10 Messed Up Marvel Villains You Won't Believe Exist

6. Dark Beast

Dark Beast Marvel Comics 960x540
Marvel Comics

X-Men fans will be the first to tell you how even the main, 'good' Earth-616 Beast has regressed into a bit of an ass over the last few decades, so you can imagine just how much of a rotten piece of work Dark Beast is by contrast.

Whereas the Henry McCoy we know and (used to) love boasts bright blue fur and a penchant for the dramatic, the Beast of Earth-295 is a straight up monster. Hailing from the Age of Apocalypse reality, Dark Beast was able to make the jump across to the main Marvel Universe and has continued to be a threat ever since, making Mister Sinister look positively quaint - at least in mad scientist terms - by comparison.

Dark Beast was bad enough during the Age of Apocalypse - where he delighted in torturing and experimenting on his fellow mutants for En Sabah Nur - but he found renewal in the mainstream Marvel timeline. He once even kidnapped the main Beast, painted his own fur blue and impersonated him in order to infiltrate the X-Men, later killing a random civilian because he wasn't able to finish killing all of the original Beast's friends and family.

The one constant with Dark Beast, though, is that he delights in torture. He embodies evil science from top to bottom, but presented with a familiar face. That's genuinely unnerving no matter which way you cut it.

Content Producer/Presenter

WhatCulture's very own resident movie guy, Ewan has been working in the content creation biz for over 10 years now, having started as a freelance contributor to WhatCulture Gaming all the way back in 2015. After graduating with a First-Class Honours in History from Northumbria University in 2017 (where he won a prize for a totally killer dissertation on the Watergate years), Ewan took on the role of Comics Editor at WhatCulture and quickly developed WhatCulture Comics into one of the biggest superhero-focused channels on YouTube. He followed this with a brief hiatus at Screen Rant in 2021, where he worked across the Gaming and Film sections as a writer and editor, before returning to WhatCulture as a Senior Content Producer / Presenter in 2023. He started his own podcast, We Love Dad Movies, in 2022, and has contributed several written pieces to the Eisner-nominated comics website Shelfdust as well. In his current role, Ewan incorporates his love of cinema, comic books, and history into written pieces and video essays for WhatCulture's Film & TV channel, as well as WhatCulture Gaming and WhatCulture Horror, with a particular focus on nineties-era Dad Movies, old school Westerns, and Golden Age Hollywood Noir. John Carpenter is his fave, and he thinks Batman Beyond should never have been cancelled. If that's your vibe, you'll probably like his stuff.