Films: The Maze Runner (2014), The Maze Runner: The Scorch Trials (2015), The Maze Runner: The Death Cure (2018)

Alias: The Grievers, the Cranks

Type: Man-made (Grievers), Mutant (Cranks)

Location: Haunted Home/Civilized Area

Height/Weight: Ranges from that of average humans to that of elephants.

Affiliation: Neutral

Summary: The craze of Young Adult fiction was rather huge during the late 2000s-early 2010s. People just seemed obsessed with capitalizing on the success of "The Hunger Games". Baring the fact that governments didn't seem to learn from how their corrupt ways would indeed anger the world's youth, many of the stories were ridiculously derivative of each-other. This one gets something of a pass from us because of, you guessed it, monsters.

History: At some point in time, solar flares reduced parts of the world to barren wastelands. Adding fuel to the fire was an attempt to control the population by usage of bioweapons. Said bioweapon mutated into the Flare, a deadly disease that slowly turned those infected into monstrous zombies known as the Cranks. Soon new organization, called WCKD (sigh, yes...that is their title), sought to find a cure by testing the immune's wits and using them to develop one. And their convoluted plan basically involved taking young people and tossing them into a shifting maze fraught with deceit, uncertainty, and near-tribal ways of thinking. Oh, and also horrifying giant scorpion-like cyborg monstrosities known as the Grievers. Because WCKD apparently loves the concept of natural selection so much that seeing kids die horribly when they're not escaping into Crank territory to overthrow them is a riot.

Notable Kills: Nothing special, unless you count the painful transformation from human to Crank.

Final Fate: Few of the kids stuck in the Maze make it to the end, and those who do get to see what remains of WCKD crumble and die after their attempts at finding a cure are ousted as just a pointless and needless source of death. The survivors manage to find the haven they fought for so long to find, and while there are still Cranks out there, at least our heroes get to live happily ever after, right?

Powers/Abilities: Grievers have a stinger containing a deadly venom that makes the skin go pale, the wound to swell up horribly, and their minds to unravel as they begin to see things and act irrationally. They are also quite agile.

Weakness: Anything conventional.

Scariness Factor: 4-This is truly a Hell on Earth, and almost all of it is of our own making. Both the Grievers and the Cranks offer their own degree of nightmare fuel. One is a hideous ogre/spider/scorpion/cyborg amalgamation that typically hunts in packs while tearing every one of your friends apart and/or infecting them with the worst venom ever, while the other is an endless horde of decaying zombies infected by a virus that ensures a slow and painful transformation. Honestly, it's impossible to decide which threat is worse. Then again, what else would you expect to let them run loose than an organization LITTERALLY TITLED WICKED?!

Trivia: -In the original books, there's even less subtlety with WCKD, as they are just titled WICKED. Also, the memory stuff caused by Griever venom is actually a specially-made serum made from it and used for specific occasions.

-As one might guess from Hollywood, almost none of the main cast are teenagers as they claim to be in the film, instead played mostly by guys in their 20s. Really, only one of them looked the part. But then again, we'd probably be a bit more traumatized seeing people that young being ripped limb from limb by the monsters.