Splash News/Marvel
There are times where directorial hiring feels like a good fit, but others where they feel like planetary alignment. After being considered for the position a couple of months back, Drew Goddard is in negotiations to both write and direct Sony’s upcoming Amazing Spider-Man spin-off, Sinister Six. The titular group is a collective of Spider-Man’s fiercest foes that team up after repeated attempts to foil the superhero by themselves prove futile. Goddard is an inspired choice for the director’s chair. The filmmaker has made a career out of shaping and creating tons of memorable villains. His work on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Angel, and Lost has added texture and depth to those shows’ bad guys, while his 2012 feature with fellow superhero helmer Joss Whedon, The Cabin in the Woods, brought a cornucopia of awful monsters to theaters. Here’s a list of some of the best villains Goddard had a hand in creating.
The Cloverfield Monster (Cloverfield)
A seriously strange and unnerving creation, this freaky giant monster wrought terror on the streets of New York in Cloverfield. It gave the found footage film a terrifying legitimacy that it has seldom been able to attain since.
Anya (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
This quickwitted vengeance demon would rip out the heart of a unfaithful lover while talking his ear off. Like many of the Buffyverse’s best villains, she becomes an official member of the Scoobies, but Anya was at her most enjoyable when she was the parton saint of bloody revenge. Goddard penned one of her best episodes, Season 7’s “Selfless.”
The First Evil (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
By Season 7, Buffy had pretty much run out of supernatural baddies to face off against, so the big bad in the show’s final season was The First Evil, an ancient being comprised of all the evil in the world.
Caleb (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Both charming and devilish, Caleb added some corporeal might to the First Evil’s campaign to end the world. Nathan Fillion, always the jag.
Spike (Buffy the Vampire Slayer)
Spike was a swaggering, punk rock, bad boy vampire that spent the early seasons of Buffy the Vampire Slayer as a recurring antagonist. Even though Spike does become a mostly good guy in the end, the Spike/Drusilla tag team from Seasons 2 and 3 is still the most terrifying duo in television history.
Dana the Vampire Slayer (Angel)
In a Goddard-penned episode of Angel, a newly powered vampire slayer kills several people at a hospital before escaping. Dana probably blurs the line between victim and villain, considering she was tortured as a child and is mentally unstable, but great villains usually do.
Ben Linus (Lost)
The sly and manipulative Ben Linus served as the primary antagonist in Lost for several seasons. His unerring devotion to the Island drove him to commit many cold-blooded actions across the show’s run, but the character redeems himself (somewhat) towards the end. Goddard wrote Ben’s first flashback episode, “The Man Behind the Curtain.”
The Smoke Monster (Lost)
This enigmatic plume of deadly black smoke that served as a constant threat to many of the survivors of Oceanic 815. It was later revealed to be the mystical Man in Black, a force of evil on the island.
Merman (The Cabin in the Woods)
While mermaids are usually elegant redheaded beauties that sing show tunes and befriend high-strung Jamaican crabs, Mermen are horrid, disfigured creatures of the deep that murder with reckless abandon.
Angry Molesting Tree (The Cabin in the Woods)
Probably the first living thing in history to be both and endangered plant species and a registered sex offender. This homage to a creature in the Evil Dead series is both silly and disturbing.
Zombie Redneck Torture Family (The Cabin in the Woods)
The primary monster of Cabin in the Woods before the film flips the script into an all out monster bash, these creatures are suitably terrifying. Regular zombies are bad enough, but add on top of that a layer of backwoods ignorance and you’ve got yourself one doozy of a monster.
Unicorn (The Cabin in the Woods)
So the horn on a unicorn’s head is used to impale innocents. Makes sense, really.
Those Guys with Doll Masks (The Cabin in the Woods)
These doll-faced humanoid creatures that pop out of an elevator don’t have any claws, fangs, or any of the other standard horror movie staples, but they are probably the scariest monsters in the film.
Murdering Clown (The Cabin in the Woods)
Our debilitating fear of clowns and bright colors were vindicated by the stab happy circus performer in Cabin in the Woods.
The Doctors (The Cabin in the Woods)
Feeding off the fear that medical doctors are really sadistic maniacs with bone saws and slightly cold hands, ‘The Doctors’ from The Cabin in the Woods are the reason some of us haven’t had a checkup since 2012. I’d rather just let this broken bone just sort itself out thank you very much.
Hell Lord (The Cabin in the Woods)
With half a dozen buzz saw blades sticking out of his head, the Hell Lord is some serious nightmare fuel.
Klu Klux Klan (The Cabin in the Woods)
Fictional monsters sure are terrible but really, racism is the real evil facing the world today.
The Killer Robot (The Cabin in the Woods)
We’d like to think that the reason the show Robot Wars was canceled was because this mechanized monster became sentient and killed its creators.
The Office Drones (The Cabin in the Woods)
With all their claws, tendrils, and unicorn horns, the creatures featured in The Cabin In The Woods are all deathly frightening, but the true monsters of the film are definitely the coffee-swilling desk jockeys that subject the unsuspecting teens to the deadly horror movie ritual. I hope giving up their souls were worth the sweet 401k plan.
Sigourney Weaver (The Cabin in the Woods)
Shudder…
