13 Frightening Moments In Games That Live In Our Heads Rent Free

There are a lot of iconic, memorable villains on this list, but I think the scariest things in video games are the things that play closest to the things I find the scariest in real life. And for me, that’s sharks. Not only do some of them eat people, and I live in a country where that’s a real, actual danger (and I’ve had my run-ins with them before, which hasn’t helped!), but it’s the fact they’re so hidden, so invisible, just lurking there beneath the waves. One second you could be surfing, the next you’re missing a leg.

So I get pretty damn scared whenever there are sharks in a video game! Assassin’s Creed Black Flag’s underwater sections were a nightmare, and I even struggle when Wind Waker’s cartoony sharks knock you off your boat. But one video game shark scares me more than any other, and that’s Half-Life’s. It’s fast, the first-person viewpoint means you never see it coming, it’s deadly, and you’re trapped in a really small place with it. All the ingredients I need to make me absolutely shit my pants. —Luke Plunkett

The name alone is perturbing enough, but then you see the headcrab in action. Its meek body scuttling across the floor, leaping toward your cranium at every opportunity it gets. It’s so gross! Part crab, roughly the size of a pumpkin, and the same fleshy color as a human scalp, this grotesque parasitoid doesn’t just want a little bite. It wants your whole body, actually, as it commandeers your motor functions when it bites down on your skull. Whatever consciousness you had will soon be replaced because the headcrab, should it latch on, turns you into a damn zombie. And once the zombification is done, your stomach cavity will be swapped out with a gaping, sharp-toothed mouth and your fingers will grow into lengthy talons. Yuck. —Levi Winslow

It’s hard not to think about batshit crazy scary moments from gamers’ pasts and not unlocking the suppressed memory of The Twins from Red Barrels’ first-person survival game, Outlast. Although the game has its fair share of equally freakish baddies, two cannibalistic brothers stalking you around every corner of David Cage’s wet dream of a mental asylum, with their dicks out like it’s going out of style, takes the cake every freaking time. Truly, an unrivaled display of caucasity. —Isaiah Colbert

Little Nightmares is one creepy-ass game. Every being in it is some kinda monstrosity, either deformed, deranged, or both. And the Janitor is no exception here. Though blinded by the flesh of his scalp, his hearing is extraordinarily precise. While slowed due to truncated leg length, his elongated arms give him plenty of reach. And despite not looking it, on account of his pale and chalky skin, he’s pretty strong, crushing your puny little body the moment he gets ahold of you. The encounter with the Janitor is truly unsettling as you play a dangerous game of cat-and-mouse, hoping to escape with your life and limbs still intact while he gropes every crevice looking for you. The game gave me anxiety as The Maw creaked and groaned throughout my playthrough, but meeting the Janitor haunted me. —Levi Winslow

I really hate the Bubble Head Nurses in Silent Hill 2. They’re slimy-skinned, staggering monsters with bloated heads barely connected to their necks, but, luckily for James, their push-up bras and cleavage remain generously intact. That juxtaposition makes me feel gross—it aims to titillate slightly more than it wants to scare. Like, the Nurses’ skirts are too short, and when you knock one down, they wriggle on the ground with their ass up.

This is some successful monster-ing, though. The Nurses, like all of Silent Hill’s horrors, are meant to reflect the anxieties of their viewer. In 2’s case, that’s James and his unresolved wife trauma and sexual frustration. Unfortunately, I think James’ subconscious projections are supremely gross. Go to therapy.

