Once you've had a villain who can kill half the universe with a snap of his fingers, what
chance does any other villain have of being that scary or threatening?
Let's take a look at some villains from Marvel Comics who can give Thanos a run for his money
when it comes to being frightening.
Galactus isn’t necessarily evil, but he’s definitely terrifying.
He’s an unstoppable force of nature, and while he doesn’t actually want to hurt any
of the trillions of people whose lives he’s ended over the years, that’s not because
he has any affection for them.
It’s because he just doesn’t care about them at all.
"When the great hunger is upon me, all creatures are enemies!"
Galactus first arrived in Fantastic Four #48, by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, kicking off decades
of his status as the definitive cosmic threat in Marvel Comics.
He’s a survivor of the universe before ours, reborn in the Big Bang as the devourer of
worlds, a creature seemingly beyond morality who is driven by his endless hunger to eat
entire planets.
While he’s been defeated every time he’s come to Earth in the past, including once
when he was confronted with the souls of every living creature he’d devoured in his billion-year
life, his very existence is downright Lovecraftian.
For all its colorful superheroes, the Marvel Universe also features a galactic force to
whom all of humanity is completely insignificant, and who might show up to end life on Earth
whenever he gets peckish.
When Annihilus was first introduced in the pages of Fantastic Four, he was called “the
Living Death that Walks,” and in the years since, he’s more than lived up to that title.
Thanos might’ve killed half the universe, and Galactus might devour planets, but they
at least see what they’re doing as necessary.
Annihilus, on the other hand, doesn’t just pillage his way across the galaxy, he enjoys
every second of it.
At heart, Annihilus is an insect, and as the ruler of the chaotic, interdimensional Negative
Zone, he’s got an entire swarm of space locusts at his command ready to consume everything
in their path.
That’s exactly what happened in Marvel’s Annihilation crossover, where he led an insectoid
armada to destroy entire planets.
He’s incapable of pity or remorse, and would casually snuff out billions of lives just
to expand his empire.
The Marvel Universe is full of unsettling monstrosities, and compared to them, an overgrown
octopus with a gigantic eye might not seem that scary.
The thing is, that’s not really Shuma-Gorath.
It’s just the way it appears in the physical world.
In reality, well, its reality, anyway, it’s part of an extra-dimensional race of beings
known as the Many-Angled Ones who ruled Earth as gods during prehistory.
It was cast down by Crom, the uncaring warrior god worshipped by Conan the Barbarian, but
it’s been trying to find its way back to Earth ever since.
"I will come for your dimension next"
As Marvel’s attempt to bring some H.P.
Lovecraft-style horror to the comics page, Shuma-Gorath was terrifying from its very
first appearance, where it forced Doctor Strange to kill his own teacher in order to stop the
evil possessing him from within.
There have been evil gods in the Marvel Universe for as long as Loki’s been around, but Shuma-Gorath
was the first one to be inhuman and incomprehensible, which makes it way scarier.
As a creature who exists entirely on the astral plane, in the realm of thoughts, the Shadow
King has no body of his own.
He can, however, take over anyone else’s body, and consume their personality.
When that happens, we're not just talking about the kind of mind control that's common
in superhero stories.
The Shadow King wants to experience the physical world however he can, spending years in a
body, using it to live out his every hedonistic desire and ruining the body in the process.
One of the most horrifying examples of his parasitic use of his hosts comes in the pages
of New Mutants, when he took over Karma and twisted her body into something monstrous
from an indulgence in carnal pleasures.
More recently, he’s been used as the primary villain on the TV series Legion, which depicts
him as the chameleon-like creature of corruption that he's always been in the comics.
Killgrave, also known as the Purple Man, isn't a god, or a cosmic entity, or a non-corporeal
psychic being.
He's just a man with one of the most simple super-powers imaginable: he can make anyone
do anything he wants.
His slightest suggestion is an irresistible command.
If he tells someone to stop breathing, they'll suffocate without drawing another breath.
He can't even turn his power on and off.
When he was first created, he was just another mind-controlling supervillain, but over the
years, his ability to effortlessly control everyone around him twisted his mind into
something truly horrifying.
When he was brought back to comics as part of Jessica Jones' backstory, his true terrifying
potential was on display, with his ability to rob victims of their own will and autonomy
combined with the very real-world horror of sexual assault.
Comics creators borrow ideas from other pieces of pop culture all the time, and the Brood
might be one of the best examples.
Created in the pages of Uncanny X-Men in 1982, they’re pretty much just the Marvel Universe
equivalent of the creature from Ridley Scott’s 1979 film Alien.
In the interest of doing something slightly different from that film, though, Chris Claremont
and Dave Cockrum created an even more viscerally frightening body horror concept.
While the xenomorph from Alien implants an egg that bursts out of a human body and kills
the host, the Brood reproduce in another way.
Their eggs don’t burst out, they take over their victims’ bodies and transform them
into new Brood.
The host is still trapped in there while their new form uses their memories and knowledge
to more effectively conquer the galaxy.
In other words, the Brood are the answer to the question “what if xenomorphs were also
zombies, and also trapped you in a mutated body that you couldn’t control?”
Fear comes in many shapes, and these guys are at least three of them.