Marvel Villains Who Are Scarier Than Thanos

Thanos is the villain that the Marvel Cinematic Universe has been building to since Avengers, and by the time he fully arrives on the scene in Avengers: Infinity War, he's as big as promised. Once he assembles all the Infinity Stones into his Infinity Gauntlet, he has the power to wipe out half the lives in the universe, and he does exactly that. Obviously, this will somehow be dealt with in the upcoming sequel, but that won't change the fact that Infinity War has the most unsettling and tragic ending of any superhero movie, and that's all the Mad Titan's doing.

So, where can you go after Thanos? Once you've had a villain who can kill half the universe with a snap of his fingers, what chance does any other villain have of being that scary or threatening? Well, that really depends on what you're afraid of, but there are certainly some villains from Marvel Comics who can give Thanos a run for his money when it comes to being frightening. Let's take a look at some of them.

Whether Galactus should be considered evil is the subject of some debate, both inside the Marvel Universe and in the real world. What's much more clear is that evil or not, he's terrifying. It's not that Galactus wants to hurt you. In fact, he doesn't care about you at all. He's a godlike space giant, and as such you're basically a bug to him. The problem is that Galactus is hungry, and only one thing can satisfy his hunger. To sustain his immortal life, Galactus eats entire planets, and you never know when he might choose yours.

Galactus first arrived to consume the Earth in Fantastic Four #48, also by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. As Lee explained in the introduction to Marvel Masterworks Fantastic Four Vol. 5, which collected that story, he and Kirby came up with Galactus because they'd created so many increasingly powerful villains that a god seemed like the obvious next step. So far, Galactus has been deflected every time he's tried to devour the Earth, usually by the super-brain of Reed Richards, leader of the Fantastic Four. He keeps coming back, however, and if he ever catches Reed and the other heroes off guard or busy with something else, that'll be it. No more Earth.

Originally introduced by Lee and Kirby in Fantastic Four Annual #6, Annihilus is creepier than your average interdimensional supervillain of the 1960s. He's the ruler of the Negative Zone (at least in as much as such a realm of chaos can truly be ruled). He walks like a human, and his shape (wings aside) is roughly humanoid, but Annihilus is emphatically not a human being. His intelligence is a match for ours, but his instincts come from a whole different phylum. At heart, Annihilus is an insect—a bug. If somebody gets in his way, he's not going to talk it over. He's probably going to eat them, and if they're too big to eat, he'll sting them until they run away or crumple to the ground. He may have the power of reason, but there's no reasoning with Annihilus. There's only running or fighting, and you have to be pretty powerful to have any hope for the latter.

As the main villain in Marvel's Annihilation crossover, Annihilus led an insectoid armada through space, destroying whole planets in their wake as he made his gambit to rule the main Marvel Universe just as he rules the Negative Zone. Incapable of pity or remorse, Annihilus displayed his willingness to casually snuff out millions of lives in pursuit of his goal.

At first glance, Shuma-Gorath might just look like some kind of large cephalopod with one big eye. Unsettling to be sure, but hardly the most frightening monstrosity the Marvel Universe has to offer. The thing is, though, that's not really Shuma-Gorath. The one-eyed octopoid is just the demon's manifestation in the physical realm. Shuma-Gorath is actually part of an extra-dimensional race of beings known as the Many-Angled Ones. It ruled Earth as a god during prehistory, but was defeated by the god Crom and cast out of Earth's dimension. Ever since then, it's been trying to find its way back in. 

Shuma-Gorath first appeared in a Doctor Strange story in Marvel Premiere #5, in which it took possession of Strange's teacher the Ancient One as a backdoor to the Earthly realm. Strange is forced to kill his own teacher to stop the evil within him. The name Shuma-Gorath came from a brief reference in a Robert E. Howard story, but the creature itself was created by Steve Englehart and Frank Brunner, as a way to bring some H.P. Lovecraft-style weird horror into the Marvel Universe. There have been evil gods in the Marvel Universe for at least as long as Thor's been bedeviled by Loki, but Shuma-Gorath was the first one to be inhuman and incomprehensible, which makes it way scarier.

