There’s no shortage of horror movies out there, and while they cover a wide variety of spooky topics, the majority of them tend to have a villain. A new study by Claims has ranked the Top 10 scariest horror movie villains of all time, so you know which horror movies to binge on over the next few days until Halloween.
Claims conducted the study by analyzing each villain’s death counts [via List of Deaths Wiki], as well as how many jump scares occurred during the films they’re featured in [via Where’s the Jump]. The sample looked at 162 horror films, and a minimum 10 jump scares had to have occurred for it to count in the study. Therefore, Claims narrowed the list down to 52 films, 32 of which were franchises, in order to select the villains.
The “villain effectiveness score,” or how terrifying they are, was then calculated for each villain by determining an average between the average number of deaths per movie and the average number of jump scares per movie, with 10 being the highest score. The results found that the villain ranked No. 10 had an effectiveness score of 6.29, while the one at the top of the list had a score of 8.71.
Scroll below to see the Top 10 scariest horror movie villains according to Claims’ Villain Effectiveness Study. Each image will include the movie or franchise they’re from, as well as the score they were given.
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