1. Heath Ledger as the Joker in The Dark Knight (2008)
It is usual to distinguish between “lovable” and “non-lovable” movie villains, largely depending on whether or not they are played by a thespian Brit. Heath Ledger’s sensationally disturbing Joker from Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight, though, straddles both traditions: a pantomime baddie who delivers a genuine frisson of evil. This Joker feels far more authentically psychopathic than previous portrayals by Jack Nicholson and Cesar Romero. His white face makeup is always on the point of being sweated off; his manic grin is there because of rouge, but also because the corners of his mouth have been slashed. Unlike the elegant, theatrically controlled Jokers of the past, Ledger’s Joker is driven, almost out of control, and conveys the sense that he is physically very strong, and there is something stomach-turning about the way he makes a pencil “disappear” by ramming it into a henchman’s eye. Truly horrible.
2. Robert Mitchum as Reverend Harry Powell in The Night of the Hunter (1955)
Robert Mitchum’s phoney snake-oil preacher in Charles Laughton’s Night of the Hunter – with “love” and “hate” famously tattooed on his knuckles – falls into the most disturbing movie villain category: the kind that exploits the weakness of children, and, in fact, cannot function without doing this. The “Reverend” Harry Powell, as he styles himself, is a psychopathic serial predator who, while in prison, got wind of a death-row jailbird’s hidden stash of pilfered loot. Once out, Powell shows up at the dead man’s house, fixing to terrify his widow and children into giving him the money. What is compelling and disquieting about this is that we see how Powell’s grotesque scare campaign is the climax of a lifelong compulsion: he has always been a drifter and violent parasite who is quite unable to master or understand his own need to bully, rob and kill. Mitchum’s ramrod-straight, baritone-voiced performance is compelling.
3. George Lopez as Mr Perez in Bread and Roses (2000)
Ken Loach’s underrated Bread and Roses contains a Premier League bad guy. In first-world Los Angeles, the gleaming corporate office-buildings all rely on a cowering, exploited, behind-the-scenes workforce of illegal Mexican cleaners; they can be abused and underpaid because, if they dare to speak out, they will be deported. And in one such organisation, the cleaners are terrorised by their supervisor, a Mr Perez, who is, of course, himself under pressure to maximise profits: Perez is played by Mexican-American standup comic George Lopez, part of the Loach tradition of casting comedians in straight roles. Pop-eyed with hatred and scorn, Perez picks on a timid elderly cleaner in one unforgettable scene and sadistically humiliates her in front of the other staff for being late, while her workmates turn away, sick with shame for not having the courage to intervene. One of the nastiest pieces of movie work I have ever seen.
4. Arno Frisch as Paul and Frank Giering as Peter in Funny Games (1997)
Paul and Peter have a reasonable claim to be the scariest, and nastiest villains in film history: forces of Satanic nature. They are the two well-dressed and very polite young men in Michael Haneke’s 1997 cult shocker who talk their way into the holiday home owned by a prosperous middle-class family, and proceed to terrorise them, for no reason at all. They have no motives and make no demands; they apparently desire nothing that could induce them to call off their open-ended campaign of meaningless horror. They were played by Arno Frisch and Frank Giering originally, and then by Michael Pitt and Brady Corbet in Haneke’s 2007 US remake. As villains, Paul and Peter are perhaps closest to the vampires of legend who have to be invited over the threshold in order to wreak their chaos. It is a genuinely terrifying film – not explicitly violent, but an ordeal of fear, with Paul and Peter at its centre.
5. Louise Fletcher as Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
Nurse Ratched is the cool, white-clad matron, played by Louise Fletcher, who rules over the male psychiatric patients in the state mental institution in which an anarchic petty criminal – Mac, played by Jack Nicholson – gets himself admitted, wrongly assuming it to be a cushy alternative to prison. Ratched is reserved and controlled, and the patients know she has the power to make recommendations about drugs or possible electro-convulsive shock therapy. Fletcher’s steely calm makes her a potent villain, but not a sadist exactly. There is a fascinating “case conference scene” in which she discusses Mac with doctors, showing every sign of professional sympathy. But, in the end, her concern is control – chilling, dictatorial, clinical control, which is an icy cancelling of the sexual tension that might otherwise be in the air, and also of any spark of human spontaneity. The mental ward is like a prison, or a grim high school: a dysfunctional institution, and Nurse Ratched is its inhuman face.
