This post is distinguished from the 10 favorite movie villains. There will be some overlap, but the “favorite” villains, while generally immoral, are not necessarily the absolute worst people in terms of pure malevolence.
That brings up the question, what is evil? By one definition, evil, as an adjective, is defined as morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked; harmful; injurious. That definition makes sense on paper, but how about in practice? This whole exercise starts to feel like a calculation an actuary would make – how many murders vs the number of rapes vs terrorism, victims who knew the assailant vs millions of unknown victims. It becomes difficult to determine which is worst between bad people.
Where does mental illness fit in? Technically, psychopathy is a disorder, and, in some ways, it feels unfair to “credit” a character with being evil when it is just in their nature that they are not like other people. However, given the drama of movies, often the most evil characters will be at least somewhat psychopathic. Even Ivan Drago had to be completely apathetic about killing Apollo Creed, by accident, in a boxing match. It’s just how movies are.
One thing I did do was eliminate anyone who was a real person. There have been movies made about Adolph Hilter, Jeffrey Dahmer, etc., and the movie depictions take on new meaning when you think about the fact that these people committed real life horrors. Unfortunately, Amon Goethe, the main antagonist in Schindler’s List, was a real person. So, he will not be included on those grounds, but Ralph Fiennes deserves credit for being an absolute bag of shit, even by Nazi standards.
As usual I will link to the character in their name and also embed a link in the post. Also, SPOILERS ahead. It’s hard to talk about someone’s evilness without announcing that they are evil, and the evil things they do.
To the list!
The most honored of honorable mentions: I have not seen this movie or play, but I have to give a shout out to the villain from the movie/play Gaslight. There have been multiple versions, the most famous of which had Charles Boyer portraying the character, Gregory Anton, which came out in 1944. The fact remains, if there’s a term for your evil behavior that is still used 75+ years later, you’re an evil motherfucker. Per Wikipedia, Gaslighting is a form of psychological manipulation in which a person seeks to sow seeds of doubt in a targeted individual or in members of a targeted group, making them question their own memory, perception, and sanity. Using persistent denial, misdirection, contradiction, and lying, gaslighting involves attempts to destabilize the victim and delegitimize the victim’s belief. As the source of this term, we must pay respect to Gregory Anton.
10. Johnny 23 – Played by Danny Trejo, Con Air
I understand that, although a personal favorite, Con Air is a ridiculous movie. Everyone is over the top, including our hero Cameron “Dee-yuh Cay-see” Poe. It’s called “Con Air” because there is a plane that is transporting criminals to a new prison. So 90% of the characters in the movie are criminals, but Johnny 23 is just despicable. In the above clip, we see that even Cyrus “The Virus” looks at him with disdain, like there is something wrong with him.
Johnny is an unabashed rapist. As much as they’re in a prison, where it is probably to a prisoner’s benefit to create a dangerous reputation, Johnny has too much joy on his face when announcing that they’d call him “Johnny 600” if they knew the truth. He gets a heart tattoo for all of the women he’s convicted of raping (apparently the victims he does not get tried for do not warrant a tattoo?).
A lot of this list depends on what we see the characters do and what we know they have done. Some movie villains do terribly evil things, but also show some type of redeeming action. Johnny 23’s actions all seem to revolve around 2 things: committing rape and bragging about rapes he has committed.
It’s the most one-dimensional character on this list, but that one dimension is total garbage. Rape is a horrible crime. It takes the emotional trauma and physical damage of a physical assault, and combines it with the greed/narcissism of theft (at least the non-desperate instances of thievery). Johnny is a repeat violator, publicly flaunting, both with his words and tattoos, his commitment to ruining lives.
9. Nokes (and the other guards) – Kevin Bacon, Sleepers
Here we have more rape, pedophilia, physical assault, murder and abuse of power. I’ve only seen this movie once, so I’m a bit hazy on the details, but essentially 4 kids get sentenced to a juvenile detention center and endure systemic abuse from the guards, led by Kevin Bacon’s Nokes, where they are physically beaten and sexually assaulted.
