Five frightening car designs, from Countach to Sagaris

Some cars are built to be beautiful or practical. Others look as if they were sculpted after midnight under a flickering bulb. This selection is about the latter — machines whose faces feel closer to horror masks than to tidy industrial products.

Lamborghini Countach

A wedge that shouts in angles. In the 1970s it looked like an alien among cigar-shaped cars and fridge-like boxes: a low silhouette, blade-edged panels, and slit-like intakes — aggression cast in metal and bolted to a V12. It unsettles not with ugliness, but with the unnervingly complete integrity of its image.

Fiat Multipla

A minivan with brilliantly packaged space for six proper seats and a face that seems to smile without the eyes. The upper light bar and swollen brow give it an uncanny, almost human presence — a friendly kind of demon that still makes you blink twice.

Mitsuoka Orochi

Japanese folklore materialized in fiberglass. It is less about speed than spectacle: headlamps that look as if they’re melting, a grille that reads as a wide-open mouth, and lines that seem to grow on their own. It doesn’t so much chase you as haunt your thoughts.

Tatra T77

A Czechoslovak ghost submarine. This early 1930s celebration of streamlining pairs a rear-mounted V8 with a teardrop silhouette. Here, pure efficiency looks almost ominous: the single-minded shape, free of decorative gestures, feels like it harbors a quiet intent.

TVR Sagaris

A British predator let off the electronic leash. The body looks stretched tight over muscle, with scar-like vents and headlamps peering from under covers. Four hundred naturally aspirated horsepower and no safety net turn every drive into a test of self-preservation.

In an era when design is increasingly smoothed by algorithms and wind tunnels, it’s these so-called monsters that remind us a car can do more than just move you — it can stir you. Frightening? Yes. Forgettable? Not in the slightest, which is precisely why they feel so alive.