Video Game Monsters That Will Haunt Us For The Rest Of Our Lives

Video games are fun, but are they scary? Yes. The answer is yes. Games are freaking horrifying. Some games scare you so much, you won't be able to sleep for weeks (and not just because you can't pry yourself away from the controller). We've gathered some of the video game horrors that haunt us ... to this day.

Silent Hill is the scariest video game series imaginable. It's basically every Freudian nightmare rolled together, and then excreted on a town filled with ghosts and the unborn abortion of Satan. Somehow, though, for everyone, the Red Pyramid Thing rises to the top of the terror list. Well, all right, while that's his real name, you might know him better as Pyramid Head. Yep, the murdering, raping monster is the terror of our every waking moment, because why the hell wouldn't he be?

Listen: once you've included faceless mannequins terrorizing us and then have them raped by a creature who looks like Goya's depiction of Hell, then you've got us pretty well pants-wettingly terrified. It's a wonder anyone bought Silent Hill, let alone the sequels. Maybe they're all scared of upsetting Pyramid Head ... err, Red Pyramid Head. After all, he does follow your character ... forever. Without stopping.

Metal Gear Solid was one of the top defining games of the early 3D age. There's crazy stealth, plot twists galore, and so many tasty mind-screws to chew on, but one of the most deliciously creepy bits would have to be Psycho Mantis — the telepathic boss who not only can read Snake's mind, but your mind as well.

See, at one point, he asks you to put your controller down and he uses his "powers" to shake it. All right, that's pretty neat, showing off the rumble, but we've felt rumble before at this point. But then ... Psycho Mantis tells you what video games you've been playing. He tells you things that no one would know ... unless, of course, they had read your mind. Or, well your memory card, which of course is what he did. Got a Castlevania: Symphony of the Night save file? (Of course you did, that game was the bomb.) He calls you out on it.

Later, he stops your character from moving unless you plug your controller into another port. You have to physically do things in the real world to beat him. Even knowing the trick, though, a villain who can attack you — coming at you even through the Fourth Wall — is one of the most terrifying baddies ever.

When Five Nights at Freddy's was quietly released, most people didn't think much of it. So? You're trapped in a creepier version of Chuck E. Cheese. Who cares? Besides, Chuck E. Cheese is plenty creepy on its own, thankyouverymuch.

Then ... people played it. These animatronics who are ... haunted? Possessed by the ghosts of a serial killer? Possessed by dead children? Just flat out evil? Whatever they are, these animatronics are horrifying. All you can do is sit in the room, checking different cameras, after listening to the horror that befell all the other people in your line of work. You sit there, in darkness, waiting and silently watching through the cameras, hoping that maybe tonight they won't move, that maybe tonight they won't come for you. Praying that you can catch them in time. Because if somehow, they sneak up on you and catch you unaware ... then it's lights out for you. That all comes before, of course, one of the most shocking jump scares you'll ever experience in your life. Have fun!

Zombies are a perennial favorite in the annals of horror. Of course, most games that feature them depict them as huge monstrous creatures — or decaying corpses. Most games don't depict them like Legend of Zelda did. From the ReDeads' first appearance in Ocarina of Time, as one of the first things you encounter when you arrive from the past to find a world gone wrong, they're terrible. They're monsters who weep over their own dead, whose very gaze freezes you in the tracks, until they munch down on your skull.

Of course, that's not even the worst part — that would be the implication that these zombies are all the people you were unable to save, now polluted beyond recognition and damned to do nothing but hunt and feed and make more of themselves, not even stopping to mourn those lost and gone forever. Struck down, by you. Damned, by you. And what do you have to say about that, Link?

"KYA! HYAAA! HAH! HUAAAAA!"

That's what we thought. You monster.

Mother Brain is an evil AI that's controlling a facility, working to end your life, while controlling the metroids which she'll unleash throughout the galaxy. But she's just a brain — that seems easy to beat, right? Well, no, because she's a brain with spikes and a single eye that shoots beams of light at you, while psychically controlling an entire room to blast you to bits. Sure, the graphics in the original NES game left a lot to be desired, so maybe you didn't know you were fighting an evil laser-brain from space. But then came ... Super Metroid.

There, to the backdrop of the eeriest boss music we've ever heard, we learn Mother Brain has a body – her brain forming a mold that has absorbed the power of thousands, and now she can move and roar and stomp around, and she destroys you with barely any effort. You're only saved due to a giant baby metroid almost killing her. But then she comes back, murdering the adorable baby 'troid in the process. It's only through absorbing its power (don't ask, games are weird), that Samus finally gains the power to end Mother Brain once and for all.

No matter which version of her you fight, however, she is at her heart a giant brain, pulsing with power and evil, spikes, and control. And that's the epitome of creepy.