As with other pedophiles, I don’t know if they take certain jobs for access to kids, or if there is something about the job that drives them to that point. Either way, it is a high level of corruption with devastating consequences. One of the taglines for a one of the Alien movies was “in space, no one can hear you scream.” This part of Sleepers is a lot like that. It isn’t corruption in highly public places with prominent people. It is in the never visited cells and back rooms of a juvenile detention center, attacking the lowest people on the food chain, “criminal” children.
I didn’t much care about the rest of the movie Sleepers, to be honest. I thought it was fine. But the abuse part stuck with me, I don’t think I was expecting it. In Shawshank the warden was corrupt, and both the guards and other prisoners were abusive. In American History X other prisoners were abusive, so I’d seen enough to not want to go to prison ever. But adult guards raping kids just felt like another level. They weren’t even close equals, and though it could certainly exist, I didn’t remember seeing anything like that in a movie. “Absolute power corrupts absolutely”.
8. Dennis Peck – Richard Gere, Internal Affairs
Unfortunately, that clip is in Spanish because it is the best quality that I could find. In part of that clip, Richard Gere (who is a cop) is having sex with his business partner’s wife, and then when discovered, he laughs and tries to convince said business partner to murder his own wife.
Everything this guy does is bad. He is a corrupt cop who is constantly murdering, planting evidence, and manipulating (people and crime scenes) for his own personal gain.
There’s a scene in the movie where Peck is with his family and we are led to believe that he does all of this to pay for his multiple children/alimonies, and that this love is real. He appears to have some positive values, that should take him off this list, but he does so many bad things just to try and uphold those family values that you wonder if they’re real or just selectively important. For instance, he berates his partner for mistreating his wife, and talks about how important family is. Later, he then has sex with the wife of that same partner.
I have seen other corrupt cops before, certainly Alonzo Harris from Training Day comes to mind. We only see Alonzo over the course of one day, when he has a plan set up so that he can repay a debt. This movie is different. Yes, Peck has alimonies and child support, but we don’t really see that the way we see Alonzo needing to pay his debt. We just see Dennis Peck murdering, planting evidence, assaulting, fornicating and manipulating. It just seems to be his nature. He’s like a ‘roided up ID.
7. Commodus – Joaquin Phoenix, Gladiator
The above video makes it clear that Marcus Aurelius was a bit neglectful with his love for his son, Commodus. It is clear that Commodus worshipped his father, and on some level, this scene makes you feel for him. Commodus “would’ve butchered the whole world if only [his father] would’ve loved him.” Sorry, what was that? To get your father’s attention and love, you would’ve killed everyone, if necessary?
Commodus had none of the 40 virtues. None?!? I mean none of the top 10, that’s one thing, you could maybe argue 10 is a subjective list, but 40? If a list is 40 items long, they’re probably hitting all of the important points, maybe even padding with a few extra just to round it out to an even number. If this was a list of the 40 most evil movie villains, 1) How far down would you read? 2) Would you really care about #33?
Commodus cheats. Not in marriage. Just at life. Cheating is a narcissistic, evil behavior. I’m not saying you should crucify someone who steals extra money in Monopoly, but I always found cheating to be a really antisocial behavior, even though society somewhat encourages it and lets it slide. If someone cheats, it means that they want what they want so badly, and they see it as so much more important than anything or anyone else, that they will transgress in any way to make it happen.
Marcus Aurelius is dying, and informs Commodus that we will name Maximus his successor, and that Rome will again become a republic. You can understand why Commodus was hurt and angered by the decision. So, what does Commodus do? He kills his father, before anyone learns of this news. He sends men to murder Maximus and his family, so that he (Commodus) can become Emperor, as the lone male heir to his father.
To win favor with the public, Commodus challenges Maximus, now a popular gladiator at the Colosseum, to a fight. Prior to the fight, he has Maximus chained up in private, and he goes and stabs Maximus in the back, literally. When Maximus comes out for the fight, he can barely stand, already mortally wounded. To be fair, Commodus isn’t a gladiator, and Maximus is awesome at fighting…but why do any of this at all? It just seems like a way to eliminate his threat, and “prove his strength”.
