While most horror movies leave viewers rooting for the Final Girl to kill the villain, there are some perennially popular killers that fans can’t help but . It is hard to create a great horror movie villain. The perfect villain needs to be scary but also entertaining. A great antagonist has to simultaneously repel viewers and also draw them in, leaving the audience cringing in terror while still coming back for more. Over the years, the horror genre has been flooded with villains that were too unpleasant to be fun (like Last House on the Left’s reprehensible murderers) or too funny to be scary (like the Leprechaun franchise’s titular killer).

However, some horror movies get this balance just right. Even horror movies everyone thought would fail, like M3GAN or A Nightmare On Elm Street, can soar if their creators come up with a memorable villain. Of course, the more interesting a villain is, the more viewers will start to care about them. As a result, many horror franchises end up ironically encouraging viewers to root for their antagonists. After all, the heroes of the Friday the 13th movies change with every new sequel, but the masked murderous monster Jason Voorhees reliably appears in every outing. At a certain point, the villains become the real heroes of these movies.

10 Carrie White (Carrie)

Brian de Palma’s 1976 horror movie Carrie opens with the disturbed teenager Carrie White experiencing her period while in the school showers. Confused and horrified, Carrie desperately begs her classmates for help and is mercilessly mocked in response. Things only get worse for her from then on. Carrie endures endless abuse from her mother and bullying from fellow pupils before her gruesome but well-earned revenge. By the time the telekinetic teen is slaughtering everyone at prom, it’s hard not to root for her.

9 Ellie (Evil Dead Rise)

While Stephen King movie adaptations are full of sympathetic anti-villains like Carrie, the Evil Dead series is a lot more straightforward in its morality. In the Evil Dead movies, there are reasonable, decent people and the sadistic, demonic Deadites that torture and murder them. Despite this, Evil Dead Rise still managed to make viewers root for its villain Ellie. A single mother possessed by Deadites, Ellie was a force of nature. Her unhinged persona and deeply creepy appearance made her much more memorable than her thinly sketched sister.

8 M3GAN (M3GAN)

When M3GAN’s trailer first dropped, the internet relentlessly mocked the title character. A smarmy preteen robot girl, M3GAN was one of the least threatening horror villains in recent history. However, this ended up working in the movie’s favor. It turned out that M3GAN was the real star of her movie (despite all the murders she committed). While her human handlers did eventually get the better of her, it was M3GAN who got the movie's most memorable moments and funniest lines, and it is obvious who viewers will return to see when the inevitable sequel arrives.

7 Freddy Krueger (Nightmare On Elm Street Series)

The original A Nightmare On Elm Street treated Freddy seriously, with director Wes Craven depicting the child murderer as a terrifying figure. However, from Nightmare On Elm Street: The Dream Master onwards, the franchise didn't even try to hide the fact that Freddy was its real star. Robert Englund’s campy delivery made Freddy’s raspy one-liners hilarious, while the villain’s ability to change his appearance at will set up all manner of absurd murder sequences as the sequels grew lighter and sillier in tone.

6 Jason Voorhees (Friday the 13th series)

Much like Freddy Krueger, Jason became the de facto lead of the Friday the 13th movies after Friday the 13th Part III introduced his iconic hockey mask. Unlike Halloween’s Michael Myers, who was always depicted as an embodiment of pure evil, Jason had a sympathetic backstory to justify his killings. Not only that, but most of the interchangeable teens that he hacked and slashed his way through were downright annoying.

5 Chucky (Bride Of Chucky)

The original Child’s Play trilogy presented Chucky as a truly creepy villain. This allowed M3GAN to dodge Chucky comparisons, although later movies in the Child’s Play franchise took on a considerably more arch tone. From 1998’s Bride of Chucky onwards, Chucky was unabashedly the main character of the series. In 2005’s surreal Seed of Chucky, he was almost a twisted antihero. While later movies reinstated his ruthless edge, the very fact that SyFy’s TV adaptation of the franchise is titled Chucky makes it clear who viewers came to see.

4 Candyman (Candyman Series)

In every version of his story, the Candyman is more than justified in his rage. It is a shame he isn’t more focused in his ire, but his anger is deeply reasonable. The victim of brutal hate crimes, the Candyman is an avenging spirit that has earned the right to gut his victims. Of course, this doesn’t excuse him for killing innocent children. This tragic backstory does, however, make Candyman's villain a much more morally ambiguous figure than the likes of Freddy Krueger.

3 The Tethered (Us)

It was easy to root for the hero of Jordan Peele’s horror movie debut, Get Out. An everyman faced with a family of murderous, racist body snatchers, Chris was clearly an unambiguous hero. However, Peele’s second entry into the genre was more morally thorny. The villains of 2019’s Us have, objectively, been tortured for decades on end, which makes it easy to root for their success. That said, their success does come in the form of slaughtering the population of America in a violent uprising.

2 The Fisherman (I Know What You Did Last Summer Series)

In the original I Know What You Did Last Summer, Ben Willis is an innocent fisherman who is killed in a hit-and-run accident by thoughtless teens. As such, his bloody vengeance on the group is pretty well justified. However, it is 2006’s I’ll Always Know What You Did Last Summer that cements the Fisherman’s status as a horror antihero. The killer of this sequel is the most likable character in the movie, and it is impossible not to cheer as he kills off the irritating, forgettable lead characters.

1 Leatherface (Leatherface)

2017’s Leatherface finally took the Texas Chainsaw Massacre franchise’s reinvention of its villains to its logical extreme by making Leatherface a tragic antihero. Before he lost his mind and became a murderer, Leatherface was a relatively ordinary young man who grew up in an institution. Upon escaping this institution, Jackson (born Jedidiah) was put through the wringer and suffered so many traumas that he ended up inevitably enduring a psychotic break. By the time the movie reached its grueling end, Leatherface had left even the hardest-hearted viewer feeling for the horror cinema legend.