Babies are generally not the first thing anyone would think of as evil beings. By their nature, babies are helpless, innocent, and incapable of murdering someone in their sleep. They require constant care in order to survive and haven’t really developed much conscious thought yet.
This hasn’t stopped them from occasionally becoming terrifying villains, however. A few games have decided to take these harmless infants and make them significantly less harmless, usually by making them much bigger than babies should be, and adding an extra layer of malice. These babies are likely to make even the most maternal or paternal person feel uneasy.
5 Ultimate Being – Parasite Eve
The final boss of PS1 action RPG Parasite Eve is a baby. For a game that opens with an opera singer setting an entire audience on fire, that might seem an unusual choice, but it does make sense in context. This baby is the Ultimate Being, the result of terrible experiments with mitochondria that have evolved to become sentient and take over the human body, resulting in a terrifying new stage of evolution.
At the game’s climax, it’s revealed that Eve, the main villain has been pregnant to the Ultimate Being all along, and her death results in the birth of the creature. It appears as a giant baby, equipped with cherub-like wings and still trailing its umbilical cord. It doesn’t stick to this form for long, as it grows during the boss battle, but it does make its entrance by blowing up a fleet of ships, proving how powerful it is even as an infant.
4 Lurkers/Crawlers – Dead Space
Dead Space is a series full of terrifying body horror, with its Necromorph enemies all being horribly mutated human corpses created by the mysterious interstellar Markers. The marker’s pathogen doesn’t discriminate though, as its victims include babies, and there are not one, but two baby-based Necromorphs in the series – the Lurker, introduced in the first game, and the Crawler, which appeared in the second.
Lurkers are formed from the embryos of unborn children, mostly from artificial wombs in the first game. They look like horribly deformed babies with added tentacles, including three that burst from their back and fire barbs. Crawlers are equally horrifying, appearing as babies crawling on their backs with explosive sacs bulging out of their stomachs that will detonate once they get close enough. The Dead Space games are already excellent at making its players feel uneasy, but these killer babies add an extra layer of terror.
3 The Child – Catherine
Atlus’ Catherine is a strange game. It stars Vincent, an unambitious man played by Troy Baker in possibly his strangest role. It’s a romantic visual novel of sorts, where the player navigates daily life, before the game takes a turn for the supernatural at night, when it becomes a block-based puzzle platformer where Vincent climbs a series of towers in his underwear. The plot of the game hinges on Vincent being torn between his girlfriend, Katherine, and a mysterious woman named Catherine who he begins an affair with.
As part of the many torments Vincent is put through in his tower-based nightmares, he will be chased by a terrifying beast representing a fear of commitment to his girlfriend. Naturally, one of these relates to the fear of starting a family, represented by The Child, a gigantic baby covered in bulging veins that screams “Daddy” at Vincent. It also returns later, this time with a chainsaw, because a giant screaming baby clearly wasn’t scary enough the first time.
2 God – Silent Hill 3
The Silent Hill series is full of monsters that represent deep psychological fears within its main cast, and Silent Hill 3 is no exception. Throughout the game, the cult of Silent Hill is trying to get protagonist Heather Mason to go to the town and bring her into the order, as she has the power to birth a god with the power to bring a terrifying new order to the world.
If that wasn’t enough, it turns out that Heather is already pregnant with the god, implanted in her by supernatural means, something that any teenage girl would find terrifying. Judging by the fact she finds a way to eject it from her body through vomiting, it suggests that it may not be where an embryo should be. The interference of main antagonist Claudia means that the god can still be brought into the world, but Heather’s actions result in a flawed god that she can then bash with a steel pipe like any other monster in the Silent Hill series.
1 House Beneviento Baby – Resident Evil Village
Fans of Resident Evil generally agree on what the scariest part of Resident Evil Village is – House Beneviento, a house found across a suspension bridge just outside the village, and home to the doll-obsessed Donna Beneviento. When Ethan visits this home in search of the pieces of his daughter, Rose, he receives an unpleasant welcome. After heading down to the basement of the house, a brief encounter with Donna’s doll Angie and an autopsy on a mannequin that looks exactly like his wife Mia, Ethan comes face to face with a giant baby monster.
Looking like a grossly elongated baby with its legs backward, it crawls towards Ethan aggressively while it laughs and cries like a real child. To make things worse, Ethan also loses his weapons during this portion, so the only way to get through this section is to hide from the creature while it pursues the player.