The Joker & The 9 Most Evil Movie Villains Of All Time, Ranked

While Joker is one of the most recent evil villains to grace the big screen, he’s not the worst of cinema’s worst monsters.

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A great hero needs an even greater villain and some of the most iconic characters in film history are villains who wowed audiences with their dark, power-packed performances. Playing the antagonist isn’t easy since actors are often required to rewire themselves significantly to get into the shoes of an amoral, evil character.

The history of cinema is littered with shocking villains, making it difficult to pick the top ten antagonists of all time. However, here are some legendary big bad characters, each trying to best the other in terms of exactly how base and inhuman one can get– some of these villains had a few redeeming features, a few had complex backstories but most were simply evil.

10 Darth Vader (The Star Wars Saga)

The most well-known villain of the hugely popular Star Wars franchise, Darth Vader is possibly the most iconic of sci-fi villains. The powerful Sith Lord with his mechanical anatomy gives off the sense of something that isn’t quite human, and almost monstrous.

Although Darth Vader is hailed as one of the greatest film villains of all time, he was finally redeemed of at least some of his deeds when he sacrificed himself to protect his son, Luke Skywalker, and help end the Empire’s tyrannical rule. While evil for the most part because of how much he willingly enforced the Empire’s brutality across the galaxy, Darth Vader’s final gestures made his character heavily debated among fans and scholars alike.

9 Nurse Ratched (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest)

Nurse Ratched from One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest was evil personified, the sinister nurse who worked in a psychiatric facility but was something of a psychopath herself. Actress Lousie Fletcher’s impeccable performance as the heartless nurse in the critically acclaimed 1975 film earned her a well-deserved Oscar.

The recently released Netflix original Ratched, starring Sarah Paulson in the title role, claims to bring to life Nurse Ratched’s origin story in a dark splash of gothic horror. Though some felt that the mere concept of the show was unnecessary, it has since proven doubts wrong and excelled in some surprising ways.

8 Voldemort (The Harry Potter Series)

The supervillain of the Harry Potter franchise was Lord Voldemort, whose lust for power and immortality made him commit horrific crimes, massacring wizards and humans alike. Fueled by an unearned sense of superiority, Voldemort loathed Muggles (i.e. a wizarding slur for non-magic people), considered them filth and strove to rid the magical universe of half-bloods (i.e. those born of the union of a wizard/witch and a muggle).

In the first of his two entries here, Ralph Fiennes brought Voldemort to life, making him perhaps even more terrifying than he was in the books. Voldemort, born Tom Riddle, murdered his own family and in his quest for immortality, went on to rip his soul into several pieces by murdering countless more people.

7 Sauron (The Lord Of The Rings Trilogy)

Another powerfully evil fantasy villain like Voldemort but way more ancient was the Dark Lord, Sauron. Sauron’s powers originated before the First Age when he used to be the right-hand man, so to speak, of the first Dark Lord, Morgoth, a primeval source of power created by Eru.

Sauron was pure evil and existed without his corporeal form, languishing for centuries until he could rise again and build an army to extend his reign over the whole of Middle Earth. In fact, as a testament to Sauron’s darkness, Mordor itself was represented as a lifeless, perilous landscape.

6 Hans Landa (Inglourious Basterds)

In something of a leap from Middle Earth, although perhaps not quite in terms of the evil, Hans Landa in Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds was an ambitious and deeply sadistic SS Nazi officer who hid sadism underneath his smiling, charismatic façade. Christoph Waltz gave an unsettling performance as the cold-blooded Landa winning an Academy Award for his role.

Landa was widely known as ‘The Jew Hunter’ simply because of how great he was at hunting down Jews. He wasn’t somebody who necessarily believed in the Nazi ideology either, as he only pursued whatever road took him towards personal gain. Whether it was the Nazis or the Allies, Landa was willing to kill anyone and everyone as long as the orders were official. The complete lack of humanity in this otherwise jovial Nazi made him even more terrifying and ruthless than usual

5 Norman Bates (Psycho)

Alfred Hitchcock’s classic Psycho gave the world yet another evil film antagonist, Norman Bates. Bates was the epitome of the mentally disturbed villain who murdered his own mother, turned her decaying body into a mummy, and would dress up as her to murder people who came into his obscure little motel.

One of the most horrifying scenes in cinema is that of Bates, dressed as ‘Mother,’ stabbing Marion Crane in the shower. More recently, the dark psychological thriller series Bates Motel starring Vera Farmiga and Freddie Highmore was inspired by Bates’ story and showed the character’s background and evolution into the iconic serial killer, although it took a different trajectory from the film.

4 Joker

One of the most iconic supervillains of all time, the Joker has been immortalized by the likes of Jack Nicholson, Heath Ledger, and more recently Joaquin Phoenix. Both Ledger and Phoenix won Academy Awards for their almost feral performances as the deranged antagonist of the celebrated Batman foe, but Phoenix’s take was the one who stood out the most.

A very loose adaptation of the DC Comics character’s origins, Joker from director Todd Phillips told the traumatic backstory of Arthur Fleck, whose troubled past and serious mental health issues drove him into becoming a mass murderer and an unintentional symbol of a violent uprising following a string of bad luck. Joker is both evil and chaos incarnate, making him a recent yet still legendary addition to cinema’s greatest villains.

3 Hannibal Lecter (The Silence Of The Lambs)

Sir Anthony Hopkins immortalized the character of the genius psychiatrist-turned-cannibalistic serial killer, Hannibal Lecter, in the classic The Silence Of The Lambs. Here, Lecter was a sleek, sophisticated psychopath who was arrested for killing people and eating their internal organs. But just because he’s behind tempered glass in the film’s start doesn’t mean he’s any less dangerous.

Beneath Hannibal Lecter’s polished exterior lurks a psychotic monster and that is what makes him even more fascinating. Lecter’s evil is all the more dangerous because of his brilliance, making him a very interesting study of human psychology.

2 John Doe (Se7en)

For those who don’t remember, the serial killer in David Fincher’s classic crime thriller, Se7en, was never identified with any name other than the placeholder ‘John Doe.’ Kevin Spacey’s heart-stopping portrayal of the calm but terrifying psychopath who murdered innocent people based on his own demented notion of cleansing the world of its sins is timeless, indeed.

John Doe was incredibly cunning and was always one step ahead of the detectives, played by Brad Pitt and Morgan Freeman. The sheer intelligence with which he set the whole thing up, almost like a puppet master, was what set John apart from other fictional serial killers.

1 Amon Göth (Schindler’s List)

Amon Göth was the depraved SS officer who ran the Płaszów concentration camp during World War II. Ralph Fiennes delivered a chilling performance as this cruel, repulsive and amoral monster of a man whose morning rituals included executing Jews at random from his balcony. For these reasons and many more, Göth was pure evil incarnate with no redeeming features and qualities to speak of, whose mere presence violated the very fabric of humanity.

But perhaps the most terrifying thing is that unlike the somewhat comical Nazi Hans Landa or everyone mentioned here, Göth was a real person. The fact that Göth isn’t the first or last of his inhuman kind is a harrowing reminder of how low humanity can go if one is not vigilant. Schindler’s List ended by showing Göth being executed as a war criminal post World War II, which is also what happened in real life.

Link Source : https://screenrant.com/joker-most-evil-movie-villains-ranked/