The Shadow King has no body of his own. He exists entirely on the astral plane, in the realm of thoughts. He can take over anyone's body, though, and basically use it as his own, sublimating their personality as he does so. When that happens, we're not just talking about the kind of mind control that's common in superhero stories, like Hawkeye working for Loki briefly because he got tapped with a magic staff. The Shadow King doesn't just want help with some scheme—he wants to live a life, regardless of whose body he's living it in. He'll live inside you for years, and use your body to live out his every hedonistic desire. He doesn't care if he keeps the body he's using in good health, or even particularly if the body stays alive. 

In his original guise of Amahl Farouk, the Shadow King was created by Chris Claremont and John Byrne for Uncanny X-Men #117, but later creators have added layers to his eternal existence. He's recently been used as the primary villain on the X-Men-based TV series Legion, which does a pretty good job of presenting him as the chameleonic creature of corruption that he's always been in the comics.

Comics creators borrow ideas from elsewhere in culture all the time. Already on this list we have Mephisto (an ersatz Satan) and Shuma-Gorath (a take on H.P. Lovecraft monsters like Cthulhu and Yog-Sothoth). Even the Hate-Monger isn't exactly an original character concept. The Brood is another perfect example of this pattern. Created for 1982's Uncanny X-Men #155 by Chris Claremont and Dave Cockrum, the Brood are an alien race who are pretty directly based on the creature from Ridley Scott's 1979 film Alien.

However, in the interest of doing something similar to—but slightly different from—that film, Claremont and Cockrum created an even more viscerally frightening body horror concept. Whereas the creature from Alien implants an embryo that bursts out and kills the host, the Brood implant their victims with eggs that don't hatch out of their bodies—they take over their bodies and transform the victims into new Brood. Then the host is still trapped in there (Get Out-style) while the insectoid Brood uses the victim's memories and knowledge to more effectively conquer the galaxy. As fates worse than death go, it's a pretty rough one.

Fear comes in many shapes, and while nobody on this list would be quite so quick to murder half the population of the galaxy (although Hela and Annihilus do their best to be competitive), there are still scarier things than Thanos with the Infinity Gauntlet. Often what frightens us most is losing control of ourselves or of the world around us, and these characters give us a lot of both.

Back when Captain Britain was first making a name for himself as the UK's top Marvel hero, his stories tended to involve a lot of travel to alternate Earths and strange timelines. In one such story by Dave Thorpe and Alan Davis that began in Marvel Super-Heroes #377, he met a man called Mad Jim Jaspers, who had total control over reality and was so out of his mind he had no regard for all the death and destruction his powers caused. Ultimately that Jaspers grew so out of control and powerful that his entire universe was destroyed.

Then Captain Britain came home to the main Marvel Universe, just in time to see that the Sir James Jaspers of this world, who held the potential for the same madness and even greater power, was running for Prime Minister on an anti-superhero platform. This Jaspers, who was created by Alan Moore and Alan Davis for Daredevils #9, was even more frightening and powerful because he had his act together well enough to accumulate political power — but as Captain Britain knew, the use of his reality-warping abilities would inevitably drive him insane as surely as they had his other-dimensional predecessor. Ultimately the universe was saved not by Captain Britain, but by an evil robot created by the other-worldly Jim Jaspers, which turned out to be the only thing that could defeat Prime Minister Jim Jaspers as his warping powers grew. Even as his reality was saved, Captain Britain was forced to deal with the possibility of a foe too powerful to fight and too mad to reason with.

Ruby Thursday, originally just called Ruby, is much less powerful than most of the villains on this list, but when we talk about which villains are the scariest, Ruby makes the list on the basis of how creepy and disturbing her very existence is. She was introduced by Steve Gerber and Sal Buscema in Defenders Vol. 1 #32, as a member of the Headmen. She has the body of an attractive woman, but in place of her head is a bright red shape-changing organic computer.  Her inhuman head can form tentacles and weapons, but it's at its creepiest as a featureless red ball.

Her origin was never directly shown, but according to Ruby she replaced her own head with this smaller, faceless piece of technology of her own invention. How her consciousness survived (if indeed it really did), let alone how her body stays alive — none of this is addressed in the heady rush of Bronze Age Comics pseudo-science. One thing she does make clear, however, is that her ideal world is full of other people with heads just like hers. So basically, she's a scientist who cut off her own head in the name of science, then decided that her own decapitation was such a success that she wants to do it to everybody else too, whether they like it or not. No matter how silly the comics she appears in may seem on the surface, that's about as creepy as a supervillain can get.