This isn’t related to cheating, but just to Commodus’ nature. He learns of a plot to help Maximus escape and lead a military coup to take back the Roman Empire. Commodus’ own sister, who he is very close with, is involved in this betrayal. Understandably he is mad, and foils the plan. He is in a tough spot, his sister needs to be dealt with for this betrayal, but she is family, and has a son, whom Commodus is also close with. Having her killed is an option. Nope! So what does Commodus do instead? “Commodus The Merciful” is going to make Lucius (her son, his nephew) live with him. If his traitorous sister “so much as looks at him (her own son) in a manner that displeases Commodus, he will kill the boy. If she decides to be “noble” and take her own life, Commodus will kill the boy. Instead, she is to “love Commodus, as he has loved her”, provide him with an heir of pure blood (ew), so that his bloodline can rule for 1000 years. He strokes her chin and goes in for a kiss. She turns away. He yells.
IS HE NOT MERCIFUL!!!!
6. Pennywise The Clown – Bill Skarsgard, It (and It: Chapter 2)
I haven’t yet seen Chapter 2, but I understand that Pennywise’s origin is apparently explained. All I know at this point is that he is a demonic, shape-shifting clown that appears every 27 years to capture and eat children. Generally, I’m not as big of a fan of supernatural plot lines or characters, and Pennywise somewhat exists in that vain (at least as far as I know without seeing Chapter 2). But the fact remains, his entire existence is predicated on getting enough child meat to last him another 27 years. Sounds evil to me.
In the scene above, he is friendly and charming to young Georgie, only to reveal his completely savage nature (to be fair, Georgie, probably not the sharpest knife in the drawer). Later in the movie, he transforms into whatever the children fear most to make them uneasy. Sometimes this is followed by an attack, but sometimes it isn’t, he just does it to make them insecure.
His “weakness” is that people have to be afraid of him to in order for him to kill and eat them. Like all of the greats, he is very good at covering this weakness. In Pennywise’s case, he covers this by being completely terrifying for children.
From a pure “evil nature” standpoint, he should be at or near the top of the list. He lives to scare and eat children, and then goes dormant for nearly three decades. I knock him down a few spots given the restriction to one yearlong appearance every 27 years, and the sci-fi element of his existence. He is also not the only evil that exists in Derry, as seemingly everyone who is not in The Losers friend group is at-best an asshole, and at-worst a child rapist. Nevertheless, Pennywise deserves acknowledgement because he doesn’t have a single redeeming quality. He has never committed a selfless act in his thousands, if not millions of years of existence. There are no stories of Pennywise holding a door open for someone else. It’s scare. eat. repeat.
Would you like a balloon?
5. Catherine Tramell – Sharon Stone, Basic Instinct
Basic Instinct is a long cat and mouse game. Catherine Tramell is a wealthy heiress, psychologist, and successful crime novelist. Many of the murders that she writes about mirror unsolved cases either beforehand or afterward, and often times the murder weapon is an ice pick. She’s intelligent, manipulative, beautiful, calm, and is emotionally closed off.
Tramell’s parents are killed in a boat explosion. It is revealed that she later authored a book where wealthy parents are killed in the same fashion by their son, “to see if he could get away with it.” She kills an ex-lover’s husband and Detective Nick Curran’s partner in similar fashions to what is described in one of her books, or future books. She successfully frames others when necessary and can never really be connected to these murders, other than as a person who knew the victim and that she has books that mirror the exact course of events.
She has befriended a couple of imprisoned murderers, one of whom becomes her girlfriend. She describes meeting Johnny Boz, a washed up rock star who she sleeps with as “just research for her novel”. When he is killed early in the movie with an ice pick by a faceless woman during intercourse, she doesn’t seem effected. At all. In the interrogation she says, “I’m a writer, I use people for what I write. Let the world beware.”
She’s probably mentally ill, which may change whether or not I should be calling her evil, but she writes books about murders she either already committed or is going to commit, and frames others to go down when necessary. Maybe it’s because Newman is in charge of the police, but she’s always one step ahead. I didn’t see the sequel, but the unsettling thought is that it seems like she could do this forever…
4. Alex DeLarge – Malcolm McDowell, A Clockwork Orange
It isn’t clear how old Alex is, but he is a naughty, criminally-inclined young man. He and his droogs sip some of that Milk Plus, and they go wreak havoc. Assault, rape, murder, it’s all on the table. It just seems to be what they do. Alex is looking for violence and sex, and doesn’t really care how it comes about.