Some of Richard Prince’s dripping nurse paintings from the early 2000s, masked, posing women covered in blood, make me think of the Bubble Heads. Everyone wants to debilitate the woman holding a syringe. —Ashley Bardhan

There are few enemies in games that disrupt a team’s dynamic quite like the stupidly annoying and terrifyingly powerful witches in Left 4 Dead. These foes suck, and not just because they can down you in a single hit—though that’s part of it. Frail and unassuming, the witches let out these ominous weeps and moans as you navigate through a level. They aren’t violent off the rip, but don’t let their docile nature fool you. Get close enough and you’ll agitate the witch, prompting her to sprint so fast toward you that it feels like she teleported. Then she incapacitates you with just one blow before mauling you to death with her long, sharp, bloodied claws. And there’s really not a whole lot you can do when she gets you since she’s not just incredibly strong but also incredibly resilient, which makes encountering her all the more frightening. —Levi Winslow

“Take a breather Spidey, it’s over.” That’s what 2000’s Spider-Man would have you believe following climatic boss battles with multi-armed jerk Doctor Octopus and symbiotic serial killer Carnage. However dear readers, it was very much not over. Enter Monster Ock.

Monster Ock is not so much an enemy or even a boss, really. They’re a writhing, poorly pixelated mass of mayhem. A grotesque amalgamation of gargling, digitized screams, and limbs that’ll rip your arachnid-ass to shreds. Sometimes I still hear the noises of Monster Ock as a voice on the wind and shiver.

For what felt like the longest four minutes of my life, I fled in terror through six levels of sickly-green hallways, blast doors, and chutes before reaching the surface and salvation. Working against me were shoddy camera angles, rubber band AI at its most terrifying, and voice line gems from our wall-crawler like “Pressure’s really building”—no shit, spidey!

Eventually, mercifully, we escape. “Perfect end to a perfect day,” we quip as Captain America and Venom of all people pick us up in a Quinjet. I’m too frazzled to care by this point. —Eric Schulkin

Nothing in Naughty Dog’s post-apocalyptic adventure is as unsettling as the first time a clicker gets you. You’re stealthing through a crumpled passageway, choking out infected humans left and right, making as little noise as possible as you clamber over verdant yet destroyed obstacles. But whoops, you knocked over some random glass bottle and now it’s there, chasing after you while flailing its arms and making this horrible clicking noise like a cricket or a croaking frog. And once it catches you, it’s curtains. It munches on your neck, presumably tearing your glands apart, and you die and it sucks. Clickers are dreadful! Covered in fungal spores and hardened flesh, they’re super fast, super strong, and super intelligent, using that spine-tingling clicking sound to communicate with other clickers to determine your exact location. Don’t let their overgrown domes fool you. The clickers in The Last of Us want your death, now. —Levi Winslow

The Shalebridge Cradle in the third Thief game remains the scariest experience I’ve ever had in all of gaming. For so much of the game, it’s this ominous building you pass by on your way elsewhere in the city. You hear rumors about it, hear its name muttered in fear, until it already possesses a sense of terror before you ever need to go inside.

When you do, it’s so much worse than you could have imagined. This section of Ion Storm’s stellar game, overseen by Dishonored’s Harvey Smith, is a masterpiece of environmental storytelling. Yes, there are awful, shuffling creatures to be feverishly hidden from among its dank, cruel corridors, and yes, they scare the bejesus out of me, but they’re not The Cradle’s true horror. The real menace, that makes this a level you can never shake from your consciousness, is the building’s history.

You know that at one point Shalebridge Cradle was once a sanatorium for the clinically insane. You also know that at one point Shalebridge Cradle was once an orphanage. What you learn as you play (and for goodness sakes, if you haven’t, stop reading now and go play it) is that the two things happened at the same time.

This moment of realization is so brutal, as you put together that those poor children were living in permanent fear of the murderous, dangerous patients, all while cruel doctors performed experiments, and, well, there’s a witch too.

