10 Worst Horror Movie Characters Of 2022

There's no getting away from it - the majority of 2022 has not been kind to the horror genre.

The bulk of this year's offerings from cinema's scariest genre have been a gloomy medley of maddeningly played out characters, drab new faces and a selection of performances that sap the audience's will to live - decidedly not in a good way.

While there have been a few bright spots - spectacular slasher X, the outrageously impressive Prey, and the always magnificent Jordan Peele's Nope standing as the finer offerings from this year - the overall wider pickings from 2022 have ranged from utterly average to notably dismal. Perhaps more dishearteningly, several of these films utilized massive promotional campaigns in the build up to their release, building fanbase anticipation to a frenzied fever pitch before whipping the ladder out from them in a depressingly uninspired manner.

Regrettably, much of this can be attributed to what can only be described as a flimsy selection of characters within these films. Characters make or break a movie. When they're terrible, the film is usually dead in the water before it even has a chance to get started; 2022 underlined that horror as a genre is no exception to this status quo.

Dr. Nate Samuels is not 2022's very worst horror character by any stretch of the imagination. Idris Elba portrays a father who must protect his teenage daughters from the film's titular beast - a terrifying, man-eating lion.

Beast makes the most of its very limited premise with some suitably thrilling action sequences and a carefully cultivated atmosphere of tension. Make no mistake, though, this is a relentlessly dumb movie - was anybody really asking for a killer lion flick in 2022? At a time where the message of conservation is so vitally important, such a premise seems laughably misjudged and out of touch.

Elba's character primarily lands himself on this list due to the fact that audiences have come to expect so much more from the actor himself. The Englishman is a critically acclaimed, A-list performer; watching him in what essentially amounts to a guilty pleasure-esque B-movie is a jarring experience after seeing him appear across multiple blockbuster franchises. Beast ultimately feels like the type of movie that Nicolas Cage would agree to do after glancing over the script for approximately eight seconds - accordingly, this feels like a bizarrely misjudged career move from the man who brought the brooding DCI Luther to life.

Samuels is hardly a disastrous character, but this writer expected far more from an Idris Elba-led horror effort.