10 Horror Superheroes Who Give Villains Nightmares

These heroes may be on the side of good, but that doesn't make them any less terrifying.

Spawn character
Image Comics

Who doesn't love it when a bad guy plays for the good team?

There's almost a certain poetry to it, when someone who wouldn't look out of place in Castle Grayskull suddenly decides that fighting for the side of rainbows and puppies would be a solid career move. But it's one thing for a normal bad guy to turn out to be on the side of the angels, it's another for someone who looks downright friggin SCARY to be doing so.

Horror has been a part of comics practically since they first became a thing. So it only makes sense that a lot of superheroes have the starting point of "hey, why don't we just make the horror monster the good guy and cut out the middleman?"

There are tons of superheroes out there that fit this mold, and we're gonna be looking a the ten best of them. These heroes would be right at home stalking a bunch of hapless teenagers in a cheesy horror B-movie, but for whatever reason, they're the hero of their respective tales.

10. Deadman

Spawn character
DC Comics

You ever stop and think about how horrifying the idea of possession is? We're gonna guess yes considering how often it's portrayed as such in media, so it should come as no surprise that Boston Brand, the Deadman, is on this list.

Boston's whole deal is that he was a trapeze artist in life, until someone with a hook with a hand decided to practice his marksmanship skills while Boston was performing...with Boston's face as the target.

Now he wanders the world as a ghost, dealing with all kinds of supernatural problems as The Deadman. He's mainly at the bottom of the list due to the fact that the moment he opens his mouth (that easy going thick Boston accent takes most of the menace out of him), but considering he needs to possess people in order to interact with the real world, that's still quite a hurdle to get over.

But even besides that, Boston has been around for quite some time, so he knows how to leverage his ghostly status to scare his enemies into giving him what he wants. You don't mess with the Deadman.

Contributor
Contributor

John Tibbetts is a novelist in theory, a Whatculture contributor in practice, and a nerd all around who loves talking about movies, TV, anime, and video games more than he loves breathing. Which might be a problem in the long term, but eh, who can think that far ahead?