This catastrophic moment rewrites your entire understanding of the place, and makes the rest of the already-terrifying section feel so, so much worse. It’s bad enough as my muscles lock up as I try to evade a shambling, masked monstrosity, leaning into my monitor as if that makes me smaller and less likely to be spotted, but it’s a whole other level of awful when you hear the ghostly fearful voices of the long-dead child inhabitants of this terrible place. Brrrrrrr. —John Walker

As a monster hunter, The Witcher 3's Geralt of Rivia is no stranger to abominations. After all, he’s also an abomination, an experiment whose single purpose is to slay beasts. But what do you do when that abomination in need of a prompt grave isn’t so much a beast but more of a satanic specter who feeds on your guilt? If you’re Geralt of Rivia, you probably fight it. If you’re everyone else who encounters the Hym Demon, though, you definitely run. A ghostly figure so black it makes shadows look bright, Hym is a tall wraith with elongated limbs and sharp claws that disappears in a puff of smoke and deals plenty of damage. Most unnerving isn’t just that the Hym Demon wallows in your tragedy. It weaponizes it, lurking in your shadow, waiting patiently to erode your mind and push you to madness or suicide. And the more pain it causes, the more anguish it devours, the stronger it grows. Yeah, no, miss me with that. —Levi Winslow

Manhunt might not be a horror game in and of itself, but the sequence with former porn-star-turned-cannibal Piggsy is absolutely horrific. A man who wears a rotted pig’s head as a mask and literally nothing else, Piggsy is the stuff of nightmares, akin to Freddy Krueger or Jason Voorhees but belligerent and nude. I mean, this dude chases you with a bloodied chainsaw, probably hoping to fuck your skull before using it as croutons in his human salad. He’s unrelenting, speaks incoherently, and has devolved from man to animal if his squeals are anything to go by. There’s also the unsettling chainsaw he leaves revving, because Piggsy is always ready to chop and gobble his next victim. —Levi Winslow

I didn’t really know I had thalassophobia until I tried Subnautica in VR. I’d been saving this game, which had some out several years earlier, until I had a headset to use with it. And going in, um, I really thought I’d play for more than an hour.

As the game begins your spaceship escape pod plunges into an alien ocean. It is daytime, and you quickly realize that your only chance of survival lies in scavenging for resources underwater. I jump in and start gathering coral and junk. Neat. Good graphics. The alien fish are cute. One small, darting species attacks me when I get too close, but no prob. I just avoid their cave.

As I swim about gathering bio-junk the daylight slowly wanes. Bioluminescence proliferates. The good graphics are now beautiful. But the water’s also looking a lot spookier. I calm my nerves and continue harvesting, noting a few new species here and there. Little things, mostly, but also a big thing, some sort of sea cow I’d seen in the distance during the day. Its bulbous, spherical tail is now glowing. Apparently I got a little too close, because suddenly it started swimming toward me. And in VR, this thing feels very, very large.

I am instantly freaked out, like, 0 to 60 in .3 seconds. Turning tail, I fairly fly out of the water and don’t stop jamming keys until I’m safely back on the deck of my crashed pod. I go inside and notice its life-support systems are draining, and I haven’t really made any progress toward stopping that. To do so would mean going back into the water, and you know what? That was enough of that. I closed the game and haven’t gone back to it since.

In theory I want to…but I haven’t. I just looked it up and this mostly peaceful creature was the one that scared me. It’s not even terribly hostile, and I’ve heard the stories of the legit, actual horrors that await in this game’s depths. I’m fairly sure I’d be okay (enough) with VR Alien: Isolation, but Subnautica? I just don’t know if I’m up to it. —Alexandra Hall

Dead Space is absolutely frightening, making the hairs on the back of my neck stand up with its eerily sparse environments and ominous sound design. And while I could very easily say the whole game scares the hell outta me—and it does, don’t get it twisted—it will always be the grotesque necromorphs that make me tremble in my shoes. Mutated corpses infected with some extraterrestrial disease, these monsters are the epitome of body horror. Deformed in the worst possible ways, with protruding bones reconfigured to resemble talons and lanky arms extending out from a gaping chasm of a stomach, the necromorphs are nigh unkillable creatures hellbent on tearing you apart. They also come in a variety of archetypes depending on how the virus affects its host, meaning you’ll see numerous different versions that’ll give you plenty of nightmare fuel. Yeah, I hate these things. Always have, always will. —Levi Winslow