Horror Movie Champions in LoL: 10 Picks Ranked by Who Survives the Night

One house, one storm, ten champions, and a long night between them and sunrise.

Somebody in this cast is going to investigate the noise. Somebody else in it simply refuses to die.

Horror Movie Champions in LoL

10 Picks Ranked by Who Survives the Night

Halloween

One house, one storm, ten champions, and a long night between them and sunrise.

Somebody in this cast is going to investigate the noise. Somebody else in it simply refuses to die.

Set the scene first, because the whole thing falls apart without it. One house at the end of a long private road. A storm that's already taken the power out, a generator sitting in a shed across a very dark yard, and a back door that nobody remembers opening. Ten champions inside, none of whom have ever seen a horror movie, so none of them understand what any of those details are for.

Horror doesn't reward the strongest person under that roof. It rewards the one who makes the fewest stupid decisions. The genre has been running this same experiment for fifty years and the results barely move: the curious go first, the confident go faster, and the character nobody bothered to write a backstory for is usually the one driving away at dawn with the radio off.

So this isn't a power ranking. Damage, scaling, all of that stays out on the porch. These ten get judged on the only currency the genre actually deals in, which is whether they're still breathing when the sky turns gray. Counting down from the first body to the last one standing.

#10: Teemo

Teemo is the cold open. Something moves out past the tree line, he says he'll only be a minute, and he walks out of the porch light with a cheerful little salute and a tune he's whistling. The camera stays on the steps. The whistling stops before the tune does.

Nobody even notices he's gone for an hour. By then the yard he crossed is seeded end to end, so the back half of the movie is the survivors running flat out through the dark and dropping one by one in a slow green fog of his own making. He was helping. He's always helping.

#9: Gragas

Gragas gets the biggest laugh in the first twenty minutes (and in this genre that's a diagnosis). He heads back to the kitchen for another drink. The screen door bangs shut behind him. The shot stays on that door about four seconds longer than it needs to.

Then a crash, a roar, the specific sound of furniture coming apart. He connected, too. Whatever walked into that kitchen took a full barrel to the head and just kept walking, and the last thing the audience gets of him is a laugh that cuts out halfway through.

#8: Caitlyn

Caitlyn has the flashlight and the badge, and she's telling everyone to stay put and stay calm in the exact tone people use when they've already decided to go down to the basement by themselves.

She sweeps it properly, too. Corners first, light and barrel tracking together, textbook the whole way down the stairs (and the textbook has never saved a single person in this genre). Upstairs they hear one shot, then the freezer humming, then nothing at all. The professional always dies confident, mid-sentence, holding exactly the right equipment.

#7: Singed

Singed isn't in the cast. He's in the prologue (thirty years earlier, in a lab coat under humming fluorescents), filling out a form while something on the other side of reinforced glass learns the sound of his footsteps. Then he signs out for the evening and drives home, and the title card comes up.

He turns up again in the last ten minutes with a containment case and a clipboard, stepping over people he recognizes to check whether the specimen is still viable. Nobody who says the words "still viable" in the final act of a horror movie makes it to the credits.

#6: Heimerdinger

By minute thirty, Heimerdinger has it solved. He's got a sample under glass, a whiteboard covered in working, and a clear explanation of which sound means the thing is hunting and which one means it's already in the room. Everybody nods at him. Nobody listens. He spends the next forty minutes being talked over in a hallway while it does precisely what he said it would do, in the order he said it would do it.

The genre keeps him breathing anyway, because somebody has to build the trap. Somebody has to run cable out to the generator in the rain, get the polarity right on the second try, and count down out loud with his hand on a switch. Whether he's still standing next to it when the lights come back on is a coin flip, and horror loves that coin.

#5: Braum

Braum holds the door.

Of course he holds the door. He gets everyone out to the truck, passes the keys through the window, tells them he's right behind them, and then sets his shoulder against a frame that's already splintering down one side. It's the kindest lie anybody tells all night.

You hear the wood give somewhere under the engine noise. Nobody in the truck looks back, and the movie is smart enough not to show you. Every single person who watches the sun come up does it because he stood in that doorway, and the film never lets you forget whose morning it actually is.

#4: Poppy

Nothing in that house takes Poppy seriously, which turns out to be the safest place in it to stand. Whatever's working its way through the cast has a list, and she isn't on it.

She has no questions, either. Not about the diary in the attic, not about the scratching under the floorboards, not about why the phone went dead at the worst possible moment. She sits with her back to a solid wall and waits. When the plaster finally bursts inward next to her she doesn't scream and she doesn't run, she picks up the hammer and swings from the heels, and something enormous goes back out through the hole it came in by.

#3: Blitzcrank

He doesn't sleep, doesn't panic, doesn't need the flashlight and cannot be talked into going to look at anything. He also weighs several tons (which rules out most of the ways this genre gets rid of people).

The real problem is that by the midpoint he's scarier than the monster. Steam curling in a dark hallway. A floor that flexes under something heavy. Footsteps that never speed up and never slow down, no matter what's happening in the room ahead. The score swells, the survivors freeze, and it's him coming around the corner again, and the movie has to keep quietly reminding you he's on your side.

#2: Ekko

Ekko opens the wrong door, gets a good long look at what's behind it, and then he's four seconds back down the hallway with the handle still cold in a hand that hasn't touched it yet.

Horror runs entirely on the gap between what the audience knows and what the character walking into the dark doesn't. He closes it. He climbs out of a basement he already died in and tells everyone which stair creaks and which cabinet not to open, and the genre has no answer for that beyond hoping it can catch him fast enough that four seconds isn't enough.

#1: Zilean

Zilean doesn't survive the night. He deletes it.

Somebody dies on the kitchen floor and then, without any fuss at all, hasn't. The clock over the sink turns backward for a second or two. Everyone in the room finds themselves holding their breath and none of them can say why. No horror film ever built knows what to do with a character who can put the last ten minutes back in the box.

He's also the only one in the house who knew. He's seen the ending already, so his whole version of the movie is a calm old man sitting in a burning kitchen with a cup of tea, watching the doorway, waiting for the part he knows is coming.

Everyone else is trying to reach morning. He's been there. The monster is the one having a bad night.

Conclusions

The pattern is the one horror has used from the start. The people who die are the ones who investigate, split up, or decide they're the most capable person in the building. The people who live stay boring, stay near each other, and hit the problem with something heavy.

Which, written down, is also a pretty fair description of how to not die in a teamfight.

If you'd rather look at the champions who'd be cast as the thing in the house, they're in our creepiest champions list, and the ones who genuinely cannot be killed are in our undead champions list.

Every ranking we've argued about is collected on the Top Ten Thursdays hub.