With Halloween around the corner, tons of horror movie fans are looking to re-watch some of their old favorites so they can see their favorite killers slaughter tons of helpless victims. Horror is one of the few genres where the villains are the main reason audiences come out. Sure, characters like Laurie Strode and Nancy Thompson are iconic, but you're not watching Halloween or A Nightmare on Elm Street for them. You're watching them for Michael and Freddy.
Still, it's inevitable that fans want to know which killer is the best. While it's hard to figure out who the most accomplished horror killer is, it is possible to calculate which killer has the highest body count. This list will rank ten horror movie killers by body count. For the record, we will not be counting kaiju like Godzilla on this list, because their body counts are impossible to determine.
For a kill to count, we need to have a body and need to see the killer kill them. With that in mind...
For Leatherface, murder is a family affair. Therefore, many of the chainsaw wielding villain's kills are taken by his associated family members. However, when Leatherface is at it, he shows people why you don't mess with Texas.
Leatherface has killed with chainsaws, mallets, and meat hooks in increasingly brutal fashion. With a new series potentially set to bring Leatherface back, this villain could be adding to his body count sometime very soon (just probably not enough to elevate him above the bottom spot).
Freddy Krueger is proof that quality is a far bigger deal than quanity. Sure, Krueger's kill count is surprisingly low for the iconic killer, but Krueger, like a fine artist, prefers to make each one spectacular. In some films, like Freddy vs. Jason, Krueger only takes a single life in the whole film.
Instead of using his time to kill tons of teens, Krueger uses it to instead come up with creative kills, such as turning a girl into a cockroach in a roach hotel, stringing a person up like a marionette by their innards, and killing a person with broken Nintendo hardware.
Now, yes, in Freddy's Dead, it is implied that Freddy has killed all the children of Elm Street, but that number is impossible to determine. So we're settling with 42 for now, until, one day, Krueger returns to Elm Street.
Chucky might be a doll, but he's been carving through people left and right over the years with increasing creativity. Whether he's three dolls, Charles Lee Ray, or an android parody toy, Chucky has been taking people down and surprising them with his brutality over countless films.
By the way, this doesn't include kills committed by Chucky's girlfriend, Tiffany, or his genderqueer child, Glen(da). Still, Chucky has made sure to be the primary breadwinner of his family, carving a path of carnage unlike any other behind him.
Remember Sleepaway Camp? This iconic horror series might be more famous for its twist end, but its killer, Angela, remains one of the most efficient around. Across four films, she kills 55 people, often in brutal mass numbers. Maybe it's the campiness of the franchise that makes people forget Angela outranks Freddy Krueger in the kill department. Ah well.
Whether Angela is a silent but deadly killer or a joking prankster, she is not the sort of killer you should underestimate -- especially when she comes to your summer camp.
Across four films, Victor Crowley has left a trail of brutality unlike any other. The serial killer, based heavily off the more famous Jason Voorhees, is a demented, deformed monster who has demolished tons of innocents with blunt weapons and bare fingers.
It is a little shocking to realize that Crowley is only one kill away from the scrawny, smiling Angela, but perhaps this is because Crowley, despite being horrific, is surprisingly easy to hurt and put down. Plus, with his howling and screaming as he runs you down, you'll have plenty of time to consider your counter-attack...or make peace with your God before Crowley sends you to meet Him.
Yes. A Leprechaun has killed more people than everyone else so far.
The iconic Leprechaun from the Leprechaun franchise has taken plenty of lives over the years. In the numerous films, whether in the Hood, space, or a terrible remake, the Leprechaun has used his abilities to inflate people's bodies until they explode, pogo-stick people to death, or simply rip a person's jaw off by tugging on a gold tooth!
Give the Leprechaun his due: at least he's creative.
Across the multiple Ju-On films in both the East and West, Kayako and Toshio Saeki have taken a disturbingly high number of lives. This list counts the American The Grudge trilogy in addition to the Japanese series, though the American films only added 17 kills to the total number. And none of this counts Kayako and Toshio's murderer, Takeo Saeki, who also murdered several poor souls who dared enter the house. Nor does this count the Sadako-Kayako fusion at the end of Sadako vs. Kayako (yes, this film exists).
The traumatic deaths of Kayako and Toshi have left a mark on their place of death. If you enter the Saeki House, you will die. No ifs, no buts. You're dead. This would result in a high body count for the killers, but the sheer number of deaths in this series is staggering.
Michael Myers has existed in multiple timelines, but when you add up his body count, it's clear Michael is the Shape of Death and Evil itself. Despite only snuffing out five lives in his first film, Michael has gone on to murder tons of people, usually with a few thrusts of the knife or strangulation. He's killed doctors, teens, his family, even a child once or twice. But his cold apathy towards it all makes him one of the scariest horror killers around.
Come next year, Michael Myers' body count will rise again with Halloween Kills, and will rise even higher with Halloween Ends. It's possible that, in a few years, Michael will sit atop this list on a throne of his victims. But until then, there's two killers above him.
Jason Voorhees has made the most of his many kill opportunities. While two of the twelve Friday the 13th films don't feature Jason as a killer, he's made the most of his partially-stunted time on screen.
Jason has torn through people with machetes, spears, arrows, axes, weedkillers, his own bare fists, sleeping bags, and liquid nitrogen. Above all, the iconic killer has managed to carve his way through the countless hordes of helpless teens from Crystal Lake to Manhattan to Elm Street to space.
But what puts Jason way over the edge in terms of kills is Freddy vs. Jason where Jason unleashes hell upon a huge party, working through teens and beer kegs alike. Because of this, it's hard to calculate the exact number of kills across his movies. But it's at least 160.
When this iconic monster returns, expect him to come with a vengeance.... But he isn't the top killer. In fact, he isn't even CLOSE to the top...
Sadako Yamamura has the highest body count of any killer in horror history, and it isn't even a close competition.
The plot of Ringu is simple: you watch Sadako's cursed video tape and you die. Throughout the Ringu films, Sadako kills several people who dare watch her tape with a mere stare. But there are also moments where Sadako elects to murder millions of people at once.
In Rasen, Sadako's curse spreads to a diary, which later on, is confirmed to be adapted into a movie, and that, too, will be cursed. In Sadako vs. Kayako, Sadako's tape is uploaded onto the internet and is copied to numerous videos across the web. Mere minutes after the first video is uploaded we see it's already been viewed over 6,000 times.
But none of this compares to the novel, Loop. Ringu is based on a series of novels which follow a different canon than the films (which itself is divided, like Halloween, into multiple canons). In the third novel, it is implied that Sadako's curse has transcended the limits of her reality and infected multiple universes (some digital simulations and some real), depopulating whole worlds.
So yes. Sadako Yamamura's body count is higher than Godzilla's.
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