Elite Facts Presents
8 CREEPIEST Monsters From Classic Literature
8.
-Mr Hyde - The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde
This classic monster from literature Featured first in Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1886 novella,
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.
Mr Hyde is the literal representation and embodiment of the darker side of the human
soul.
The novel tells the tale of Dr. Henry Jekyll who has covered up a secret life of evil deeds
but is constantly haunted by them.
He drinks a potion of that he created, turning into Edward Hyde, Thus making his secret past
life come to the forefront of his current one.
Hyde becomes stronger as time goes on and eventually takes over.
In one of his nightly forays he kills Sir Danvers Carew in a murderous rage.
He is then hunted by Inspector Newcomen of Scotland Yard and friends of Jekyll’s including
Dr. Lanyon, Mr. Utterson and Richard Enfield as well as Jekyll’s butler Poole.
Because of this, Hyde tries to recreate the formula but after several failed attempts
to do so he realizes that he will soon be Hyde forever if he doesn’t find one soon
enough.
He then writes a testament before drinking poison, killing them both.
Stevenson focuses largely on the duality of human nature, but the novella has also been
interpreted as a representation of Victorian social standards versus sexuality or also
the need of a homosexual in those times to create a double life.
7.
-The Giant Squid - 20,000 Leagues Under The Sea
So as if Giant Squids weren’t scary enough, The Book “20,000 Leagues Under The Sea”
takes the giant squid to a whole nother level.
Captain Nemo’s underwater ship, Nautilus, is equipped with the world’s most advanced
weaponry for the 1800s, including electrified bullets.
But near the end of the novel, Nautilus is swarmed by a school of “poulpes,” which
translated from french means “octopi.”
It is almost always translated as “giant squid” because one people in particular
becomes entangled in Nautilus’s propellers, and the crew has to go topside and battle
it with axes, harpoons and knives.
The book’s writer, Jules Verne never gives the squid’s exact size, but implies it,
“one of these animals, only six feet long, would have tentacles 27 feet long.
That would make a formidable monster.”
While battling it, the squid manages to grab up one crewman and drown him, then devour
him before the others chop off its entangling tentacles and drive it away.
The real horror of this monster is that Verne was always interested in being realistic in
his science fiction, So as you’d expect, what he wrote was probably the most realistic
scenario you could expect when encountering one of these creatures if provoked.
Its tentacles are lined with serrated teeth and sharp hooks that can slice human skin
like a razor.
They have the largest beak of all animals, large and strong enough to bite off a human
hand.
The largest recorded specimen weighed 1,091 pounds.
6.
-Medusa One of the most popular monsters from Greek
Mythology, it is quite easy to see why Medusa belongs on this list as she is without a doubt
the purest entry on this list in terms of physical horror.
Medusa is said to be the daughter of sea gods Phorcys and Ceto, and in the original version
of the mythos, she and her three sisters, (who also had snake-haired and were ugly beyond
sin), always existed in their monstrous form.
It’s the late addition popularized by Ovid in his Metamorphoses that gives Medusa the
backstory of once being so beautiful that Poseidon raped her in Athena’s temple.
This infuriated Athena, who promptly transformed Medusa into a snake-haired hag so hideous
that even looking into her eyes would turn any living thing into solid stone.
5.
-Scylla - The Odyssey Continuing on with the theme of Greek Mythology,
Scylla is also one of the great stories belonging to Greek mythology.
The story is a metaphor, similar to that of Daedalus and Icarus, for following the middle
ground, and not veering too far one way or the other.
In the Odyssey, Circe informs Odysseus that his route will take through the Strait of
Scylla and Chraybdis.
Charybdis is a huge whirlpool that will sink his ship.
It will be better, thus, for him to sail closer to Scylla and lose a few men, rather than
all of them.
This he does, and Homer sings, “…gasping, they squirmed as Scylla swung them up her
crag and into her cavernous mouth she gobbled them up raw, howling and flailing their arms
at me.”
Scylla’s appearance is horrid beyond reason: four eyes, six necks stretched long like hungry
half-feathered chicks, huge, nasty heads, with three rows of ragged, shark teeth in
each.
Twelve tentacle legs and a cat’s tail with six dog heads blistered out around her waist.
Needless to say, this beast is a serious case of nightmare fuel but it’s definitely something
worth reading if you like a good monster story!
4.
-Pennywise The Clown - Stephen King’s IT Yeah we’re not joking.
Now let’s be honest, the Mini-series/film of IT wasn’t perfect.
Sure it was an entertaining film but it left out a whole lot of content that was important
to the novel’s story.
Tim Curry’s portrayal in the film version is outstanding, but the book is a hundred
times better.
Now in terms of Supernatural entities or Extraterrestrial entities, This is probably Stephen King’s
best work.
