the sadistic human hunter-trapper from the Wolf Creek franchise of two films and a TV series who's basically an evil version of Australian icons like Steve Irwin and Crocodile Dundee. "Seems like the kinda salt-of-the-earth bloke you could have coupla pints with, maybe sing a few songs," LWMolver wrote. "Bursting with affable Aussie charm (and psycho-sadist xenophobic brutality)."

Taylor is a gregarious, funny guy who tells interesting stories to lull his victims into a false sense of security before brutally killing them. "I feel like Mick has that personality of a cool uncle or that one friend of your dad's," wrote OnceInABluMoon. "I read that [John Jarratt] based Mick's personality a lot on his dad (the social side, not the killer part.)"

"The character's success is due largely to John Jarratt's amazing performance in the role... I can't imagine anyone else as Mick," LWMolver wrote. "I think the charm and terror of Mick both come from the fact that he is a very believable character — although his craziness and violence is ratcheted up for the sake of drama, there really are guys like him in Australia, and in any place in the world that harbours backcountry bigotries and simmering xenophobia," they added. "Which honestly, is pretty much everywhere."

The gory, preposterous supernatural horror series Hemlock Grove was one of Netflix's first original shows and is, for the most part, not fondly remembered — except by Reddit user MilaKsenia, who loves the devious femme fatale Olivia Godfrey (Famke Janssen), a vampiric, immortal upir from Slavic mythology. "I will die on the hill that Olivia Godfrey is the greatest female villain of all time," MilaKsenia wrote. "She was AMAZING and had the best one liners ever." ("I don't kill my children ... anymore. I've changed.")

Olivia did all kinds of awful things, from ripping her lover/dead husband's brother Norman's (Dougray Scott) heart out of his body to killing her babies that weren't born upirs to hypnotizing her family members into doing unspeakable acts. "She was truly evil but easily one of my favorite characters of all time," MilaKsenia wrote. "I would recommend that show just for her performance alone as bizarre as it is, it's really entertaining."

Vanessaquery agreed with MilaKsenia, writing, "I am right there with you on that hill! I've always loved Famke Janssen and she made me howl with laughter and horror so much in that show, especially with her dynamic with Joel de la Fuente," who played her mad scientist frenemy Dr. Johann Pryce.

Redditor Plastic-Pat really gets Michael Myers, the silent, masked slasher from the Halloween franchise. "Even though he never speaks a word, we get these little glimpses of his personality," Plastic-Pat wrote. "The Shape definitely has an extremely dark sense of humor, and a sense of showmanship."

According to Plastic-Pat, the showmanship really comes through in John Carpenter's 1978 original and David Gordon Green's 2018 sequel. "I mean, dressing in Bob's ghost costume to garrote Linda with a telephone cord was pretty showy by '78 standards," they wrote of the scene where Michael Myers kills the character played by '70s and '80s icon P.J. Soles.

Plastic-Pat also cited the "cop-o-lantern" from the 2018 Halloween as an example of Michael Myers' twisted sense of humor. In the scene, a cop car pulls up in front of Laurie Strode's (Jamie Lee Curtis) house, and her son-in-law Ray (Toby Huss) goes out to talk to the officers. He sees what looks like a jack-o'-lantern inside the car, and when he opens the door, he finds that one of the cops' face and scalp have been peeled off, and the mask-like piece of skin is being lit from the inside with a flashlight clutched in the other dead cop's hand. It's horrifically gruesome, and Myers staged the gruesome tableau in order to get the drop on whoever found it.

"Notice how he waited for Ray to see the cop-o-lantern before he moved in," Plastic-Pat wrote. "I bet he had himself a silent chuckle at Ray's expense. Michael seems to believe in 'everyone deserves a good scare on Halloween.'"