He has a disagreement with his gang, who seem to want more lucrative scores, but Alex isn’t doing this purely for money. It’s just what he enjoys. He reasserts himself by beating them up, to re-cement his leadership status.
Alex is eventually betrayed by his gang, caught by police, imprisoned, and then volunteers for a new therapy technique where they basically condition him to get sick at the thought of violence, sex, and unfortunately, the music of Beethoven. To be clear, he volunteered in exchange for earlier release from prison, and did not know what the technique would be. It is ultimately resolved that after Alex’s capture and torture at the hands of one of his original victims, the government wants to eliminate any bad press for the technique. They reverse the treatment, and set Alex up so long as he doesn’t speak about what happened. So he ends right back where he started, from a moral standpoint.
Similar to another villain I’ve written about, it is hard to write about Alex and everything that he’s about, you just have to see it for yourself. It is a dystopian future, Alex and the droogs are just a crazy gang doing horrible things for no apparent reason. There’s no motives of revenge, or defending turf, or even money, really. It is just a few bad seeds, led by the charismatic Alex, assaulting people just for…kicks.
3. Amy Dunne – Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl
I already wrote about Amy on the villains list. Not every villain is pure evil, which is why there isn’t a ton of overlap with the two lists. Amy belongs on both lists. Mental illness may be a caveat here as well, but how could she not be on this list?
She catches her husband cheating, admittedly, a terrible thing about which she is understandably angry. She wants revenge, and then she plans to take her own life. She could do a murder-suicide? If not an actual murder-suicide where they happen together, maybe with some time in between? Instead, Amy draws it out by taking a year to set Nick up and frame him for her murder. I get wanting revenge, but Nick cheated, a crappy thing yes, but should he go to jail for a murder he didn’t commit? It’s not exactly an eye for an eye.
As the story unfolds, we learn that this isn’t the first time Amy has set up a boyfriend/husband like this. She was dating boyfriend Tommy O’Hara until, for reasons unknown to anyone, she accused him of rape. Similar to the current story, she sets it up masterfully, and it doesn’t look good for Tommy. Amy lets him sweat it out, but eventually drops the charges if he pleads down to a lesser sentence, which ends up including Tommy being a registered sex offender.
Then there’s the scene above. It’s my understanding that Desi gets more time in the book than in the movie. Suffice it to say, after Amy gets robbed and is out of money, she runs to safe-keeping with Desi, an old friend who used to be obsessed with her. She lies and says her husband was abusing her and she left. Amy’s disappearance is a national story, it is unclear how much detail Desi knows, but he takes her in. However, when Nick goes on a Nancy Grace-type show and proclaims his innocence, it rekindles Amy’s love for him, and she decides, on the fly, that she will kill and frame Desi for everything. Imagine someone you’ve been romantically obsessed with needs your help, and you’re in a position to help! Then they have sex with you (!)…and then, in the middle of the sex, they slit your throat! What the H??!?! It goes from the best moment to the worst moment of your life, just that fast.
I glossed over most of what she did with her husband because I didn’t want to tread on the same territory. But Amy is cunning, patient, intelligent, and willing to go the distance to make the other person suffer for whatever is she’s annoyed about.
2. Noah Cross – John Huston, Chinatown
Noah Cross is particularly interesting because unlike most others on this list, he is evil at both the micro and macro levels. We’ll start with the macro. Cross is already the richest and most powerful man in Los Angeles. He currently works as the head of the city’s water department, and is exploiting his position. He is cutting off the city’s water supply so that 1) He can force farmers in the San Fernando valley to sell their land for much cheaper than it’s worth, so that he can develop it, and make a fortune; and 2) He can get a proposal passed to build a new dam that would irrigate his new land in the Valley.
