40 Greatest Screen Villains of All Time - Part One

We all love rooting for our screen heroes but they would be nothing without a great villain to go up against. Almost since the very beginning, cinema has provided plenty of memorable antagonists for us to boo and hiss, as well as a fair few that give us sleepless nights.

This week be begin our two-part countdown of forty of the finest.

40. Dr. Jack Griffin in The Invisible Man (1933) 

On a snowy night, a mysterious man enters a cosy inn with his face swathed in bandages and brusquely rents a room. This is Dr. Jack Griffin (Claude Rains), who has developed a serum that can turn a person invisible. Unfortunately for him, it also has psychotic side effects. As his mind deteriorates, he becomes murderously insane with delusions of world domination.

Released two years after Dracula and Frankenstein set the Universal Classic Monsters train into motion, James Whale (who directed the latter) was at the helm again for another tour-de-force of fantastical horror, this time adapting H.G. Wells’ The Invisible Man. Although we don’t see his face until the end, Claude Rains is captivating in the role, his body language radiating menace when visible in clothing and his silky tones escalating into raving mania. 

The special effects, although primitive by today’s standards, are ingenious and still unnervingly powerful.

39. Scorpio in Dirty Harry (1971)

A young woman enjoys a swim in a rooftop pool, completely oblivious to a killer’s cross-hairs trained on her from a neighbouring building. He pulls the trigger, putting a bullet through her back. She gasps and sinks beneath the water, the first random victim in Scorpio’s reign of terror as he holds San Francisco to ransom.

The city sizzles and Lalo Schiffrin’s score shimmers in Don Siegel’s hard-nosed thriller about a grimacing maverick cop (Clint Eastwood) relentlessly chasing down the giggling hippie psycho. Loosely based on the real-life Zodiac Killer, Andy Robinson nails the role of Scorpio in his screen debut, all too believable with his sickly cherubic face and the sadistic glee he gets from taunting his pursuers. By the time he hijacks a bus load of school kids in the final act, we have no doubt he’ll murder them all if our man Harry doesn’t blow him away first.

38. Jack Carter in Get Carter (1971)

Mob enforcer Jack Carter (Michael Caine) isn’t a very nice guy, but he’s all we’ve got to cling onto in Mike Hodges’ flinty kitchen-sink revenge thriller. Many years of living in the Big Smoke makes Carter something of a fish out of water when he returns to Newcastle for his brother’s funeral. But as the local crooks soon find out, that fish is a shark ready to take a big bite out of anyone who stands in his way when he suspects the death wasn’t an accident. When Carter learns that the motive involves a porn ring that has also taken advantage of his young niece, things get very ugly indeed.

Jack Carter is a mean and callous man who cares for absolutely no-one, his Northeast rampage turning into a nihilistic spiral towards his inevitable demise. Caine has had many fine roles in a career spanning eight decades and over 130 films, but Carter may be his quintessential performance. He adds steel to the aloof roguishness of his ‘60s star-making roles (Alfie, The Ipcress File) and casual menace to his trademark halting delivery. A stone-cold masterpiece of utter cinematic bastardry.

37. Principal Ed Rooney in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)

If we are able to separate art from the vile artist for a moment, then maybe we can still acknowledge Jeffrey Jones as one of the great character actors of the ‘80s and ‘90s. He was at his comic best playing uptight and supercilious Principal Rooney in John Hughes’ classic, the self-styled nemesis of skiving smart-ass Ferris Bueller (Matthew Broderick).

As Ferris plans one last epic act of hooky before the end of term, Rooney goes on a hellbent mission to catch the kid and his friends red-handed. Technically, I guess the Principal has a point, but his determination to bust Ferris turns him into a bumbling stalker and housebreaker. Much of the joy comes from watching Rooney’s frustration build to demented proportions as Bueller repeatedly gets the better of him. The result is comedy gold all the way through to Rooney’s defeated walk of shame over the closing credits.

36. Harlan Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life (1946)

Frank Capra’s classic has obvious shades of A Christmas Carol, and Harlan Potter (Lionel Barrymore) is clearly the Scrooge of the piece. Opposed by selfless nice guy George Bailey (James Stewart), the unscrupulous millionaire has his money-grabbing claws into the regular folk of Bedford Falls and only wants to tighten his grip further.

