‘Nosferatu’ has Count Orlok, ‘Terrifier 3’ has Art the Clown. How horror villains leave their mark on viewers long after the credits roll.

What makes a horror movie villain sink its teeth into viewers’ fears long after the movie is over?

For the director of Nosferatu, Robert Eggers, seeing Bill Skarsgård in It: Chapter Two as the creepy clown Pennywise convinced the filmmaker to cast him as the lusty yet deadly vampire Count Orlok in his remake of the 1922 F.W. Murnau silent film of the same name.

“That was scary,” the director told the Los Angeles Times about Skarsgård’s performance in the 2017 film adaptation of the Stephen King novel. “I said to myself, ‘I think Bill can do Orlok.’”

The horror villain fear factor consists of a magic movie mix of makeup, costumes, lighting and camera angles — but also the actor, who ultimately gives life to a character that’s all about the kills.

“The villains that tend to really shock audiences are those that add an element of unpredictability,” Kendall R. Phillips, author of Projected Fears: Horror Films and American Culture, told Yahoo Entertainment. “Consider Nicolas Cage’s character in Longlegs. The character was so strange that audiences couldn’t take their eyes off of him. The same was true with Freddy Krueger back in 1984.”

Whether it’s Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Jason in Friday the 13th or Michael Myers in Halloween, horror movie villains have become infamous on the big screen. 2024 has summoned its own set of contenders. Not only do audiences have the revamped Count Orlok, who arrives in theaters on Christmas Day; but also Art the Clown from the Terrifier franchise, who will be back in theaters Christmas Eve and Christmas Day; and Cage’s Longlegs, who arrived in July.

“Eggers has a great opportunity to play with the vampire, a character that is in many ways very familiar,” Phillips said of Nosferatu. “But since Eggers is drawing on a film that predates Tod Browning’s 1931 Dracula, he can render that character in ways that might surprise audiences.”

For critics and his own co-stars, Skarsgård has seemingly succeeded in surprising them.

Lily-Rose Depp, who stars in Nosferatu as Count Orlok’s human obsession, told Interview magazine, “There were moments on Nosferatu when I was shooting with Bill [Skarsgård] where I was like, ‘I’m actually scared of you.’” The actress added that he was “so scary,” recalling his face and “all of the details and the voice.”

“Bill’s very intimidating. He’s a physical presence. You know? He’s a tall, big guy,” actor Nicholas Hoult, who is also in the film, told GamesRadar+. “Then he had the big costume on top of that, and his hair, and the makeup, and the physicality he brought to the character, but also the intensity.”

Another movie — and villain — that shook audiences this year was Terrifier 3, about a deadly clown named Art who is out for blood. In the latest installment of the franchise, which originally hit theaters in October, people walked out of theaters because the unrated film was so shocking and gruesome.

“I wanted to create a clown that was really going to scare the hell out of me,” Damien Leone, writer-director of the Terrifier franchise, told Yahoo Entertainment. “I wanted him to look as different from Tim Curry’s Pennywise as possible.”

That meant stripping him of the vibrant color scheme — Art the Clown is all black and white. “It makes the blood really pop on his costume,” Leone said.

It’s also an homage to the haunting black-and-white films of the past, he explained. “They still creep me out to this day,” he said, noting that Art was inspired in part by the Twilight Zone episode “Five Characters in Search of an Exit.”

Leone, who is also a special effects artist, said, “I wanted him to have these more sort of demonic and witchy devilish characteristics. So I started sculpting [prosthetics with] a pointed chin, a pointed nose, sort of these gaunt, zombie-like features.”

Leone wanted the actor who would play Art in the feature films to be tall and thin, to accentuate that “zombie look.” (Leone’s friend, who is not a professional actor, played the role in his original shorts featuring the character.)

“I knew a really thin sort of lanky actor would make this look much creepier. So when we were in the casting room, David Howard Thornton, who now plays Art the Clown, was probably the sixth person to walk into the room,” he explained. “And as soon as I saw him physically, I was like, that’s my guy.”

For Leone, Thornton’s theatricality as an actor was important, especially given that he does not speak in the film.

“He had a wonderful smile, wonderful facial expressions, which was huge because the way he could emote through the makeup is amazing,” he said. “There’s so much personality that David injects into Art the Clown that really brings a humanity to the character.”

This expressiveness makes the villains more than just a caricature.

“Most horror villains turn the world upside down, they intrude on normal life in ways that make everything seem more fragile and precarious. Really terrifying horror villains break our expectations and make audiences want to scream out, ‘You can’t do that!’” Phillips explained. “I think this is one of the things that made the recent Terrifier films so popular: a sense that the movies would break all the rules and push audiences to their limits.”

With Terrifier 3, those limits include a home invasion that involves a child in the film’s opening scene.

“To me, a home invasion is probably the most horrifying thing, the creepiest thing that could happen, especially to a family,” Leone said, adding that “true-life crime” was something that “creeped me out as a kid.”

Leone also wanted to dial the terror up a notch because audiences were connecting so much with the murderous Art.

“Art was getting so popular — which is lovely — and likable. But eventually, what happens is the audience starts sort of rooting for the killer, and they’re coming there to see the killer and they want him to kill as many people as possible and they’re no longer afraid of him. He becomes the hero of the piece,” Leone explained. “And I said, ‘I want him to remain as creepy and disturbing as possible and unpredictable.’”

That connection to the villain isn’t unusual, according to Phillips, and perhaps is part of the draw.

“Their unpredictability encourages audiences to try to understand them and, at least for some villains, we may envy them as well,” he said. “Dracula, the foundational horror villain, is both terrifying and seductive. As an audience member, we want to understand what makes him tick, and we may also fantasize about what life would be like if we were unfettered by the norms and laws of the world.”

As they become more iconic, he added, these villains become more familiar and draw on a “key visual signature, like Jason’s hockey mask or the Jigsaw puppet’s spiral makeup in the Saw films.”

When it comes to the villains that scare — or at least intrigue — horror filmmakers themselves, Leone said he appreciated Michael Myers’s “silent stalker slasher aspect,” which he incorporated into Art. While he said Robert Englund’s performance as Freddy Krueger “added so many different layers to the character,” Jason may be his favorite.

“I just love the way he looked with the hockey mask,” he said. “If I could ever remake, get a chance to reboot one of those franchises, Friday the 13th would be my first pick.”

The mask, according to Phillips, plays a “key role in making a villain mysterious and adding to the tension around their unpredictability.”

That’s one reason, he said, we wear masks on Halloween — “to allow ourselves to be someone or something else, even if just for one night.”

Or one night at the movies.

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