Cross’s son in-law, and former business partner, Hollis Mulwray, is the chief engineer of LA Water and Power. Mulwray is opposed to the building of this dam because the geological formations won’t support it, and there have been previously built dams on that fault line that have failed. Mulwray is found dead the day after presenting his case at a city meeting. It is presumed that Mulwray also figured out Cross’s master plan.
So, to summarize, Cross, already the richest man in Los Angeles, is cutting off the city’s water supply and creating a drought, as the city’s Head of LA Water and Power no less, so that he can force farmers in the Valley to have to sell him their land for less than it is worth. In some cases, he sends guys to threaten these farmers off of their land, and poison their wells. You know, just ruining their livelihoods, and creating a city-wide drought in the process. Additionally, he can’t be the obvious buyer of this land either because it would be a conflict of interest, so he is buying it in the name of residents at a nursing home, some of whom are recently deceased – so a little identity theft. He also wants to build an expensive dam that has been scientifically proven to be unsafe. So, the city’s taxes will go up and more importantly, at some point in the future, this dam could cause disastrous issues for the surrounding people in the city. All of this so that he could “buy the future.”
That plan was all big picture machinations. On the local level, so to speak, he raped his own daughter, Evelyn, when she was 15 and impregnated her! So, that’s obviously a traumatic experience that haunts Evelyn for the rest of her life. But also, he is constantly trying to find his daughter/grand- daughter, which is stressful and bothersome to Evelyn, who is constantly trying to keep her daughter/sister hidden. It would be a hard enough situation for anyone, but add to that the fact that her father has ample resources and owns several police and politicians. So she really has no recourse.
“I mean this guy is a real jerk.”
1. Michael Myers – Nick Castle (and others), Halloween franchise (except for III)
Despite being one of my all time favorites, Michael Myers didn’t seem like a good candidate for this list just given that we know nothing about him, and he just seems like a killing machine, like the shark from Jaws. I didn’t think there would really be any analysis because he just kills people, it doesn’t matter who they are, and that’s what everything in his life revolves around. And then I remembered, that is maybe the most purely evil behavior of anyone ever.
With the other famous slasher, Jason Voorhees, there’s a little bit of backstory: camp counselors let him drown, and then, after his mother began killing some of them, she was killed. It’s not much, but we get why Jason is upset. To borrow from The Ringer’s Shea Serrano, “he (Myers) started murdering when he was 6 years old, then got sent off to a sanitarium, then broke out and started murdering again. We never got to fully learn why he was murdering, only that he was murdering and that he would murder forever.” That’s all he is.
If there was a field with 1000 people just there, standing still and not reacting. Michael Myers would just walk up to that field and stab every single one of them to death. He wouldn’t get bored or weirded out or tired. His evil is targeted at everyone. Noah Cross wouldn’t just show up to a field and murder or rape everyone there. He’ll only kill you if you get in his way, and as far as we know, he isn’t a serial rapist. Amy Dunne only goes after people she’s involved with. Controlling and defeating the random people in a field doesn’t suit her needs.
One semi-knock that people have had on the Halloween movies is that Myers is impossible to kill. He just keeps coming. To some extent, this means he is supernatural or more than a human. He is the symbol of evil. Unfortunately, there will always be evil in the world. You can kill one, but another will pop up. In the case of Halloween, they just skip the introductions of a new villain, and stick with the same guy…the most “purely and simply” evil, Michael Myers. The Bogeyman. The Shape. If he sees you, he will pursue you forever.
(heavy breathing)
Honorable Mentions: Woo-jin Lee – Ji-tae Yu, Oldboy; Holly Jones – Melissa Leo, Prisoners; Jame Gumm (aka Buffalo Bill) – Ted Levine, The Silence of the Lambs; John Doe – Kevin Spacey, Se7en; Cameron Alexander – Stacy Keach, American History X; Anton Chigurh – Javier Bardem, No Country For Old Men; Calvin Candie – Leonardo DiCaprio, Django Unchained; Mrs. Robinson – Anne Bancroft, The Graduate; Warden Norton – Bob Gunton, The Shawshank Redemption; Jigsaw – Tobin Bell, Saw franchise; Peter – Nicolas Giraud, Taken; Thanos – Josh Brolin, Avengers: Infinity War & End Game
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