Unlike Dickens’ famous miser, however, there is no indication that Potter was ever a nicer person in his younger years and his actions are utterly irredeemable. After pocketing $8000 that forgetful Uncle Billy (Thomas Mitchell) accidentally gives him, he seizes on the opportunity to crush his opponent by driving George to the brink of suicide. 

He receives no comeuppance at the end, either, representing ruthless, all-devouring capitalism. Many of us now live in a version of Pottersville (literally or figuratively) that we see in the nightmarish fantasy sequence where George is shown what life would be like without him. Barrymore’s portrayal of an avaricious one-percenter still cuts close to the bone and the FBI at the time considered the film Anti-American Communist propaganda.

35. Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)

Speaking of megalomania and naked greed, we also have Immortan Joe (Hugh Keays-Byrne) in George Miller’s heavy metal fourth instalment of the Mad Max series. In a world devastated by a nuclear holocaust, the freakish despot takes late stage Capitalism to its logical (and not entirely unrealistic) extreme. Joe lords it over the ragged peasants of the Citadel, hoarding precious water and keeping a harem of attractive young women whom he hopes to impregnate with an untainted heir. 

Keays-Byrne also memorably played another unrelated Mad Max antagonist, Toecutter, in the first film, but his appearance this time around is truly frightening. His bloated grey body is covered in open sores and he wears a horrendous mask with oversized gnashers to help him breathe and look even more intimidating. Despite his outlandish visage, it wasn’t lost on some viewers that Joe eerily presaged the rise of another strongarm leader with a shock of unruly blonde hair - Donald Trump.

34. Biff Tannen in the Back to the Future series (1985 - 1990)

That line sums up the greatness of Biff Tannen (Thomas F. Wilson), the knuckleheaded nemesis of the McFly family in the Back to the Future trilogy. Daunting in size, overblown with self-assurance, and lacking somewhat in the brain department, he’s an all-too-recognisable caricature of just about every bully you ever met.

Thanks to Wilson’s performance, he’s also a delight whenever he is onscreen. The actor finds new wrinkles to the character in every iteration he plays throughout the franchise, perhaps never bettering the three versions he plays in the first movie. When we first meet him, he’s the obnoxious boss of George McFly (Crispin Glover); in the ‘50s, a dimwitted tormentor of the same man as a teen; finally, he becomes a grovelling servant after George finally plucked up the courage to put him in his place.

As the series progressed, further versions of Biff in an alternative future and the Old West gave the comic antagonism a different dimension. Much like Batman and the Joker are eternal adversaries, it seems that the McFlys are destined to confront Tannen throughout the ages.

33. Tommy DeVito in Goodfellas (1990)

Is there a scarier question in the gangster genre? I remember how I stopped breathing during the scene when I first saw Goodfellas: Tommy (Joe Pesci) is regaling his friends with an anecdote, reducing them to howls of laughter. Wiping tears of merriment from his eyes, Henry Hill (Ray Liotta) makes the mistake of telling his diminutive partner in crime how amusing he is. Tommy’s mood turns on a dime and silence falls as he grills Henry about the comment, making his pal squirm in his seat. The tension is deadly before Henry finally calls his bluff and it’s all laughs again.

Tommy is one of the great loose cannons. Every cinematic criminal gang seems to have one, but what makes him such a pint-sized threat is his unpredictability, with his sudden mood swings and hair-trigger temper. Pesci deservedly picked up his only Oscar for the performance.

32. El Indio in For a Few Dollars More (1965)

Sprung from prison by his band of sweaty desperados, El Indio (Gia Maria Volonte) times his duels to the melancholy chimes of a pocket watch stolen from a young woman he raped and murdered on her wedding night years before. He doesn’t like to play fair – not only is he quick on the draw, he knows exactly when the last note will play.

El Indio has a high price on his head, attracting two competing bounty hunters: Manco, played by Clint Eastwood with his “Man with No Name” persona, and Colonel Douglas Mortimer (Lee Van Cleef), who has a far more personal reason for tracking down the bandit.

Henry Fonda’s diabolical Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West may be Sergio Leone’s most revered villain, but El Indio is a more fascinating character. Portrayed with smouldering magnetism by Volonte, he may be a ruthless maniac but we also get the sense that he was truly in love with the girl, who happened to be Mortimer’s sister. His twisted obsession with her memory provides a dark counterpoint to the Colonel’s brotherly love, making their final showdown one of the most emotionally charged shootouts in western movies.

