: The text considers the visual appearance of demonic characters in the modern Mari folklore. Based on the texts of non-fabulous prose (bylichka, byvalschina), the author explores the manifestations of otherness in the descriptions of “evil spirits”: iya, keremet, ovda, targyltysh, revenants. The research focuses on models of describing the images of the Mari evil spirits, their visual characteristics and liminality in folklore narratives. The author considers the categories of color, size and other attributes as characteristics marking demonic folklore characters as chthonic. The work is based on field materials collected in places of compact residence of the Mari population in 2017–2022 (the Mari El Republic, the Kirov oblast’, the Republic of Bashkortostan). The work was carried out in an interdisciplinary manner, based on a combination of ethnographic and folkloristic scientific methods. The main scholarly direction addressed by the researcher is a semiotic approach to the study of myth and folklore, that is, a view of folklore texts and images as a sign system of concepts. The author combines the methods of field research, interviewing, narrative analysis, as well as the typological method. According to the author, in the description of “evil spirits” by informants several models of representation can be distinguished: anthropomorphic, anthropomorphic with hyperbolized features, zoomorphic, abstract. Special attention in the article is paid to the nominative features of characters in oral texts. The res earcher noted a tendency of informants to neutralize category of a folklore character.