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For every Jason Voorhees or Michael Myers constantly racking up high body counts, there is also a horror movie villain that isn’t actually all that good at knocking off victims, even if they have appeared in multiple films across a franchise.
8 Ghostface – Scream
Ghostface is one of the more famous serial killers in film history. That’s despite the fact that the identity of Ghostface, unlike that of any other famous movie serial killer, changes with every new Scream film.
Ghostface makes this list because no matter who is doing the killing, and no matter how large a body count they manage to rack up, they’re not that good at it. Countless times in countless chase scenes, Ghostface has tripped, been knocked down, or even beaten up by the intended victim. Ghostface may get a lot of kills, but it’s about quality, not quantity.
7 Minnie Castavet – Rosemary’s Baby
The legacy of Rosemary’s Baby is a hefty one in the horror genre. The unsettling story inspired many more legendary films such as The Shining, but the primary villain, Minnie Castavet, doesn’t actually kill anybody. Or so it seems.
While there is one death, and one death only, throughout the film, it appears more to be a result of Minnie, her husband, and many more characters in the film worshipping the devil, who does the killing in her stead. Of course, this doesn’t mean that she is incapable of killing if she wanted to, but as a frail elderly woman with no apparent powers given to her by the devil, it seems unlikely she’d be great at physical murder.
6 Annabelle – The Conjuring
Another horror movie trope is that of the murderous doll. From Goosebumps and Child’s Play to the infamous Annabelle, which has appeared in her own trilogy of spin-off films as well as The Conjuring film that introduced her initially.
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While Annabelle has appeared in many films, there are very few deaths in any of them. The Conjuring and Annabelle ComesHome are both completely death-free, even if they are two of the best Conjuring universe films. A doll, even a possessed one, doesn’t make a very effective serial killer outside of Chucky.
5 Jack Torrance – The Shining
This one is a little unfair since Jack Torrance was fighting against the possession of the demonic force in the Overlook hotel. It is more the hotel itself that couldn’t take control of Jack’s mind well enough to defeat the young family.
But since Jack is the face of the evil in the film, it is fair to say that he isn’t a very good killer. The Shining is iconic for several reasons in the genre, but only the unfortunate Dick Halloran meets his maker throughout the runtime, despite being an amazing horror movie supporting character. If you can’t get rid of a child-like Danny then you aren’t getting ranked highly on the serial killing ladder.
4 Regan MacNeil – The Exorcist
It is often the case that possessed people, being an ineffective tool for murder in the hands of whatever force is acting upon them, aren’t the greatest killers. Regan, a child possessed by the demon Pazuzu, terrifies her mother and some priests but doesn’t actually do a lot of evil throughout the film’s runtime.
Threatening the life of this child and then leaping from Regan into Father Karras is all the evil that Pazuzu manages to do in the film. Karras leaps from the window upon becoming possessed to get rid of the demon and dies, but that is all. Despite all of this, The Exorcist does remain timeless.
3 The Babadook – The Babadook
While a terrifying demonic entity, the Babadook was also surprisingly ineffective at killing. While it managed to terrify Amelia and her son Sam and eventually possessed Amelia, she was another case of an ineffectively possessed killer and couldn’t manage to kill her son while possessed by the Babadook.
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The Babadook did manage to use her to kill their dog Bugsy, but that was all that it managed to achieve before being expelled and forced to live in a basement eating earthworms. Not the most victorious an ending a horror villain has ever achieved.
2 Annie Wilkes – Misery
Annie Wilkes is another unassuming, totally ordinary horror villain. Except that she is totally and completely insane. When she gets the chance to trap her favorite writer in her house under the pretense of helping him recover from a car crash, she takes it and keeps him trapped there, breaking his other leg violently.
However, she never kills him. She doesn’t want to for the majority of the film. The terror of Annie is completely psychological, but she probably wouldn’t have the strength or skill to become an expert serial killer even if it was her desire. Because of Annie and the amazing performance of her by Kathy Bates, Misery is still a great horror movie.
1 John Kramer – Saw
John Kramer is one of the most effective and brutal villains in the history of the horror genre. His traps that force people to sacrifice their bodies or die are brutal in nature and constantly cause a huge number of deaths in the Saw films.
However, Kramer believes that the deaths of these people were of their own making in not being able to commit the self-mutilation that Kramer’s traps force them to go through. Therefore, in his own mind, he has never killed anyone in his films. As an elderly man with cancer, it is unlikely he’d be able to start physically murdering anybody even if he tried, but he could arguably make the greatest horror movie killers list if he changed his ideology. He could also be an intriguing choice for a horror prequel.
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