10 Great Sci-Fi Movie Villains Who Only Appeared Once

10. Those Spiders - The Mist

Monsters in the eponymous pea-souper are, in fact, the least of our protagonist’s worries in this bleak Stephen King adaptation from 2007. Frequently and rightfully listed as one of the decade’s best underseen gems, The Shawshank Redemption helmer Frank Darabont’s dark psychological horror proves to be more concerned with the dangers of groupthink, small town prejudice, and herd mentality, as well as nihilism and its attendant pitfalls, than any actual beasties creeping through the titular mist.

Despite this, we really wouldn’t want to walk into any of this film’s sparsely seen creatures on the way home from a night on the town, and we really wish we got another chance to see their impressively creepy design onscreen. Some viewers were most impressed by the skyscraper sized thing encountered near the tail end of this flick, but for our money it’s the acid-web spewing giant spiders which got the furthest under our skin.

Massive but not too big to seem utterly unbelievable, these once-glimpsed monsters are also shown to lay eggs under the skin of the unfortunate—and still living—victims, leaving their offspring to eat them from the outside in as they are paralysed in place.

Yeah, on second thought maybe we’ve seen enough of them.