Top 10 Cinematic Villains

Here's a list I've been putting together for a while as I've reflected over the tons of villains I've watched scare up the screen.  Nothing makes a movie classic quite like a badass bad guy, and these are the best of the bunch.  Evil, insane, brilliant, calculating, sociopathic, or just plain blood-thirsty.  Many different ingredients go toward making a great villain, and here are my choices for the greatest baddies to ever hit theaters.  

10. Maleficent - 'Sleeping Beauty'

In one of the greatest, oddest, and most uniquely crafted Disney films of all time, we're given this exquisitely cruel sorceress so consumed with envy and spite that she'll unleash a deadly curse on a newborn baby!  She's cold, relentless, and wrapped in a classic Disney evil the likes of which hasn't been seen since.  

9. Amon Goethe - 'Schindler's List'

Aside from the political figureheads of Nazi Germany, it's hard to put an actual face on the up-close and nonsensical brutality of the Holocaust.  Ralph Feinnes did just that in 'Schindler's List', embodying the hellacious mix of aristocratic Western austerity and animalistic hatred and rage.  The character was also a real person.

8. Nurse Ratched - 'One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest'

It takes a hell of a villain to make you want to personally strangle her to death throughout the entire film.  Emotionless and unfeeling in some of the most monstrous ways, she makes the plight of the hospital's inmates all the more universal.  

7. Hans Beckert - 'M'

He's the very first cinematic serial killer, a disturbingly everyday monster roaming the streets and whistling as he approaches the children he preys upon.  His bug eyes and frantic pleas of understanding make him one of the most chilling characters ever on film.  "That's a nice balloon you have there, little girl," he says.  All the more frightening because creature like him really are out there.  

6. Anton Chigurh - 'No Country For Old Men'

The fatalistic 'flip-a-coin' motif has been employed by numerous villains, but none with more menace and psychotic gusto than this pauper-haired rogue killer.  His pneumatic cattle gun is one the best weapons ever used in a movie.  Cold-blooded.

5. Reverend Harry Powell - 'Night of the Hunter'

With 'love' and 'hate' tattooed on his hands, this evil and obsessed perversion of a clergymen will stop at nothing to kill two small children and take the cash they're hiding.  In a surrealist hell of a film, he's the devil himself luring the innocent to their doom.  Robert Mitchum's performance has influenced countless villains since. 

4. Lil' Ze - 'City of God'

In a Brazilian gangland loaded with rampant violence and teenage gunmen, one killer reigns supreme.  He grows from a laughing pint-sized murderer to an evil walking holocaust, a sociopathic nightmare let loose on everyone around him in a destitute land where there is no law but the gun.  Temperamental, unpredictable, and ultra-violent, he's a being so awful he almost defies belief.  But the kicker is this guy actually existed.  

3. Hannibal Lecter - 'Silence of the Lambs'

A cannibalistic villain so genuinely terrifying that he was almost as scary behind prison walls as he was once on the loose.  He combined polished intellectual charm with grisly viciousness in a way that made him both revolting and oddly appealing, especially considering the unique ethics he used when choosing who to feast on.  No can use 'fava beans' in a sentence anymore without bringing him to mind.  

2. The Joker - 'The Dark Knight'

It's impossible to Heath Ledger's untimely death from the brilliant character he created, and the Joker's every move has a sense of finality and impending doom that blankets the entire film, even when he's not in the scene.  Finally doing Bob Kane's bravura creation justice on the big screen, he's a deadly and wildly unpredictable wildcard whose actions are much easily condemned than his anarchist observations, and that makes him all the more disturbing.  A walking nightmare in caked on makeup.

1. Darth Vader - 'Star Wars'

The ultimate movie bad guy.  He's got the cape, the voice, the swagger, and the icy heart, not to mention to ability to choke you to death through a video screen.  George Lucas recreated the prototype mythological antagonist to do battle with his set of charismatic heroes, and that galaxy far far away wouldn't be near as exciting without his fearsome visage lording over it.  He's the ultimate cinematic icon, the perfect personification of evil, and he's this list's #1 movie villain of all time.