What makes a great villian?

As for cartoon villains I don't have a clear cut favorite, but certainly the one I think of first is Frank Booth from Blue Velvet played by Dennis Hopper. I can't imagine a villain who is more over-the-top and a conglaumeration of psychoses and evil to the core. Hopper is simply wild, bizzare and inhuman in his portrayal. Frank Booth kidnaps, ransoms, murders, steals, runs illegal operations, wears makeup, has sexual fetishes, swears like non other, and beats women. It's difficult to imagine a more perfect villain! He has so many great scenes and the performance by Hopper I have seen polarize many viewers I've watched the film with or have shown it to. Some love it, others like my girlfriend despise the film and the character and never want to see either again. Now I'm certain people like Frank Booth more or less exist but it's the style and over-the-top presentation that takes the character into the unreal realm.

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My least liked villain... as in I think they are a poor villain and not a very good character is Hannibal Lecter.

I approach his character more or less on how the audience views Lecter. Lecter is not really a villain at all if we approach Silence of the Lambs or his other films as identifying with the main character. In Silence of the Lambs the main character is Jodi Foster. Foster earns the respect of Lecter. Lecter kills people who are rude. Lecter avenges Foster by making the man who threw cum on her kill himself. That's almost like a hero! Wow. If we identify with the main character then we therefore see Lecter as a character we could buddy buddy up to with. Cuddle up in bed and watch reruns of "The Andy Griffith Show" while petting kittens! But watchout if we have a rude aunt or in-law come over guess what... Lecter will eat them for their rudeness!

Wow what a perfect villain!

Yes, that's a quick summation of my thoughts of Lecter and why he's seen as a good villain and also why I truly hate him as a villain and a film character he is completely worthless to me and I absolutely hate Hopkins performance of Lecter making him into this mystical killer who knows and sees all!

What a ****ing joke. I can grimmance and tilt my head and gaze unblinkingly into the camera too. Doesn't make me a villain.

She was cold, and cunning. Her blond hair and cute face disguised a pitiless soul. Her mother backed her every evil move, and her little brother Willie was her complete thrall.

Nellie Olson

The great villians I'd say are those that are the most fleshed out and realistic. To simply have a villian try to take over the world and kill people is just bulls***.

Take Magneto from the Xmen for example. He is easily one of the best comic villains around and that is because he is the most... 'real'. he has realistic reasons for being a villain. Depending which origin you go into, he is a holocaust survivor, who sees who doesn't want what happed to the Jewish people happen to the mutants. In his own kind of twisted way, he actually is helping them and just trying to keep them safe. It doesn't hurt that the movie version was played by Sir Ian Mccellen




It doesn't always have to be the case though. The joker (particularily the Dark Knight H.L. version) doesn't need a reason to be. He is the anti-thesis to Batman plain and simple and yet for his case, it works out perfectly.

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A great villain:
-Has a bakstory
-Has motives
-Has a nice look, acts cool, is calm and ironic
-Has values
-Inspite of all this...has a wicked and twisted mind

A great example, and in my opinion the best villain of all time: Shishio

Another example of a psychotic incredibly intelligent, twisted and scary villain is the Joker

to me, a greater villian is one who can give the viewer ONE look and you get chills!! whether he speaks a single line of dialogue, the body langauge alone sends me to terror. for instance, no one would ever thought anthony perkins was scary until he did Psycho. watch his eyes and the ways he shifts his body, to me that is more eerie than being over the top. a voice can do it as well. take tony todd from the candyman series. his voice sends chills up my spine. hopkins is a master of this as well. just staying calm as havoc is wrecked just makes a villian much more believeable. finally, the way the actor or actress can be in a scene but your eyes are drawn to the extras and their reactions. the scene i say this for is in the Dark Knight when the Joker crashes Bruce Wayne's party. i feel the terror in some of the partygoers faces and the smugness all at the same time.

To me Darth Vader was the ultimate movie villain.
Whoever he was influenced by, Lucas took it and improved on it.



It was the whole package that did it for me.
Dressed all in black.
Helmet and mask so you couldn't see his face.
Big dark cape.
A laser sword.
That voice!!!!
And the freaky breathing.

When I was a kid I remember thinking how utterly scarey it would be to be in a room and then just suddenly hear that breathing behind you.

Course the mask and 'Ch-ch-ch' sound from Jason were the same thing for me but Vader could kick Jason's ass any day of the week.

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I like villains who don't give me the chills. The people we trust and hold in our confidence and who are sauve, and approachable make the best kind of villains. Kind of like James Mason in North by Northwest. I agree with you on Anthony Perkins, but I never really found him that creepy for whatever reasons.

Hopkins I've never much been a fan of, in any of his films.

I certainly don't have any set rules on who can be a good/bad villain based on how realistic someone thinks they are or if they're cartoons or even if they're completely evil, etc. To me, each villain stands within the context of its own film. I do enjoy witty villains who seem to be the nemesis of the hero and can even "out-suave" them, but what I really enjoy is a villain who's completely unpredictable. Now, I'll admit that Frank in Blue Velvet is completely unpredictable, but I also find him to be utterly ridiculous. By unpredictable, I probably mean somebody like the Joker in The Dark Knight, although the Joker in Tim Burton's Batman was very unpredictable too and much scarier than Frank. Amon Goeth in Schindler's List is also very unpredictable to me. One minute he's trying to seduce you, the next minute he's beating you. One second he's planning on spending his life with you, the next sec he's ready to send you to the gas chamber.



