A debate stirred up recently on Twitter regarding who the horror mascots of the 21st century might be. There aren’t nearly as many instantly recognisable faces (or masks) as there were in the ‘80s and ‘90s, which saw the rise of Michael Myers, Jason Voorhees, Freddy Krueger, Chucky, Leatherface, and Ghostface to name a few.
Jigsaw, the Demogorgon, and Annabelle are popular picks for today’s new blood. More recent lists also tend to include M3GAN and Art the Clown. Only a couple of these come close to the iconic status of their forebears. But the problem isn’t that there aren’t as many notable horror villains anymore. It’s that we’re looking in the wrong place.
Some picks I didn’t see crop up much were The Babadook, Us doppelgangers, and Victor Crowley.
Creepypastas And Iconic Internet Horror: Slender Man And Herobrine
With the birth of the internet came digital urban legends, horror stories told on forums like virtual campfires that gripped onlookers on a global scale. For many young people, this was where we got our horror fix in the ‘00s, not movies.
In 2009, on the Something Awful website, a contest was held asking participants to digitally alter photos to create something that looked supernatural. One user, Victor Surge, uploaded two images showing a tall thin figure with no face — Slender Man.
Their design wasn’t just popular on Something Awful, it went viral across the internet. Fan art, cosplay, and even dedicated fanfic spread across countless forums, seeking to give this newfound legend his own backstory and identity, shaping him into an internet myth.
Riding the hype, independent developer Mark J. Hadley released Slender: The Eight Pages, which skyrocketed him to new levels of fame as prolific YouTubers got stuck in and brought the character to an even wider audience. The popularity grew so much that Slender Man even inspired the Endermen inMinecraft. Speaking of which…
In 2018, there was also an awful, awful Slender Man movie. But that just goes to show how popular this little forum contest submission turned out to be.
In 2010, a story surfaced on 4Chan about “a pair of white pixels” that supposedly appeared whenever you heard the ambient noises in Minecraft’s old Alpha caves (thanks,Fandom). Someone even shared a screenshot on the /x/ board of a figure watching them from the fog just on the cusp of their render distance, with bright, ominous, white eyes. See if you can spot them below.
This figure would become known as Herobrine, and it was such a captivating storytold so earnestlythat people genuinely believed that a supernatural figure was haunting the game. As a kid, I bought into it! When new layers were added to the myth, such as being able to summon Herobrine with golden blocks and redstone torches, I tried them in the hopes of catching a glimpse at the fabled phantom.
Though the Backrooms aren’t technically a villain, the antagonistic architecturehas had an impact in gamingand beyond since the concept was invented in 2019.
Slender Man and Herobrine might be the most enduring legacies of modern digital folklore, whether it’s Creepypasta or SCP (the latter of which even influenced the gameControl). So, if we’re going to discuss the 21st century mascots, we can’t ignore the ways in which the genre has adapted and reshaped over the years. But it’s not just internet legends that have birthed new icons. Video games have done a lot of heavy lifting these past two decades, too.
Take Pyramid Head. He iseverythingyou want from a classic horror icon — an instantly recognisable silhouette, a snappy name, a vague and mysterious backstory, and a simple but striking mask that rips away their humanity. They are the Michael Myers of video games, an unstoppable force of nature, sluggish but brutal.
Debuting inSilent Hill 2back in 2001, they quickly become one of the most recognisable horror icons in video game history, a title they still hold as firmly as their giant knife. Strengthened by continuing crossovers, films, and new games, Pyramid Head stands tall with the greats all these years later.
Indies have also given us some amazing horror mascots.Amnesia,Outlast, and Poppy Playtime to name a few have incredibly iconic villains. But nothing comes close toFive Nights at Freddy’s.
In 2014, an indie game about a security guard watching the camera footage at a family pizzeria blew up. The premise is simple: haunted animatronics come to life and kill whoever gets in their way when night falls. It’s your job to keep them at bay until the sun comes up.
There are now ten mainline FNAF games, myriad spin-offs, novels, comics, andan enormously successful theatrical filmstarring none other than Matthew Lillard, who played one of the original Ghostface killers. This innocuous indie horror has catapulted into the spotlight, and so much of that is down to each animatronic’s distinct designs. I’d go as far as to say that Freddy Fazbear is the Chucky of Zoomers and Gen Alpha.
On the cusp of the 21st century,Resident Evilalso gave us Mr. X, Nemesis,andAlbert Wesker. But more recently, we’ve seen Lady Dimitrescu and the Baker family take center stage.
It cannot be overstated how much the internet and bursting horror scene in video games shifted the genre. So, looking at just films, of course it feels dry. Horror has expanded so much that you need to take into account these new mediums if you really want to find the enduring mascots that we’ll be talking about in decades to come. The 20th century was all about the slashers, and now it’s all about the Internet and gaming.
