When you think of iconic movie villains, I’m sure you go through the usual list: Heath Ledger’s Joker, The Emperor, Darth Vader, Freddy Kruger, etc… the list could go on forever. But those are the more commonly known ones, there’s many more that you don’t obviously think about right off the top of your head. When you do sit down and ponder their crimes, you realize that these film protagonists are actually some of the vilest out there.
Don’t believe me? Take a look at the list below. These film villains are downright evil and what’s scary is that it’s not just physical fear that makes them scary, but it’s their motivations, or lack of motivations that make them the worst of the worst.
Like this guy; remember him? You will.
David – Alien: Covenant
While the entire movie might be a mess, the character of David is an absolute monster. At the end of the previous film Prometheus, it’s just him and Dr. Shaw, looking for the engineers’ homeworld.
When they find it, he kills her, uses her body to incubate a new species of alien predator for the purpose of genocide. He then takes out every single person on the Engineer’s homeworld, and I mean everything, in the most gruesome way. But of course, that wasn’t enough.
He then takes the perfect predator he created and hijacks a colony vessel with thousands of human embryo’s to let his engineered xenomorphs run free, to help exterminate the human race.
This is cranking the evil knob to 11.
Harry Lime – The Third Man
This guy was a pretty dark villain for the times. Lime operated in post-world-war II Vienna, where he obtained Penicillin, then diluted it and sold it to poor, war-ravaged hospitals, resulting in painful deaths for people. As watered-down penicillin is ineffective and makes a patient immune from future doses, this is pretty, fucking cold. Most of his victims were kids with meningitis, causing some to die, while causing others to go insane.
Why did he do it? Because it was profitable, and he was unrepentant about it. Viewing people as objects and assigning value, he was just concerned with his bottom line. When it came time to account for his actions, he faked his death and went into hiding, kicking off the events of the film.
Syndrome – The Incredibles
This one might seem surprising, but when you lay it out, he’s a pretty sociopathic Pixar villain. This guy is evil, when he doesn’t really have a reason to be. His backstory isn’t that tragic, in fact it’s pretty normal.
As a kid, his real name was Buddy and he wanted to be Mr. Incredible’s sidekick, even naming himself ‘Incredibly.’ As we all know, Mr. Incredible got annoyed with him and told him “Fly home, Buddy. I work alone.” Buddy’s broken hearted, feels rejected and goes home to try to become his own hero and invents some new gadgets.
Then he goes nuts. He lures/kills all the other superheroes so he could be the only one, tortures Mr. Incredible by trying to kill his entire family and is indifferent to his suffering. Then he launches an attack on a city so he could save the day as “Syndrome,” killing who knows how many people.
Oh, he also kidnaps a baby. Sure, it’s baby Jack who has every single superpower known to man, but still, you don’t mess with a baby. Here’s the line, and Syndrome crosses it. He’s bad news.
John Doe – Seven
This is a psychopathic serial killer who used the seven deadly sins as his method of killing. Let’s review, shall we?
He force fed a man for gluttony, took a pound of flesh from a lawyer for greed, strapped a child molester to a bed for a year for sloth, had a prostitute fucked to death with a dangerous dildo for lust, mutilated the face of a gorgeous model for pride, then had Det. Mill’s wife killed for Envy, leading Mills to shoot him out of wrath.
That doesn’t even take into consideration the missing fingerprints, hundreds of crazy journals and all the other shit that John Doe did.
Sharptooth – The Land Before Time
This one is going way back to my childhood, and you know what, it still hurts. Sharptooth is the worst thing to happen to some pretty cool dinosaurs, leaving one of them orphaned. We first meet him when he goes after LIttlefoot and Cera, who are just doing what kids do; playing. Then Littlefoot’s mom gets involved, rescuing them and suffering mortal wounds, leaving the kids of the 80’s devastated. Seriously, watch THIS scene and tell me that you’re not feeling the dagger of sorrow in your heart when his mother tells him he’ll always see her, even when she’s not there. Fuck, I’m already crying. This guy was the worst villain of them all.
Eleanor Iselin – The Manchurian Candidate
While most of the villains on this list are dudes, this is one female villain so bad that she makes the rest of these guys look like pansies. Played to perfection by Angela Lansbury, she’s a secret Communist agent who’s the political mind behind a McCarthy-like senator, and a willing participant in brainwashing her son into assassinating several political rivals and presidential nominees.
