20 Greatest Ever Horror Movie Icons

A horror film is only as good as its bad guy. Thus films with nonsensical bad guys - like the mangle in Tobe Hooper's The Mangler, the (titular) Leprechaun and the ridiculous Fuad Ramses in HG Lewis' Blood Feast - end up being as pathetic as their villains. Although Lewis would go on to create a really good bad guy in Montag the Magician in The Wizard of Gore. Montag is inherently evil. He kills all of the women who participate in his stage act. He wants to cause death on a larger scale and he spends vast swathes of the movie having a tripped out self-debate on the nature of reality. With his bushy eyebrows and greying hair (which changes from scene to scene depending on how much talcum powder has been used), Montag is a fabulous trash horror icon. It is this degree of bad guy fabulousness that this article seeks to promote. All of the heavy weight horror names are here - characters that linger long in your memory after the film is watched. The films chosen in the list are usually the horror icon's first appearance. A full discussion of the icon's character - i.e. dipping into later franchise works for more information - has been dismissed for the sake of brevity. These are the definitive horror icon's movies and they have also been chosen for their excellence. No duds on this list.