Unseen Evil: 6 Horror Films That Hide Their Villains
So many horror films are built on the backs of their monsters. From the disquieting aura of seeing Michael Myers stalking his victims from a distance in Halloween to the primal terror of realizing the cave your protagonists have been spelunking in is full of murderous humanoid demons in The Descent, a quality villain is often the key to a successful horror feature.
But what about the films that don’t have any physical antagonists to speak of? In the absence of a corporal being to latch your fears onto, your sense of terror is suddenly left to run loose within the expanse of your imagination. The tension is never broken by having an opportunity to grasp a handle on a foe’s physicality. The rules have been broken, and now anything’s possible. Horror films in which you don’t see the villain are their own breed within the genre, and below are six of the best of them.
The Blair Witch Project (1999)
We can get the most obvious selection out of the way first. The Blair Witch Project wasn’t only a revolutionary pop cultural phenomenon because of its raw found-footage approach and groundbreaking viral marketing campaign, but also because of how its terror stems from everything you don’t see. To this day, many an argument has been waged about whether this story about three friends who get lost in the woods while shooting their amateur documentary on the local Blair Witch legend is actually all that scary or not. After all, it’s ostensibly just about people walking around in the woods getting creeped out for 90 minutes.
But such logic diminishes the unnerving atmosphere and sense of helpless terror that shapes this nightmare camping trip. The Blair Witch Project is one of the scariest films ever made, all the more impressive because there’s no discernable Blair Witch to speak of in the movie.
Paranormal Activity (2007)
Ten years after The Blair Witch Project, another independent, found-footage feature became a horror sensation, and it’s yet another one that cloaks its monster. Paranormal Activity became such a phenomenon because of how startlingly realistic and recognizable it felt to one’s own perceived notions of domesticity. Audiences were not yet worn out of the found-footage structure, affording the film a fresh and relatable docu-style feel that extended, to a more frightening degree, to the nighttime sequences.
The now-iconic, simple camera set-up that captures the demonic horror disturbing Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat) while they sleep is still superbly terrifying in its unembellished structure. It acts as a paradigm for how audiences can take the anxiety of a horror film all the way home with them—both from recognizing themselves as the ones sleeping in that bed and from the gnawing fear that something they just can’t see is haunting them as well.
Final Destination (2000)
The entire series encompasses the theme at hand, but we can narrow this entry down to the first film. Final Destination is essentially a slasher film, but one where the killer is the imperceivable presence of Death (like, literally, Death itself) who decides to construct elaborate, murderous Rube Goldberg-type set-pieces for his targeted band of unsuspecting teens. Well, there is one suspecting teen: Alex (Devon Sawa), who aborts a departing aircraft with several of his classmates after having a premonition that the plane would explode.
It’s not long after when he discerns that Death is still coming after each of them, stringing along a series of killings engineered to make viewers afraid of planes, trains, clotheslines, wet electrical equipment, and more. There are slight, shadowy flashes of Death offered to characters before they meet their maker, but they’re imperceptible enough for Final Destination to work as a perfect example of an unobservable villain in horror.
Oculus (2013)
Mike Flanagan’s first major film to put him on the map sees Karen Gillan and Brenton Thwaites squaring off with an evil mirror in the present and in the past as children in a household torn apart by the object’s supernatural forces. Of course, the mirror isn’t the actual monster. Rather, it’s the dwelling of an evil entity that has consumed generations of unfortunate, unknowing souls who have once owned the antique. You see all of them plenty, but the spirit itself is left unrevealed, instead acting as a force that terrorizes purely psychologically and emotionally.
This out-of-sight approach holds up tremendously over ten years after release. It helps materialize the tropes of Flanagan’s work, like familial trauma and non-linear storytelling, into a horror film that foregrounds the cerebral terror of being uncertain of your reality by steering its characters through a maze of illusions and memories.
Skinamarink (2023)
The surprise avant-garde horror viral sensation of 2023, Skinamarink is a film that thrives on all the things you don’t see, so of course it doesn’t show you whatever demon or monster has trapped two defenseless children in their own home by removing all the doors and windows. You also don’t see much of anything else. This is an experimental horror film down to its bones, which means it takes on a shooting method that avoids the faces of its main characters. Instead, director Kyle Edward Ball opts for long, static takes of the seemingly ordinary, but increasingly ominous, fixtures of the inside of the house.
The foreboding, dull glow of a television set, the unnerving empty corners and spaces of the rooms, the sinister whispering of the malevolent force to the children—all of it comes together to create a terrifying distillation of childhood nightmares and trauma. It’s not for everyone, but if it’s for you then you’ll have a hard time shaking loose its grasp, despite how desperately you may want to.
Hereditary (2018)
With Hereditary, Ari Aster morphs the tenets of familial melodrama into an almost darkly comic assembly line of tragedy and terror for his characters. Following the death of her mother, Annie Graham (Toni Collette) and her family become victims to a startling, inescapable chain of events that tie back to the late matriarch and her leadership over a demonic cult intending to resurrect the demon Paimon. Whoops!
What ensues is a horror film with its fair share of haunting imagery and unsettling scares, but one whose backbone ultimately lies in overwhelming desolation in the face of preordained calamity. To that end, Aster is content with allowing his horror to play out through means of implication and suggestion. Some may argue that elements of possession and the presence of creepy cult members constitute on-screen evil, but there’s no visual representation of the demon they’re in service of, and so much of Hereditary’s magic lies in its power of foreboding atmosphere and insinuation over outright reveals that its place on this list feels more than deserving.
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