The fact that a mother could be so cold as to use her own child as a brainwashed pawn, is the iciest of villains.
The Skeksis – The Dark Crystal
Sure, this might be a kids movie that uses Muppets, but this is a pretty frightening film with some bad villains. The Skeksis are corrupt rulers of their world, who love power, are selfish and want to live forever. All they do is subjugate their followers, turn people into slaves and steal the life force of all the creatures on their planet, going as far as committing genocide against the Gelflings, and turning the land around their castle into a barren and desolate wasteland. As opposed to one singular villain, this race is the worst of the worst.
Plus they’re creepy Muppets. Muppets aren’t supposed to be creepy; they’re nice, fluffy and friendly. This whole movie gives me the willies.
The Prince of Darkness – Legend
Other than being called “The Prince of Darkness,” he’s pretty much evil personified. Played by Tim Curry, he’s evil for evil’s sake and orders the death of two unicorns who hold the power of light can defeat him. When it comes down to the final fight, after Tom Cruise has rescued the princess, Darkness has one final ace up his sleeve – that it doesn’t matter if he’s destroyed, as evil and sin live in all of us and it’s far too easy for him to come back. Being evil is one thing, but being evil and right is pretty scary.
Plus killing unicorns is a no-no in our books. J.K. Rowling says so.
Anton Chigurh – No Country for Old Men
What could be worse than a relentless assassin who’s unstoppable and completely emotionless. This guy was like the terminator, using his captive-bolt pistol to blow open locks and skulls. Considered a psychopath, a sadist and completely lacking in morals, he’s also completely terrifying in how he allows you to choose whether you’ll live or die based on a coin toss.
Pretty chilling stuff.
Cruella DeVil – 101 Dalmatians
If you think about it, this woman is pretty heinous. She already has a closet full of animal clothes that probably involved some poaching, slaughtering and cruelty, but that’s not enough for her, it it?
Now she want’s a Dalmatian coat, which needs to be made from 100 puppies. And the way she wants to do it is to drown them. Then, to make it worse, she wants to make it reversible with Labrador on the other side, so that when her theft of the Dalmatian puppies goes through the news, she can wear her coat inside out with Lab side on the outside, so no one knows that it was her.
Which means this Disney film about puppy slaughter isn’t just about 100 spotted puppies, but possibly another 100 yellow fur balls.
I think Cruella needs to get a life, perhaps date a little? Might we suggest Buffalo Bill?
Max Cady – Cape Fear
The original version of the film was pretty good, but when Martin Scorsese got his hands on it, with Robert De Niro in the lead role, we got to see what true villainy was.
Originally incarcerated for raping a woman, Cady finds out that his lawyer, Bowden, had information that could have had his sentence reduced or acquitted, so he wants revenge. He finds all the loopholes in the law and exploits them, killing the family dog, stalking and terrorizing the family, seducing their 16-year old daughter and raping Bowden’s secretary. He even twists facts so that Cady gets a restraining order filed against Bowden. This dude was relentless and the final scene on the boat is a pretty nail-biting finale, with De Niro imbuing Cady with some seriously relentless anger and villainy.
Reverend Harry Powell – The Night of the Hunter
An old film, but a really thrilling one. Harry Powell is a serial-killing preacher, who uses switchblades and has a love/hate relationship with women. He travels rural roads, finding women to seduce and money to steal, to fund the word of God.
After he seduces and marries a window to get access to the money her husband left her, he ends up killing her and threatening her two kids. Of course, as he’s a man of God, no one thinks to believe the kids that he’s a murderer leading to a thrilling chase down a river.
Col. William Tavington – The Patriot
Before he played Lucius Malfoy in the Harry Potter series, he was the villain in The Patriot. Starting off the film by shooting a child and ordering an injured soldier to be hanged, before ordering the shooting of unarmed, wounded soldiers, is pretty much a huge dick move.
Then, later on, he taunts Mel Gibson’s character, threatens the family, burns down his house, then he fills a church with townspeople and burns it down. Finally, he kills Heath Ledger’s character. He’s a sadistic and egotistic solider, and when he’s finally stabbed to death, I know I emitted a loud cheer in the theatre.
These guys make me angry.
H/T Quora
