Minecraft is normally a lighthearted game with colorful visuals and pleasant music. Subtly, however, there is a bit of a scarier element to the game if the player looks in the right places. Whether it’s the ominous ambient sounds one hears when exploring a cave, or the legitimately spine tingling music disks 11 and 13, Minecraft is capable of creeping out even veteran players, if only on occasion.
With mods, however, this element can be greatly enhanced to the point where the look and mood of the game are entirely different. New sounds and music can be added that induce constant paranoia, enemies can be given a more intimidating appearance, and new structures can be generated that take players on new and terrifying adventures. This is especially fun to do around Halloween, so gear up!
13 Scape And Run: Parasites
Scape and Run: Parasites is a unique mod in that it adds an entirely new faction of enemies, the parasites, to the game. These Parasites gradually become more numerous the longer the game is played, infecting various mobs and assimilating them into their ranks.
There is more than one class of Parasite as well; they range from small worm-like mobs to giant flying monstrosities. Certain Parasites primarily infect the environment and become stronger the longer they remain alive. These mobs even have the ability to spawn other Parasite enemies after a certain point.
12 Hardcore Darkness
Ever felt like Minecraft’s nights are just too bright? Hardcore Darkness aims to fix this by removing the minimum light level. This results in nights and caves being virtually pitch black, which can make walking around very dangerous, especially if this mod is used in conjunction with other ones. Consequently, this makes things like torches and armor much more important.
Optifine is also rather useful because torches held in the player’s left-hand cast light, meaning that torches don’t need to be placed to illuminate the surrounding area.
11 The Legend of Herobrine
Herobrine is the ultimate Minecraft villain. Though he was only ever a creepypasta and never actually in the game, the story has inspired countless mods, such as The Legend of Herobrine, which adds him in as a supernatural enemy with many powers and abilities.
In this mod, Herobrine can manipulate the environment, create illusions, infect mobs, stalk the player from afar and even attack them directly. The mod offers a few ways of defeating Herobrine after he is summoned, however, one mustn’t think this means the sight of glowing white eyes in the darkness isn’t something to dread on lonely nights.
10 Recurrent Complex
While the current suite of generated structures in Minecraft is nice, Recurrent Complex goes the extra mile and adds a whole host of new and interesting areas, buildings, and dungeons to explore. While not necessarily frightening in and of themselves, these new additions work well when coupled with dedicated horror mods like Scape and Run: Parasites.
Even with visual changes such as shader or resource packs that alter the mood, this pack can turn the game scary. Suddenly those new graveyards, huge mazes, and jungle ruins become much more grim and foreboding to the inexperienced player.
9 Bloodmoon
Players of Terraria will immediately recognize this one. With this mod, Bloodmoons rise every so often in place of a regular moon, and with them comes a massive increase of enemies in the surrounding shadows. In addition to the obvious problems this creates for the player, sleeping to skip the night is disabled.
This means that the player has to deal with whatever the Bloodmoon throws at them. The frequency of these events is customized via the config file. Combined with other mods, Bloodmoons can easily become a major life or death event in anyone’s game unless they’re prepared.
8 Epic Siege Mod
This highly configurable mod allows for mobs to be all sorts of terrifying. It doesn’t change any mob’s appearance or make them sound any different, but it does change how they behave and what effect they can have on the world. In short, it makes them much, much more powerful.
Some changes are rather simple, like an increased mob awareness distance, which allows them to see the player more easily. Other changes fundamentally alter the way the player has to approach the game, like giving mobs the ability to break or stack blocks and even dig towards the player. Imagine the faint sound of blocks breaking in every direction closing in while skulking the deep dark caverns of the overworld.
7 Zombie Awareness
Similar to Epic Siege Mod, Zombie Awareness alters mob behavior, except this time it only changes zombies. Overall, it makes zombies less predictable, and more aware of the player in general.
Not only are lights and sounds that come from the player more attractive of zombies, but there is also a new mechanic added in which the player bleeds for a certain amount of time when damaged. Zombies can smell the player’s blood and find them more easily. The mod also gives random speed boosts to certain zombies and allows larger groups of them to spawn, making zombie encounters more harrowing.
6 Horror Movie Monsters
Ever wanted to fight Freddy Krueger in Minecraft? Well, with Horror Movie Monsters, players can do more than that. In fact, this mod adds quite a few characters from some of the most critically acclaimed and famous horror movies to the game.
Characters like Michael Myers, Candyman, Jason Voorhees, Leatherface and so many more can be configured to spawn one at a time or all at once. New weapons are added, as well such as a chainsaw and revolver. The mod certainly lends itself well to the spirit of Halloween.
5 SCP Lockdown
Inspired by the wildly popular SCP universe (as well as SCP: Containment Breech the game), SCP Lockdown adds all sorts of new mobs, structures, block types effects, and more to Minecraft. What this means is that the player can be exploring Minecraft’s overworld and suddenly come across not only mobs from SCP series, but the labs designed to contain said mobs randomly generated just like any other world structure.
Mobs like the Sculpture, Sky Guy, the Hard-to-Destroy Reptile, and many more of the most recognizable SCPs make an appearance in this mod, along with plenty of other series-accurate gadgets, clothing, structures, and sounds.
4 The Grue Mod
The Grue mod aims to do one thing, and it does that thing very well: it attempts to make the darkness itself deadly. Any player who finds themselves without the minimum amount of light will receive a warning. If the player does not act quick enough, the game will spawn the Grue, an immortal monster that does enough damage to kill the player instantly.
Being near a source of light is the only method with which to keep it away. This mod is actually a reference to the Zork series of games, which contained a monster called the Grue that hunted the player in dark areas.
3 Tissou’s Zombie Pack
Zombies in Minecraft are a bit basic. Granted, this is by design, but what if a player wanted to turn their game into a full-on zombie horror experience like The Walking Dead? Tissou’s Zombie Pack is a resource pack that changes the way zombies look and sound, bringing a more gritty and creepy depiction of zombies to Minecraft.
The mod goes out of its way to make every zombie look unique as well. It adds over 1000 new textures for the various zombie types, including husks and drowned. Good luck trying to find two zombies that look alike. It is recommended that the player also have Optifine installed to get the full experience, or else they’ll miss out on cool features such as zombies having eyes that glow in the darkness.
2 Doctor Who - Weeping Angel
Fans of Doctor Who are sure to enjoy this wonderfully creepy mod. Featuring the infamous Weeping Angels, stone statues that move when not being directly observed, this mod adds them into Minecraft as one of the many enemies the player may encounter.
The Angels can be found anywhere in the overworld and if encountered can only be harmed with a pickaxe or be teleported away with a Chronodyne generator. Be careful when approaching these mobs, as they can send the player to another dimension very far away from their original location upon direct contact.
1 Shaders
There are tons of shader mods out there, and they are not necessarily scary by design. Normally they’re supposed to make Minecraft look more beautiful by adding new lighting and post-processing effects. Some shaders, however, are customizable to the point where they can be made to look like anything.
Nights and shadows can be made darker, the colors can be more muted, and other features like volumetric fog can be more or less intense. This means that shaders are commonly used to create all sorts of interesting moods and atmospheres. In this case, they can absolutely be used to elicit a more terrifying vibe.
Minecraftis available on PS5, PS4, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, Switch, PC, Android, and iOS.
