Every good movie has a villain, some antagonists trying to keep our heroes from achieving greatness. Without a great villain, the movie won’t be as good as it is. It is a role where we want them to go down in the movie and after the movie it is the most respected role. Here are some of the greatest villains in cinematic history.
Darth Vader
Before turning to the dark side, Vader was Anakin Skywalker, a poor slave boy from Tatooine who knew his way around an engine. After suffering the loss of the most important people in his life, including his mother and his wife, his sadness turned into rage, eventually turning him into the masked and heavy-breathing monster sitting in the display cases on fanboys everywhere.
Although Vader is first introduced in the original trilogy as a ruthless cyborg, killing anyone who stands in his path to galactic domination, by the final film, he’s using his last ounce of humanity to sacrifices himself to save his son’s life. What makes Darth Vader one of the greatest villains ever is the fact that he wasn’t really a villain, to begin with.
The Joker
When it comes to comic book villains, there are bad guys and then there’s The Joker. He stands above the rest as the most evil of the bunch and portrayals of him on-screen have been met with mutual levels of wonder and fear. But when it comes to choosing the BEST version of The Joker, it’s hard to determine a single performance, hence this being a joint entry among Jack Nicholson’s in Batman and Heath Ledger’s (Oscar Winning) performance in The Dark Knight and Joaquin Phoenix in Joker. Each brings a different aspect to The Joker’s insanity.
Hans Gruber
“I’m going to count to three. There will not be a four.” Possibly the most perfect combination of voice and face put to screen for a villain, Alan Rickman brought something so very special to Hans Gruber. A cultured, conniving villain who could improvise and change the situation even when his original plan was compromised by a pesky, barefoot NYPD cop (Bruce Willis’ John McClane), Gruber sears himself into cine-history. It doesn’t hurt that he was given some truly memorable dialogue by writers Jeb Stuart and Steven E. de Souza. His delivery is precise, belaying his theatrical training, and just gives more weight to everything Hans says. And all great villains need a noble defeat; few get to fall the way Gruber goes.
Agent Smith
With that permanently down-turned mouth and magnificently furrowed brow, Hugo Weaving’s Agent Smith is a remorseless enforcer whose remit is simply to maintain cold, hard order. Of course, he’s just an AI program in a virtual reality designed to keep humanity comatose. Technically, he shouldn’t even despise us, but clearly his files are corrupted, as that wonderful “I hate this place” speech to Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) reveals. That’s the key to Smith’s effectiveness as a baddie: he’s not just the epitome of an oppressive-regime stooge, but one who hates his job.
The Terminator
The word “monster” implies many things: enormous animals, undead stalkers, pint-sized demons. Monsters come in all guises. In the world introduced in James Cameron’s seminal The Terminator, they’re actually robots, though their metallic forms don’t stop them from being some of the deadliest monsters in all of cinema.
Built by Skynet, an advanced artificial intelligence from the future, the killing machines, or “endoskeletons,” were designed to resemble humans, from the ways they move to their physical makeups, usually covered in synthetic skin. The key difference being, of course, that flesh-and-blood folks can’t withstand dozens of bullets, nor can they intimidate foes by simply flashing their red, laser-beam eyes.
Nurse Ratched
The coldest of hearts, the sternest of looks, the reddest of tapes. Nurse Mildred Ratched is more than merely the head of administration at a psychiatric hospital. In Louise Fletcher’s Oscar-winning turn, she rules the ward with a quietly terrifying iron fist, serving passive-aggressive put-downs to break the spirits of the mentally ill, efficiently and effectively. It’s little wonder that über-producer Ryan Murphy last year looked beyond Jack Nicholson’s protagonist McMurphy in granting Ratched her own spin-off Netflix origin series. As McMurphy himself puts it: “She’s somethin’ of a cunt, ain’t she, Doc?”
Norman Bates
Psycho‘s Norman Bates must hold the record for the biggest mommy-issues of the lot! Raised by his emotionally abusive single-mother, Norma, Norman was raised to believe that sexual intercourse was sinful and that all women besides her were sinful and impure. After Norman’s father dies, he and his mother live together, isolated from the world. When Norman’s mother meets a man and plans to marry him, Norman is driven into a rage and kills his mother and her new partner. He frames his mother for a murder-suicide and develops a dissociative identity disorder, with his “Mother” forming a dominant aspect of his psyche.
In time Norman commits several murders, in reality, it’s the “Mother” aspect of his mind who does the killing with Norman himself often unaware of what he’s done.
Hannibal Lecter
It’s easy to forget that Hannibal Lector isn’t the protagonist, or primary antagonist, of The Silence Of The Lambs. His role is more of a twisted mentor who aids FBI agent Clarice Starling as she hunts down serial killer Buffalo Bill. He tests Clarice’s skills and intelligence as he gives her complex clues as to the identity of the man she seeks, all the while probing her for personal information as his razor-sharp mind has been denied input for so long during his incarceration.
Not only can Lector get inside the most fiercely guarded mind, he also devours the body of his prey; earning him the nickname “Hannibal the Cannibal”. Descended from European nobility, Hannibal oozes charm and charisma and is impeccably cultured. It’s easy to forget that he’s killed, and devoured, numerous victims. Hopkins’ portrayal is so mesmerizing that he simply has to be our choice for the number one movie villain. He has the Joker’s insanity, Vader’s ferocity, Norman Bates’ painful childhood, and even Bruce the shark’s love of human flesh!
