The most terrifying TV monsters

No modern TV show is more synonymous with monsters than “Stranger Things.” We could have gone with a few different notable monsters. However, it all started with the Demogorgon. Without the Demogorgon, maybe we don’t get the “Stranger Things” phenomenon as we know it.

There have been a few zombie shows at this point, and we can’t really give them to any specific TV show. Then again, maybe we can. “The Walking Dead” was one of the most popular TV shows of the new millennium. It was a huge hit, it spawned a couple of sequels, and it helped popularize zombies as monsters on TV.

In “Ghostbusters,” Slimer, aka Onionhead, makes an outsized impact. The guy doesn’t talk. He’s not crucial. He just eats a bunch of food and slimes Venkman. In the “Ghostbusters” cartoon, though, Slimer is back. Not only that, he can talk, and he’s friends with the Ghostbusters. To many kids of a certain generation, this was their first exposure to Slimer, making seeing the 1984 film a bit of a surprise.

For the ‘90s kids out there, we have to shout out the Nickelodeon cartoon “Aaahh!!! Real Monsters.” The show was teaming with monsters, but the one that sticks out to us in our mind is Krumm. He’s the one who held his eyes in his hands. You remember him, right?

Swamp Thing is a DC comics character, a sort of plant elemental man who defends the swamp from evil. Don’t mess with the environment around Swamp Thing. The character was at the center of a USA show in the early ‘90s that ran for 72 episodes. There was also apparently a Swamp Thing show in 2019, but the one from the ‘90s is the one we remember, even if it didn’t have the biggest budget.

“Lost” was a phenomenon, but in time people lost more and more patience with it. Maybe by the end, you weren’t happy with “Lost.” Over the years, though, it created some iconic characters and also moments. A big part of that? The “Smoke Monster,” one of the supernatural elements of the island the plane crashed on.

“Dr. Who” has gone to the monster well many times. Hey, the show has been on for decades. While a lot of the baddies are alien in nature, some are definitely more on the monster end of things. Aside from the Daleks, though, arguably no villain from “Dr. Who” has captured minds more than the Weeping Angels. They seem like statues, but the moment nobody is looking at a Weeping Angel, they move with tremendous speed, growing more menacing in appearance. Before you know it, that Weeping Angel has gotten you.

It’s perhaps the quintessential “Twilight Zone” story, which is really saying something. A nervous airline passenger, in the original TV show played by William Shatner, sees a gremlin on the wing of the plane. Nobody else sees it, though, and the passenger’s high-strung nature further leads the others on the plane to dismiss him. Of course, Shatner is right, but can he convince anybody that is the case?

While the second season of “The Terror” was a misfire, the first season, the one actually based on the Dan Simmons novel, was a hit for fans of stories of exploration, survival, and also monsters. To polar exploration, ships become trapped by ice, which is bad enough as is. Then, they have to deal with the tuunbaq, effectively a monstrous version of a polar bear.

Bigfoot is perhaps the quintessential American monster, a cryptozoological creature on par with the Loch Ness Monster and the Yeti. As a result, the foremost of the sasquatch has appeared in TV several times. Once, on “The Six Million Dollar Man,” he was played by Andre the Giant. Then, of course, there’s the sitcom “Harry and the Hendersons” as well.

“Buffy the Vampire Slayer” teemed with monsters, but based on our research, none struck a chord quite like The Gentlemen. These monsters-of-the-week made an outsized impact to be sure. In the iconic “Buffy” episode “Hush,” The Gentlemen come to Sunnyvale and steal everybody’s voices. Why? So they can’t scream as The Gentleman cuts out their hearts. Yeesh.

Do recall that the first adaptation of Stephen King’s novel “It” was a TV miniseries. Hey, even turning it into a film required two movies (and cutting out a lot of weird King stuff as well). Tim Curry’s version of Pennywise the Clown was able to pave a path to the nightmares of TV viewers and turned Pennywise into a readily recognizable monster from pop culture.

“Trilogy of Terror” was a 1975 made-for-TV film that left a mark on the minds of many at the time, particularly any children who happened to watch these three tales based on Richard Matheson stories. Karen Black starred in all three stories, but the one that stood out was “Amelia.” In this one, Black’s character comes into the possession of a wooden doll that, years before “Child’s Play,” contains the spirit of a murderer. The doll comes to life, and the image of that living, violent doll coming after Black became iconic.

Like “Buffy,” “The X-Files” gave us no shortage of options for monsters. Some of them scary, some of them actually funny, most of them pretty gross. The Flukeman made a mark by being super creepy and gross even by the standards of “The X-Files.” A Chernobyl mutation, the Flukeman takes to the sewers of New Jersey and really does some damage before being stopped.

Well, “Monster” is right in his name. Cookie Monster is certainly chiller than most, if not all, of the monsters on this list. The blue, furry Muppet is friendly to most. He just craves cookies, because, well, he loves cookies. Back in the day,  maybe you would have had to fear your cookie cache being eaten by a ravenous Cookie Monster, but even now that isn’t a worry, as the monster has learned that cookies are a “sometimes food.”

You, your friends, and your talking dog are cruising in your custom van. Suddenly, you stumble upon, say, an abandoned amusement park or a menacing mansion. It turns out a ghost or ghoul or some sort of monster has scared everybody away. You have a mystery on your hands! When all is said and done, and after much chasing, you pull a rubber mask off this so-called “monster” and it turns out to be a person! More often than not, a person who was trying to scare folks off for some real estate reason. Does somebody have a vested interest in a business failing or in a house being on the market? Odds are even they have a monster suit in the closet, waiting to be busted out.