Reviews by Kyle Ellis

Played by: Rie Inō

Film(s): [Link removed - login to see], [Link removed - login to see]

The most chilling of the stream of raven-haired J-horror ghosts, Sadako is the ultimate video nasty. Hideo Nakata's original Japanese version is much more terrifying than Gore Verbinski's American remake precisely because it has the balls not to show us Sadako's face, trusting instead that a close-up of a vengeful eye will be enough to make us rush to unplug the telly.

Played by: Bela Lugosi

Film(s): Dracula (1931)

"Listen to them. Children of the night. What music they make." Bela Lugosi made an impact that few actors have equalled before or since as the scheming, fiendish Transvylanian c(o)unt in Tod Browning's 1931 version. Based on a stage play, Lugosi's is by far the most verbose of screen Draculas, wrapping that magnificent Hungarian accent around lines like the above while, with his burning stare and Ray Reardon hair, he's possibly the most iconic screen vampire of them all. Maybe even more so than Christopher Lee's version.

Played by: Colin Clive

Film(s): [Link removed - login to see]

Although he shouts "It's alive!" in a manner that sparked hundreds of imitators, Colin Clive's Henry Frankenstein isn't the insaniac that many screen Frankensteins are. He's clearly one bolt short, but Clive plays Frankenstein as a driven, hungry young scientist who is almost immediately consumed by regret and guilt once he sees what he has created. Perhaps because audiences in the 1930s needed someone to root for, Clive is alive by the movie's end, and is more heroic still in Bride Of Frankenstein, where he's coerced into continuing with his experiments.

Played by: Various

Film(s): [Link removed - login to see], [Link removed - login to see], [Link removed - login to see], Friday The 13th Part 2 (1981), Friday the 13th Part III (1981), Friday the 13th Part III (1982), Friday the 13th Part VI: Jason Lives (1986), Friday the 13th Part VII: The New Blood (1988), Friday the 13th Part VIII: Jason Takes Manhattan (1989), Friday the 13th: A New Beginning (1985), Friday the 13th: The Final Chapter (1984), Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday (1993)

Let's be frank: when it comes to chopping up teenagers, Jason may be more creative than Michael Myers, but he has none of the genuine menace or the interesting backstory. In fact, when Jason shows up as a readymade killing machine in Friday The 13th Part 2, it makes next-to-no-sense, given the events of the first film. Still, the mask, the machete and the massacring are all too iconic for him not to rank highly, even if he did descend into self-parody long before the end.

Played by: Rutger Hauer

Film(s): [Link removed - login to see]

Enigmatic evil from Rutger Hauer, as the hitch-hiking psychopath desperate to be stopped by a worthy opponent. He's ruthless enough to tear someone in half with a truck, playful enough to place a severed finger in a plate of French fries.

Played by: Peter Cushing

Film(s): [Link removed - login to see]

For a man who was known as the Nicest Guy In Showbiz, Peter Cushing did have an amazing talent for playing rotten bastards. His take on Baron Victor Frankenstein is a bold one, a 180 from Colin Clive's noble scientist in the Universal films. Victor is a wild-eyed nutter, entirely focused on his goal of creating life from death - and if, along the way, he has to create a few deaths from life in order to get that little bit closer to being a living God, then so be it. Cushing, steely-eyed and dastardly from the off, is fantastic here, creating a character that would reappear in six sequels (one of which doesn't star Cushing).

Played by: Conrad Veidt

Film(s): [Link removed - login to see]

The great Conrad Veidt is touching as the sleepwalking slave - very nearly a homunculus - of Dr. Caligari, forced to murder innocents until he's beguiled by the beauty of Lil Dagover's Jane. Cesare meets his end, in somewhat unorthodox fashion for a Big Bad, from exhaustion.

Played by: Max Schreck

Film(s): [Link removed - login to see]

Monster monster! The original - and some would say, best - screen vampire is a balding, rat-like, inhuman creature whose very shadow has more personality and menace than a thousand imitators.

Played by: Peter Cushing

Film(s): Horror of Dracula (1958)

Not the original iteration of Bram Stoker's vampire killing Dutch doctor, of course, but by far the best. Cushing plays his Van Helsing with a cut-glass English accent, and a sense of moral rectitude and purpose as sharp as his stakes. His look of triumph upon reducing Christopher Lee's Dracula to ash in the original Hammer movie is as dastardly as this good Doctor (Cushing actually played the role several times, although it wasn't always the same Van Helsing) ever gets.