Nemesis is, simply put, what he sounds like: your ultimate enemy in Resident Evil (or, at least, in Resident Evil 3). He's huge, monstrous, and seemingly unstoppable. He has a black trenchoat, a face like old meat, and teeth like a tiger. In a game filled with terrifying zombies, he's the worst of them. If you try hard enough, you can defeat him ... but even if you do, he comes back. There's no way to actually finish him off. As the game progresses, he becomes even more mutated, even more terrifying, and even more monstrous. He even gets a rocket launcher at one point! What are you supposed to do against a monster like that, aside from run?

The only thing that really defeats this monstrous, intelligent demon is a nuclear blast. Think about that — to defeat him, you need a nuke. Although, as we know, whenever he's defeated ... he comes back.

Mother/Earthbound is a weird, weird series about a bunch of weird things. It's one of the most beloved Nintendo games ever, with one of the weirdest endings ever. See, there's a giant creature called Giygas coming to destroy everything. You and your friends travel to beat it. Pretty standard so far. However, the last level is a bit ... weird. It kinda, almost, sorta looks like you're travelling through a human being. In fact, if we didn't know better, we'd say you're going into the monster's mother's womb, in order to kill it as a fetus. And wait, is that the monster? As a fetus? Are we nothing more but preventative care? You're literally killing the super-evil Nintendo version of Hitler before he's born!

And still, even in this fetal state, he's one of the toughest bosses you'll ever face. Combine the body horror of us literally invading a body to kill its fetus, and the fact that the fetus is one of the strongest things we've ever fought, and you've got one of the most horrifying monsters ever: Giygas, or Abortion Death Baby.

The Dino Piranha, on its own, isn't a creature that terrifies us — there's nothing horrifying about how it looks or its moves. No, this one bothers us because of our actions. See, this battle begins by you aggressively hatching an egg, at which point a baby monster — its shell still on its body — starts attacking you. Because duhhhh, it's a scared baby that you literally attacked before it hatched. But your response to that is just *mumbled Italian garbage* and repeatedly whacking it in the brain with its own spiked tail.

That's right — in Super Mario Galaxy, you go ahead and hatch a baby ... and then brutally murder it. It's fun for the whole (Manson) family! We know Mario indiscriminately slaughters people, and yeah we've had eggs for breakfast, but this is like the ultimate nightmare of an abortion. Make the kid be fully born, and then kill it. Mario is the real monster here, and no we will not get over it.

You know the best part of video games is? There's always a way to win! Seriously, if you fail, just reset and try again. You can always beat the villain. Except ... in the case of the Dhaka. He's a force unleashed by your actions in the last game, and he's always hunting you. He does nothing but force himself relentlessly after you. But, wait, you can beat him! You can turn back time. You can destroy anything ... but not the Dhaka. There is no way to beat him — all you can do is run and run and run and run, and hope you can get away. In that way, he's a lot like death. Aren't video games fun?

Even if you could fight him, he'd still be terrifying. He looks like Satan got into heavy metal and then somehow got even gnarlier. Plus, he's literally the repercussions of your character meddling with time. He's the embodiment of the futility of fighting fate.

Asura's Wrath is a criminally underappreciated game featuring one of the coolest bosses ever: Gongen Wyzen. You can watch the boss battle above, but in case your mind can't fathom what you're seeing, here it is. Gongen is the size of a planet. Strike that. He is the size of multiple planets, and you fight him. He's an angry god come to rain down judgement. If he wanted, he could smack the moon at you and what would you do? (You'd punch it back obviously, but it's still scary!).

He's like Galactus, but there's no Reed Richards here to save us — just you. Most video games deal with world-ending threats, but few of them have ever had a villain so monstrous, so powerful, that his world-ending attack was to, basically, poke the planet. Want to know why? Because that's horrifying. That's why Gongen Wyzen rules ... in a terrifying, horrifying way.

Tabuu is the last enemy in the solo run of Super Smash Bros. Brawl. He's tougher than almost anyone, and looks like black holes mixed with a bolt of electricity to make something to compete with Death. All the bad things in the game — from the characters being kidnapped, to their worlds being messed up — is all his fault. You fight him in a seemingly voidlike place, and even then, it's almost impossible to defeat him.

But that's not the scariest — what makes him scariest is that he isn't from any Nintendo game. Unlike Master Hand, he has no explanation for his appearance. He's not the hand of a kid playing with toys, he's not one of the Nintendo characters ... he's something other, from another time and another space. Worse than that, though, is how he seems to be able to control the game itself. If anything, Tabuu is the literal personification of a glitch, wrecking the entire fabric of the world. And what's more terrifying than discovering mid-way through your playthrough that there's a game-destroying glitch? Nothing, that's what.