Pennywise is the name the monster takes on when it is in it’s clown form, In hopes
that it would lure children to him with his somewhat friendly appearance.
It is said that it has been around for millions of years and arrived on Earth from an extraterrestrial
origin.
It appears to a person in the form of whatever most terrifies him or her.
If a person, especially a child, does not know, at first, to be afraid of it, it appears
as a clown to lure the person closer.
It hibernates for some 25-30 years and wakes up during some horrible catastrophe or act
of violence.
It assumes the form of anything it wants, in order to terrify human beings, especially
children, whose fears are easy to manifest.
But as we’ve previously stated, its most common disguise is as a clown carrying balloons
that float against the wind.
Its first scene is the infamous sewer scene, in which it stands up in a rainy sewer while
little Georgie Denbrough is looking for his toy sailboat.
Pennywise offers him the boat and balloons, and when Georgie reaches in to get it, Pennywise
rips his arm out of the socket and devours it with horrible, ragged lion teeth.
Yeah they don’t show you that bit in the film do they?
It’s just implied that poor little georgie dies and moves on.
All it wants is to eat people, and people taste best when they are terrified.
It delights in causing as much psychological, emotional and physical agony in people as
it possibly can.
The human mind can, only in terms of fear, approximate Pennywise’s true physical form.
The most common human fear is arachnophobia, and thus, at the end, to the grown-up children
who pursue it into the sewers, it appears as a very fast, gigantic, black spider with
enormous fangs.
Yeah again, that’s something they don’t tell you in the film.
No wonder most people were so damn confused with the film’s ending!
3.
-Count Dracula - Bram Stoker’s Dracula It’s Dracula!
What more do we really need to say?
Well more obviously or else the video will be so much shorter!
So for those of you who’ve been living under a rock your whole life, Dracula is one of
the greatest icons of horror in almost all forms of media, But it all started with Bram
Stoker’s novelization written way back in 1897.
A Transylvanian lord and magician, the undead Count Dracula is the origin of the modern
vampire—the charming, refined, yet menacing monster whose true nature is only revealed
while on the hunt for human prey.
Dracula is yet another monster that plays to our most basic of fears as he’ll stop
at nothing to get what he most desires…..Fresh human blood.
He possesses overwhelming strength and is nearly impervious to harm.
He is a trickster capable of walking among us and luring us into his wicked schemes.
Dracula’s terror is not limited to fiction, either, as it seems likely that he is at least
partially inspired by stories of Vlad Dracula, the Impaler, a 15th century European tyrant
with the nasty habit of impaling people—a method of execution that ensured a slow and
agonizing death.
2.
-The Jabberwocky - Through the Looking-Glass When it comes to fiction, it’s hard to not
mention Lewis Carroll's “Through The Looking Glass”, The sequel to Carroll’s most famous
work “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” The main antagonist of this book is in the
form of a monstrous nightmare known as the Jabberwocky.
The reason he is so horrifying is because of Carroll’s masterful description of him
using blends (portmanteaus).
He concocted new words throughout his famous poem, The Jabberwocky, to lend an air of nonsense,
but with that nonsense comes fear.
The creature, whose “jaws that bite” and “claws that catch,” resembled a chimera,
and had the body of a dragon and a catfish-like head.
Carroll’s description of the man-eating beast painted a colorful, but grotesque picture
of the creature’s movements and sounds.
We don’t want to run into anything in the woods that “whiffles” and “burbles.”
1.
-Cthulhu - The Call of Cthulhu You knew it was coming.
How could you not have Cthulhu on a list like this?
Back in the day, H.P Lovecraft was (And still is) considered one of the greatest horror
novelists of all time as he wrote such classics like The Re-Animator, The Necronomicon and
of course The Call of Cthulhu just to name a few.
Cthulhu could be said to be the sum of all things we find frightening.
An alien from the stars, he is a being of darkness and madness dwelling deep beneath
the ocean, both reptilian and octopus-like in appearance.Now alone, Cthulhu is an incredibly
horrifying monster in his own right, However what makes him just that more terrifying is
that he also has many frightening minions to call upon at his disposal, Ranging from
mad human cults, to aquatic Deep Ones, to fiendish and incomprehensible alien life forms.
Now it is said that Cthulhu is asleep, but that is always accompanied by the ominous
promise that he will one day return to public sight giving everyone the sense of impending
doom until he finally returns, and readers are left to imagine how horrible an event
that could be, considering how terrifying just his minions are.
Interestingly, Cthulhu is a very popular figure in pop culture, being referenced by everything
from South Park, to Metallica songs, to World of Warcraft.
It just goes to show how interested we are in our own fears.
Any we missed out?
Tell us your favourite monsters from literature in the comments below.
Thank you for watching!
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