I agree that George C. Scott was excellent in The Hustler but he does play a type of character. He's plays Mephistopheles. He buys and sells Fast Eddie and those who care for him. I think he's a very good villain, but I find nothing terribly original about him except that he fits into the Greek Tragedy scenario perfectly.



I want to make sure that I don't forget Lady Macbeth in all the film versions and variations of the Shakespeare play. She's always been a super villain to me, whether it be in a Kurosawa film (Throne of Blood, Polanski's personal exorcism version of Macbeth or any of the other takes of the film., well, except for maybe the pointless add-on at the end of Mystic River.

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I think originality is certainly over valued. I admire quality. Even if George C. Scott in The Hustler isn't original... who cares. I think he's an enlarged reflection upon what many people are. Characters don't always need to be original. In The Hustler, he needed to be human, but rotten and he certainly works on that level.


If you're going by the context of the film (which I agree is probably the best way to view these things) Frank Booth is entirely appropriate for the film. He does fit well into David Lynch's random dark worlds.

I dislike Amon Goeth within the context of the film Schindler's List, simply because the film needed some kind of super villain to counter act its super hero.

That portrayal was Scott's best ever. He should have gotten the Oscar for that part (I think he was nominated, wasn't he?) than for Patton. Certainly his was the best performance in that picture--far better than Newman, better even than Gleason. The thing about Scott's character was that he had a reason for what he did, he wanted something and he went after it the best way he could. Newman's character wanted the title, but he just didn't want it badly enough. He didn't want the girl badly enough to stand by her. He wasn't loyal enough to his partner to stand by him. His character was half-ass; Scott's character was whole-hog.

What makes a great villain great is a little something that sets him aside from everything else in the story.

One of my all-time favorite villains is the gunfighter Wilson played by Jack Palance in Shane, the role that really made Palance's movie career. Recently saw a TV special on villains in which director John Carpenter spotlighted the role of Wilson as a great villain. Carpenter remarked that Wilson was so tough that "even the dog gets out of his way." Which is true--in scenes in Shane when Wilson comes into the bar or gets up from where he was sitting, there's a big hound in the bar that gets up and leaves every time! Even the dog knew not to mess with Wilson!
Another thing about Wilson as portrayed by Palance: with the exception of when Shane buys a soda pop for the kid, everytime anyone gets a drink in the bar is whiskey or beer--usually whiskey. The one constant exception is Palance's Wilson, who always drinks coffee!!! A small but--to me, anyway--important difference. What's the thing with coffee? I keep wondering.

Of course, what really sets Wilson apart is his coldblooded cruelty. The scene where he hogs the woodens sidewalk, forcing Elisha Cook's "Stonewall" into the muddy, slippery street, picks a fight with him, beats him to the draw, and stands grinning over him before pulling the trigger. That scene really had movie-goers talking back then.

It's interesting that in citing cowboy villains, that program listed Palance's Wilson, Lee Van Cleeve's Angel Eyes in the Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, Eastwood's Bill Mony from Unforgiven, Scott Glenn's Wes Hightower in Urban Cowboy, and Roy Barcroft who played heavies vs. Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, Bill Elliott, and other B-Western cowboy heroes.

Among the gangster villains, the film cite Paul Muni in the original Scarface, which alluded to Al Capone's career and was Al Capone's favorite film, although banned in some cities (including I think Chicago) for some years. Cagney's Tom Powers in Public Enemy, which made him a star, was based on Jewish gagser Hymie Weis who once smashed a omlet in a girlfriend's face. The program also mentioned movie star George Raph once worked for gangster Owney Madden, but didn't mention it was primarily as an entertainer--a dancer--in one of Madden's nightclubs, with a possible sideline as a bagman. Raft was tough enough to be a childhood friend of "Bugsy" Siegal however, and palled around with Siegal and even got him a screen test when Siegel went Hollywood.

The program cited Josephman Wiseman as the first of the "super villians" in the title role of Dr. No, the first James Bond film. Didn't even mention Wiseman's great definitive role as the nutsy crook, high on drugs, who turns cop-killer in Detective Story. That was the best portrayal of a gangster ever.

Best of show for psycho characers, according to the program, were Robert Mitchum in both Night of the Hunter and the original Cape Fear (he certainly gets my vote!), Joseph Cotton in Shadow of a Doubt (a serial killer of women who loves his sister and her family who he visits); Robert Walker in Strangers on a Train; Martin Landau as James Mason's henchman in North by Northwest (who by injecting the hint of homosexual undertones in his performance forced Mason to have to change his character), and of course Tony Perkins as Norman Bates in the original Psycho, which, John Carpenter said "made Perkins' career and destroyed it." Both Norman Bates and Leatherface in Texas Chainsaw Massacre were based on the real-life mass murderer.

The program also referred to space villains in "Cold War parables" like the 1951 original The Thing and the 1960 original Village of the Damned. Carpenter said his later remake of The Thing was based on "lack of trust" among people.

It is the goodness and pure heart of the hero in a story that makes a villian the bad guy in comparision.

Think Simba and Scar from "Lion King."



or here, where Scar confesses to killing Mufasa--"Long live the King."



Here's a good movie with an unlikely villian: Burt Lancaster in "Sweet Smell of Success"--don't let those glasses fool you. Lancaster's character is scary mean, I tell you--scary mean.

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javier bardem in NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN surely outdoes most in this category...sent a chill round my spine with that fixed stare....the scene where he tracks josh brolin to his hotel room is one of the most taut,haunting moments in film history,i think!