6. Aaron Eckhart as Chad in In the Company of Men (1997)
Movie villains can be feared or laughed at. But Chad, played by Aaron Eckhart in Neil LaBute’s vicious satire In the Company of Men, is there, above all, to be hated. He is a monster of pure misogyny, an obnoxious macho middle-manager enraged at his own sexual failures. He is driven by a psychopathic need for revenge against women, and bullies a timid beta-male subordinate into helping him with a horrible prank. He convinces this man that they should both romance a shy, hearing-impaired woman in their office, encourage her to fall in love with them both – and then dump her at the same time. It is the psycho-bully equivalent of a three-way. Nowadays, Eckhart plays nice guys and conventional straight leads, but Chad made him notorious at the time for pure obnoxiousness and shock. One of the great villains of indie cinema.
7. Imelda Staunton as Dolores Umbridge in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (2007)
The Harry Potter movies are crammed with obviously villainous figures, such as Ralph Fiennes’s Voldemort and Alan Rickman’s Snape. But Imelda Staunton’s Dolores Umbridge is a much more powerful, insidious and authentic force for wickedness, and one who seems to come not from fantasy, but from the world we all live in – the sort of teacher you can imagine in real life. She is a nasty bully with a sucrose manner – you can see Staunton playing Umbridge in a Mike Leigh film. Professor Umbridge, a foe of Harry Potter, makes him do lines (unjustly). He has to write “I must not tell lies” and these appear painfully, magically scratched out on the back of his hand. This humiliation is corporal punishment that is actually abuse, all wrapped up in petty magic. A villainous combination.
8. Ned Beatty as Lotso-Huggin’-Bear in Toy Story 3 (2010)
When Buzz Lightyear and Woody are finally taken to a daycare centre in the third and final Toy Story movie, they are at first thrilled that they will be played with by real kids. But the atmosphere of this place is worryingly like the prison in Cool Hand Luke, and they discover that the person who effectively rules over everything is not quite what he seems. This is the “lovable” Lots-O’-Huggin’ Bear, richly and warmly voiced by Ned Beatty. He is the senior prisoner and everyone appears to respect him as a sweet, grandfatherly figure — but he is an insidious and creepy bully, almost like a cult leader, who rules with henchmen enforcers. That name, and the bland cuddly teddybear face are both highly effective at putting across his parasitic villainy.
9. Peter Lorre as Hans Beckert in M (1931)
Hannibal Lecter is, for some, cinema’s most famous serial killer, but Hans Beckert is up there with him. He is a child killer on the loose in 1930s Berlin, played unforgettably by Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang’s oppressively atmospheric movie. Beckert writes jeering and taunting letters to the press, but in person, is a whingeing, cringing figure. Bulging-eyed, porcine, sweaty and ugly, heavily dressed in suit, overcoat and hat, he perennially behaves with a kind of fugitive self-pity, almost as if he is the victim. And, in a sense, he is the victim, both of the criminal classes’ manhunt and then of their kangaroo-court tribunal. He is perhaps the least scary villain because there is something so pathetic and abject about him, and yet this contemptible quality is what makes Beckert such a villainous excrescence.
10. Linda Blair as Regan/Satan in The Exorcist (1973)
Playing Satan is the biggest challenge for an actor, and the best, the most ingenious (and most complex) approach came in William Friedkin’s classic chiller, in which the performer plays someone entirely innocent – that is, a child – and also the Evil One who has invaded that child’s body. Linda Blair gave a heroic performance as Regan and also Satan, even though the voice was dubbed in by Mercedes McCambridge and some of the most legendary head-swivelling was achieved through prosthetics. Blair’s face was contorted into a chucklingly evil doll (I sometimes think she inspired Chucky) and, in some ways, the most unforgettable moment came at the very end when we see her face, back to normal, but pale, battered, almost pock-marked with trauma. It was an incredible, self-lacerating work from Blair: a real uber-villain.
