Daddy Dearest: Scary Horror Movie Fathers

As is the case with several of the movies on this list, it's a stepfather who turns out to be evil, and sham preacher Harry Powell is about as evil as they come. Wearing the words "LOVE" and "HATE" emblazoned across his knuckles and spitting fire 'n brimstone, Harry charms his way into the home (and bed) of a widow just so he can figure out where her dead husband hid a wad of cash. The two young kids in the home know, and Harry resorts to murder and mayhem to get the secret out of them in this edgy children-in-peril thriller.

Is there any father scarier than Satan? Maybe Tom Cruise. In Rosemary's Baby, we catch only a glimpse of the Devil, but his presence is felt through a series of bizarre occurrences and strange coincidences as Rosemary comes to realize that Satan slipped her a mickey. After she gives birth to the Devil's spawn, he goes on to lend a similar helping hand (or claw) to his son Damien in 1976's The Omen.

The patriarch of the cannibalistic Sawyer family, Grandpa isn't as strong or as agile as he used to be when he swung a sledgehammer for the ol' slaughterhouse. In fact, he can't even brain a woman when she's laid out right in front of him. So sad. But he'll always be evil in our eyes, and he passed those evil genes onto a capable litter of psychopaths who kill in his name.

The family of hill-dwelling cannibals in The Hills Have Eyes is headed by the burly Jupiter, who guides his clan's efforts to kidnap, rape, murder and eat anything that crosses their inbred path.

Alison's recently deceased father was a particularly reprehensible fellow: abusive and prone to taking part in cake-filled sexual orgies. Even worse, he keeps showing up even after death, looking worse for the wear -- pasty, shirtless, cloudy-eyed and undoubtedly stinky.

The Lutz family gets a sweet deal on a lakeside house, and with good reason: it was the site of a mass murder the year before. That would explain the bleeding walls and the disembodied voice telling them to "Get out!" The spirits possess father George and try to convince him that killing his family would be a good idea. Maybe, but it won't help the property value.

Like The Amityville Horror, a father's mind is warped by ghosts trying to get him to murder his family. But in his defense, all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy...

Michael Winner, director of The Sentinel, obviously has father issues, because he followed that film up with Scream for Help, a tale of a teenaged girl whose stepfather is trying to kill her and her wealthy mother.

This stepfather seems like a harmless enough guy -- an idealistic family man in a "Stepford husband" sort of way -- until you realize that he makes a habit of starting families and then "disposing of them" when things go sour.

He isn't generally thought of as a father figure, but in this "final" Nightmare on Elm Street film (or not), Freddy Krueger is revealed to have a daughter named Katherine. Like most kids, though, she's ungrateful (perhaps having something to do with him killing her mother in front of her eyes), and she ends up hoisting him by his own petard. That means his glove.