Who are the scariest villains of fiction?

For me they'd be the ordinary people rather than aliens, monsters, etc. Like in an episode of Hawaii Five-O where a family of rednecks have been murdering people across America and now Hawaii for small sums of money and when finally caught, the father tells Steve McGarrett that they weren't kin so it didn't matter if they killed them and stealing off dead people don't count.

Or the Purple Man in a Marvel comic. His words are absolute law to others. He goes into a McDonalds for breakfast. Lots of noisy people and kids running about so he tells them to hold their breath. When he left after eating his meal and reading a newspaper, there were 30-odd dead adults and kids left behind him.

Yet when it comes to films, there are not many real villains about. The Joker of course, but he's from the comics.

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All secrets are safe with this man, because none are as deadly to him as his own. His secret is that he is Richard Kimble. (The Fugitive - Conspiracy of Silence)

Well, you could go with Pinhead, but they sort of made him a nice guy in the end (if you don't count that crappy Hellraiser in space thing they did). What about Kevin Spacey? People still try to steal from his part in Se7en. And he may have been a bit of the villain in Usual Suspects.

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“Worker bees can leave.
Even drones can fly away.
The Queen is their slave.”

Mr. Squears from Nicholas Nickelby. He's horrible.

Mrs. Havisham from Great Expectations is a villain of the emotional sadist sort.

Bill Sykes from Oliver Twist. Thug nasty.

For really, rotten yet coached in reality villainy, Charles Dickens seems to fill the bill.

I hear that Honore de Balzac has created some excellent true to life villains but I have never read his work.

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Louise Vale first woman to play Jane Eyre in the flickers.

It's not just whether they are ordinairy people or monsters, if an antagonist is portrayed in a certain way and used effectively, they will be scary regardless. One of the main reasons why Heath Ledger's Joker was frightening was because he wasn't humanised in the way Jack Nicholson's Joker was. There was no backstory no main reason as to why he was the way he was. He just is. It's the same the Freddy Kruger. In the first few Nightmare films all we knew was that he was a child killer who got burnt and returned as a supernatural force. No motive except to continue doing his thing but in the privacy of one's sleep.

But yeah, Freddy Kruger has always done it for me.

Ledger's Joker was frightening? I tell you, the thing I learn on this site.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre dude gets me, but those creatures from The Descent scare the sh#$ out of me.

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The four fascists from Salo?

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"Don't be so gloomy. After all it's not that awful. Like the fella says, in Italy for 30 years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love - they had 500 years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."

Joker, Heath Ledger

Me too!

This man, he scares me:

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Fredy Kruger was always scary.

Buffalo Bill Silence Of The Lambs is by far the creepest."It puts the lotion in the basket" That is some creepy crap. The mirror scene geez...... I wouldn't want to run into that freak

Sally Field's mother in Sybil.

Yeah Javier Bardem in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN... scared the **** out of me !
and also... Jabba the hut !

Classicqueen13 -- Alan Arkin from Wait Until Dark (1967) .... Roat / Roat Jr. / Roat Sr.
Really good call. He would not have come to (my) mind at first - but he is an excellent pick for this thread. Really gives you the creeps. Alan is great (love the guy).

PS - this was one of his first roles and shows that great actors are great, right out of the gate.

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R.I.P.

"Keep your lovin' brother happy."
Henry Fonda was terrific in Once Upon A Time In The West. Rarely does one see such a display of pure evil. The scary thing is; men like this exited - killed women and children for a big corporations. What's even more scary, they still exist. More than ever.


Freddie Jones, as Bytes in The Elephant Man (1980). There are many real people like this guy - who torture and use others for their own profit.

I'm with Zach.. The Leatherface in TCM.. well pretty much the whole family creeps me out. I think the realism of a family like that is the scariest part

Snow White's stepmother when she does her transition into a witch.

NURSE RATCHED - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)