From teeth covered aparitions to mutated flatworms, television has been home to some of the most creative monsters of all time.
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Since the dawn of television, the small screen has been home to a variety of monsters designed to terrify viewers and boost sales for nightlight manufacturers. These foul beasts come in every shape and size. Some covered in fur, others dripping with slime, but all doing their best to delight horror fans and scar children too young to be watching. But while some monsters take a paint-by-numbers approach to scaring — glowing eyes, sharp fangs, and wicked claws — others are more creative. These creatures aren’t content to hide in the closet and yell “Boo!” but would rather employ more inspired tactics.
We’ve put together a list of the most imaginative of these TV terrors. Whether mutant parasites or fungus-stuffed revenants, these ghouls delight in finding new and unique ways to scare viewers. So turn off the lights, and cozy up to the screen as we present the 10 most creative monsters to ever possess a television set.
1) Tooth Child – Channel Zero
Syfy’s Channel Zero was a horror anthology for the creepypasta generation. While the series lasted for four seasons, each based on a different online ghost story, its lasting legacy is Season 1 antagonist the “Tooth Child.” Candle Cove, based on a creepypasta of the same name, introduced the world to a horrifying golem crafted from thousands of children’s teeth.
You may not remember Channel Zero, but chances are you’ve seen the Tooth Child once or twice. The dental demon still lurks in a liminal internet space, waiting to pop up and scare the life out of anyone not careful with their Google image searches.
2) Gulper – Fallout
The Fallout video game series is home to some gruesome mutations, but Prime Video’s Fallout streaming series might have it beat. The Gulper is a human/salamander hybrid large enough to swallow a human whole. On the outside, his grotesque beast resembles a bus-sized axolotl covered in long, fleshy tendrils. Inside is somehow worse — a large gaping maw lined with human fingers all the way down its throat.
Being eaten by a large predator is already scary enough, but the thought of thousands of fingers grabbing at you and slowly dragging you into oblivion is the stuff of nightmares.
3) Mouse Monster – Creepshow
For four seasons, Shudder’s Creepshow has been doing its part to fill the same niche that Tales from the Crypt once occupied. This campy, lowbrow horror anthology is more concerned with having a bloody good time than scratching a cerebral itch like The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror. Nothing represents this unserious but still horrifying tone like the Mouse Monster from Season 4’s Twenty Minutes with Cassandra
The Mouse Monster — a human-sized manifestation of a mouse the main character caught in a glue trap — isn’t super creative on the outside. The horror makeup, while expertly done, resembles any hairy, werewolf-style monster. What earns the mouse monster a place on this list is its penchant for philosophical discussion in lieu of physical violence. While the monster turns out to be a physical representation of an internal fear, taking the hulking chatterbox at face value is a surreal and fairly unique experience.
4) Flukeman – The X-Files
The X-Files may have ended up an alien conspiracy show, but early seasons followed more of a monster-of-the-week format. The best — or should we say, worst? — of these weekly ghouls was Flukeman, a Chernobyl-born cross between a man and a parasite. Flukeman only appeared in a single Season 2 episode, but it was enough to make an impression. To this day, the mutant worm-man stands out as one of the creepiest monsters to plague Agents Scully and Mulder and proof that X-Files creator Chris Carter has a sickness deep within his mind that no amount of therapy can ever cure.
5) Weeping Angels – Doctor Who
While not a horror show in the traditional sense, Doctor Who has been terrifying viewers since the first Dalek raised its toilet plunger in anger. Though many frightful villains have menaced The Doctor over the years, The Weeping Angels are easily the scariest of all. These statue-like creatures subvert the childlike belief that as long as you don’t look at the monster, it can’t hurt you by presenting a monster that can only be held at bay by staring directly at it.
The minute a potential victim stops looking — even if it’s a momentary blink — the Weeping Angels strike. Not content to simply kill their prey, the Angels banish them to the past and consume the potential energy they would have exerted over a lifetime if left alone. Weeping Angels aren’t just creative, they’re scary as hell, making them the definitive Doctor Who monster of the modern era.
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6) The Gentlemen – Buffy the Vampire Slayer
Despite the title, Buffy the Vampire Slayer often featured non-vampire monsters, one of the most unique being The Gentlemen. Bald Demons with rictus grins and tailored suits, who floated inches above the ground rather than walking, the Gentlemen were fear incarnate. The Gentlemen had only one weakness — the human voice. To get around this, the silent villains would steal the voices of all their victims before surgically removing their hearts.
Dressed to the nines with a permanent shark’s grin, the Gentlemen are not only one of the weirdest monsters on the list but also one of the creepiest.
7) The Moving Finger – Monsters
Monsters was a late ’80s horror anthology that flew under most people’s radar. So there’s a good chance that you’ve never seen, or even heard of, the Moving Finger. Based on a short story by Stephen King — admittedly not one of his best — “The Moving Finger” was the very last episode of Monsters to ever air, which may have been why it was allowed to be so weird. The Moving Finger is just that, a finger, albeit one discovered poking out of a sink drain.
When poor Howard Mitla finds the finger in his bathroom sink, he first tries to dissolve it with drain cleaner. Unfortunately, that only seems to make the finger angry as it snakes its way out of the drain and attacks Mitla. Man and finger do battle until Mitla takes a hedge trimmer to the offending digit. Covered in blood with no finger in sight, Mitla can finally relax … until a four-fingered hand pops out of his toilet.
The Crypt Keeper – Tales from the Crypt
Tales from the Crypt was home to many entertaining monsters over the years, but none of them could hold a candle to the one hosting the show. The Crypt Keeper as a concept may have come from the original Tales from the Crypt comic book, but it was the TV series that made the character the beloved horror icon he is today. Originally a wrinkly old man in a cloak, HBO decided to turn the Keeper into a wisecracking puppet designed to look like a rotting corpse.
It’s hard to decide which of the Crypt Keeper’s origins is crazier. In canon, he’s the offspring of Enoch, the two-faced man, a sideshow attraction, and a 4,000-year-old mummy. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the Crypt Keeper puppet was rumored to be constructed from the remains of a discarded Chucky animatronic. Either way, the Crypt Keeper is one of a kind in the world of TV monsters and deserves to make a comeback.
9) Clickers – The Last of Us
After decades of the same, bite-infected, shambling undead, zombies as a monster were in desperate need of a reboot. Enter the fungus-covered clickers. The Last of Us took the zombie apocalypse trope and added mushrooms for a new and, oddly, more realistic take on the walking dead.
Infected by a parasitic fungus known as cordyceps, clickers have lost all but the barest traces of humanity. Clickers’ faces are entirely covered in fungal growth, blocking their eyes and forcing them to develop a crude form of echolocation to catch their prey, hence the name clickers. While the Last of Us video games may have introduced the clickers, it was the HBO series that truly brought the grotesque creatures to life, resulting in a uniquely horrifying television oddity.
10) Demogorgan – Stranger Things
The Demogorgan took the eyeless horror of Xenomorphs to the next level by presenting a creature whose whole head is one giant mouth. Unlike most of the monsters on this list, the Demogorgon hails from a different dimension, explaining why it looks like nothing else on Earth. The coldly alien design, coupled with the beast’s ferocity and increased durability, makes the Demogorgon a surreal horror and one of the most creative TV monsters of the 21st century.
What do you think of our list? Agree, disagree? Let us know in the comments.
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