Anton Chigurh
“What’s this guy supposed to be, the ultimate badass?” asks Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) in No Country for Old Men.” Nah, I don’t think that’s how I’d describe him,” answers Carson Wells (Woody Harrelson), a man with insider information about hired killer Anton Chigurh. He continues: “I guess I’d say he doesn’t have a sense of humor.”
But of course the Coen brothers do, and so Chigurh provides some of the deadpan comedy in the dry-as-dust crime-as-process adaptation of McCarthy’s novel. Think of his startling cough during the conversation with the gas station clerk—hilarious, if you’ve got the right perspective.
Like the Judge, the philosophizing antagonist of McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, Chigurh is a man with a particular perspective on the world, one concerned with chance, fate, and debts accrued during the course of human life. His name is inscrutable, his methods unusual. He’s more of an idea with the ability to murder you than a person, which is not a knock against Javier Bardem’s performance. Indeed, he’s perfect for the part: He reveals nothing.
Michael Myers
As Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) puts it in writer-director John Carpenter’s 1978 slasher trend-setter Halloween, Michael Myers is “purely and simply evil.” That iconic white mask is a perfect fit, since, like Myers himself, it’s a blank canvas devoid of emotion. The escaped mental patient who murdered his older sister when he was only 6-years-old doesn’t speak or show any signs of humanity. And, creepiest of all, he doesn’t even have a legitimate motive for killing. It’s just what he does.
The greatest Michael Myers moment ever happens in the original ’78 film. Having just jammed a large butcher’s knife into a teenage boy’s chest, pinning the victim against the wall like he’s a note, Myers stares at the lifeless, hanging body. And then, very subtly, Myers tilts his head and looks at the corpse in wonderment. In this scene, Carpenter captures the character’s essence: Myers’ mind never advanced past that childhood day when he slaughtered his sister. It’s a case of arrested development gone horribly wrong.
Freddy Krueger
Over the years, Freddy Krueger (Robert Englund) has garnered acclaim more for his comic qualities than his ability to inspire terror. It makes perfect sense since Englund’s brilliant portrayal of the child molester turned knife-glove-wearing dreamland serial killer fully embraces the character’s morbid wit.
When writer-director Wes Craven first imagined Freddy, though, the ideas bouncing around in Craven’s head were sickly clever. While sleeping, people are at their most vulnerable, making it nearly impossible to stop Krueger from offing whomever he pleases in gory, imaginative ways. Furthermore, nobody can stay awake forever, so, eventually, whether it’s after a week or two months or longer, you’re going to enter Freddy’s domain. And the outcome won’t be ideal.
Thanos
Over the last ten years, Marvel Studios spent time building up the Thanos. While diehards already knew what he was building towards (gaining all of the Infinity Stones to take out half of the universe), seeing him sporadically in post-credits scenes could’ve been a disaster. What if 2018’s Infinity War was a brick? There was a lot riding on Thanos being the true behemoth to hit the MCU. Luckily, the Mad Titan was everything we’d hoped for, and more. Throughout Infinity War, Thanos laid down his reasoning for why it made sense to decimate half of the universe—then he gathered the Stones and did exactly that. It was a gut-punch that rocked the MCU and had fans going back for repeated viewings. The question isn’t if the MCU will recuperate from what Thanos did; it’s will they be able to craft a villain as devious as—or even more menacing than—Thanos.
Keyser Söze
Keyser Soze is the unseen mastermind behind the conspiracy in The Usual Suspects, except he’s right there in front of you the whole time. His greatest trick, like the Devil himself, is that he makes you believe he isn’t real.
Kevin Spacey’s pitch-perfect portrayal of Verbal Kint, the low-level criminal telling the story of heists gone bad, draws you into his tale. It is not until the final scene that you realize, all too late, that Verbal’s tale has been taken from subtle clues laid out on the notice board in front of him. Not only is his tale fabricated, but HE is the mysterious Keyser Soze, the man who brought such havoc upon his enemies as to be considered a myth and legend among the criminal fraternity.
His most evil act is the one only mentioned, but never fully seen, where he kills his entire family so that they cannot be used against him as leverage by his enemies. Truly barbaric.
Colonel Hans Landa
On-screen Nazis tend to be cut from a particular Wehrmacht cloth: psychotic (Schindler’s List), deformed (Raiders Of The Lost Ark), cartoonish (The Great Dictator), or all of the above (Captain America: The First Avenger). But SS Colonel Hans Landa was entirely different: verbose; culturally high-minded; multilingual; unrepentant in his love of strudel. He’s a psychopath, certainly, but also disarmingly charming, which makes it all far more disturbing. He finds the ideal (and Oscar-winning) vessel in Christoph Waltz, whose fizzy ebullience and intellect make him ideal to speak Tarantino dialogue.
Voldemort
Some say Voldemort’s name was inspired by decaying Edgar Allan Poe’s character M. Valdemar. In reality, though, it was J.K. Rowling’s love of French that resulted in the moniker, meaning “flight of death”. “I needed a name that evokes both power and exoticism,” she said in 2009.
Those two words sum up the Death Eater Supreme nicely. Exotic, because he’s a chilling mix of man and snake, slit-nosed and cold-blooded. Powerful, because his command of dark magic is so complete he can fly without a broomstick. You sense his presence in every shadow on the screen. Whatever his name means, there’s a reason no-one dares say it.
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