Most Disturbing Creatures In The Resident Evil Universe

If they are being honest, most Resident Evil fans will admit that they laughed the first time they saw Mr. X. By this point, the player had triumphed over monstrosities that would have given Lovecraft nightmares, so what could possibly be so scary about an ugly dude in a trenchcoat?

The answer is that this guy is more or less the Terminator: he is nearly impossible to stop, actually impossible to kill for most of the game, forcing you to drop everything and run when he appears. And this guy isn’t afraid to crash through the walls like the Kool-Aid Man if it means getting a chance to snuff you. Simply put, he is unstoppable evil in not-quite-human form, and that makes him downright terrifying. 

The first Resident Evil remake was a largely faithful adaptation of the original game, but it added some new flourishes and surprises for players. One of these surprises was adding an extra step to killing zombies: if players don’t take the time to burn the bodies of any zombies they’ve managed to drop, those zombies pop back up, stronger and meaner than before.

And, in a twist that really took old-school Resident Evil players by surprise, these Crimson Head zombies were insanely fast. They would run at you while screaming, and while they still weren’t the toughest enemies in that game, the combination of speed and sound from these guys soon had us letting out a loud scream of our very own.

Yes, Resident Evil 4 fans: that guy that you always referred to as “The Chainsaw Man” (not to be confused with our favorite anime protagonist) has a real name.

Of course, it’s not his name that’s scary, but his weapon of choice: all it takes is one hit from this chainsaw to end Leon’s attempts to save Ashley once and for all, complete with an animation of your character getting brutally decapitated right in front of you.

Compared to other enemies in the game, this demented doctor isn’t the strongest, smartest, and certainly not the fastest. But none of that diminishes the terror of hearing his chainsaw revving up and knowing that you are just one mistake away from certain death.

For our money, the Lickers introduced in Resident Evil 2 are some of the scariest enemies on two different levels. To start, their appearance is freaky: this thing is all rage and no skin, making it look like one of Clive Barker’s rejected Hellraiser designs. And if this thing merely looked nasty, we’d still be properly freaked out.

But to make things worse, these things can drop down from any surface, transforming what looked like a safe room into a sudden fight for your life. The first game barely had such vertical threats except for the occasional giant spider, so we were terrified to see these new high-stepping horrors become a mainstay of the sequel.

While it was a very successful game, Resident Evil: Village changed up several of the most familiar aspects of the franchise. This included making everything first-person and giving us a very different kind of bad guy in the form of the Baker family. While each member of this carnivorous clan is spooky, none quite made us screech like Marguerite.

Marguerite starts out already looking a bit like a Deadite from Evil Dead, and then it gets worse: she transforms into an even nastier monster that seems like something only David Cronenberg could dream up. Throw in the fact that she can control and weaponize insects and this is a villain that always makes our skin crawl.

While Resident Evil fans sometimes debate this notion, we think it’s fair to say that Nemesis from Resident Evil 3 is the franchise’s most iconic villain. He is more or less an updated version of Mr. X, and he has a similar M.O….he’s nearly impossible to kill and has a talent for showing up at the worst possible times.

If anything, they made this guy even scarier in the Resident Evil 3 remake. That game showed us both the terrible mutations this creature is capable of and the extreme firepower needed to take him out, both of which cement his place as the most disturbing creature in the Resident Evil universe.