5 Deep-Cut Monsters From Folklore to Terrify You This Halloween
Look, vampires, werewolves, witches and the like are classics for a reason. You don’t achieve “Monster Mash” status without having some real appeal. After this long, though, it does feel like they’ve all lost a little bit of their actual spook factor. There’s not a 13-year-old in the world who wouldn’t scoff dismissively at a scary story that ends with a run-of-the-mill Dracula.
So why not dip a little deeper into the world’s weirdest creatures, for something that everyone’s not already mentally immune to?
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Here are five freaks from folklore who deserve a little more shine…
Wendigo
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A protagonist getting gnawed on and eaten up by a boring, old-fashioned zombie? Absolute snoozefest. Instead, next time you’re looking for a man-eating creature, tag in the Native American legend of the Wendigo. They were, much like zombies, once regular humans who wouldn’t dream of chowing down on their peers. But, in a Pringles-esque situation, they tried human flesh and then just couldn't stop. They now roam the wilderness with an insatiable hunger — and extremely cool horns.
Slit-Mouth Lady
Known as kuchisake-onna, this Japanese nightmare is a combination of unpleasantries, most unique of which is her weaponization of awkward conversation. The woman herself looks mostly normal, outside of her ear-to-ear sliced mouth, the Japanese equivalent of a Chelsea grin. She covers it with a mask, so you might not notice at first when she asks you an innocent question: “Am I beautiful?” At which point you’re more than likely completely boned.
If you say she’s not beautiful, she kills you. If you say she is, she’ll take off the mask, revealing her far-too-long mouth, and ask, “Even now?” If you change to no? She’ll mutilate you in an identical manner. If you stick with yes out of kindness? She’ll let you go — home, where she’ll murder you later that night. Apparently, the only escape is to tell her she looks completely average.
Black Shuck
Want a lupine terror that’s not a lycanthrope? After all, a werewolf’s life is mostly dominated by run-of-the-mill human stuff, with only one full moon’s worth of action. Plus, at this point, even the least superstitious person in the world could probably tell you that all you need is a silver bullet. The Black Shuck had no need to follow the lunar calendar, and doesn’t have a recorded weakness to speak of. It was just a massive dog, by some accounts as big as a horse, with glowing red eyes that roamed around ripping people to pieces.
Oh, and apparently its steps are completely silent, so you can't even hear it coming.
Hecatoncheires
We’re going all the way back to the Greek gods for a creature that, to be fair, wasn’t inherently evil. Not that you’d know by meeting or even looking at it. This is the bit of quantitative body horror and spelling-bee tiebreaker that is the Hecatoncheires. Their grossness is beautiful in its simplicity: They had way too many of pretty much every body part. Specifically, 100 hands and 50 heads. There’s no possible way for those all to be connected that wouldn’t have even David Cronenberg gagging.
Fairies
Okay, stay with me for a second. I realize fairies are far from a deep cut, but media is completely suffused with the nice, cute ones that look perfectly at home on a child’s T-shirt. If you go by the folklore, there are plenty of fae beings that sure aren’t hopping from toadstool to toadstool sprinkling delightful diamond dust. A lot of fairies are straight-up evil little assholes.
We need to balance this out posthaste. We need less fairies that swap kids’ lost teeth for small change and more fairies that swap the kids altogether. Or instead of sipping nectar from a honeysuckle bloom, how about sucking blood straight out of innocent humans? There’s a dark history here that’s left untapped, and I’ve seen enough of the Lisa Frank version.