31. HAL 9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

Cinema has always provided a sandbox to play out dark scenarios where our tech is out to get us, and HAL from Stanley Kubrick’s stately cosmic saga stands head and shoulders above most other malevolent AI – even though he is only depicted on screen by a single baleful red light keeping watch over the crew on a mission to Jupiter.

Strangely, the murderous supercomputer is not only the villain but also the most “human” character in the film. While his flesh and blood crew-mates are emotionless, we register notes of disapproval and menace in his hypnotic monotone, voiced superbly by Douglas Rain. When he goes on the fritz and decides that the human component is the biggest threat to the mission’s success, he systematically terminates the crew. This leads to the movie’s most poignant scene as HAL pleads for his existence as the sole survivor shuts him down.

30. Crossley in The Shout (1978)

Adapted from a short story by Robert Graves, Jerzy Skolimowski’s art-house horror The Shout quickly vanished when it was first released in 1978. Perhaps audiences didn’t take to it because the premise is so peculiar and the method so uncanny. Alan Bates plays Crossley, a sinister yet charismatic drifter who invites himself into the home of Anthony (John Hurt) and Rachel (Susannah York), a young married couple living by the sea. He claims to have spent years in the Outback with an Aboriginal tribe where he learned shamanic powers. The most menacing is the ability to shout people to death with an ear-splitting roar.

Skolimowski takes the brooding sexuality that Bates brought to Ken Russell’s Women in Love and gives it a dark supernatural twist. Crossley is a threatening character but an intensely magnetic one, bringing Rachel under his spell by stealing a buckle from her shoe – another magical power that he uses to make her his sex slave and drive Anthony from his home. 

Although The Shout died a quick death at the box office, it fared better at Cannes where it won the Grand Prix, the second-highest accolade at the festival.

29. Auric Goldfinger in Goldfinger (1964)

Compared to some of the more apocalyptic schemes of James Bond super-villains, Auric Goldfinger’s plan is relatively modest: His goal is to detonate a nuke inside Fort Knox and send the value of his own stash skyrocketing. Yet it is the madness behind the method that makes the rotund hoarder so menacing. As Shirley Bassey’s iconic theme song spells things out, this guy really, really loves gold and will stop at nothing to get more.

Played brusquely by German actor Gert Fröbe, Goldfinger is a neat counterpoint to Sean Connery’s unflappable 007. He’s petty, humourless, and spiteful, which spells doom for two Bond girls when our secret agent crosses him - most memorably in the case of Jill Masterson (Shirley Eaton), who pays for her dalliance with Bond by getting smothered with gold paint. 

We rarely fear that Bond will die, but Goldfinger gives us the sense that 007 is living dangerously by provoking him, as his beloved manhood almost finds out in one of the franchise’s most famous deathtrap scenes. On top of Goldfinger’s own considerable threat, he employs one of the great screen henchmen: the mute and brutish Oddjob with his razor-rimmed bowler hat.

28. Cody Jarrett in White Heat (1949)

James Cagney may have won his only Oscar for portraying a fine upstanding American legend in Yankee Doodle-Dandy, but he will forever be remembered for playing gangsters. Amongst those roles, one remains top of the world over 70 years later: trigger-happy train robber and deranged mama’s boy Cody Jarrett.

Cagney had tried to get away from the criminal roles that made him a star in the ‘30s, but a string of flops after his Academy Award in 1943 forced him to return reluctantly to the well. Yet when he finally signed on to play Jarrett, he let it all hang out as one of the most unhinged mobsters of Hollywood’s Golden Era. Cody is a seething mass of insecurity and Oedipal hangups barely contained within a sneering, barrel-chested thug. He trusts no one other than his beloved Ma (Margaret Wycherly) and - fatally - the undercover cop assigned to infiltrate his gang (Edmond O’Brien).

Jarrett is frighteningly disturbed, suffering from crippling headaches that only abate when he crawls into his mother’s lap, an unsettling act that Cagney adopts with admirable commitment to the character’s psychosis. When one of his gang offs the old lady, Jarrett’s volcanic temper fully explodes, culminating in his famous last words of reckless triumph.

27. T-800 in The Terminator (1984)

Would The Terminator have been so successful if James Cameron stuck with his original casting choices of O.J. Simpson as a cyborg from the future and Arnie as Kyle Reese, the rebel sent back to protect Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton)? You never know, but Cameron just couldn’t see “The Juice” as a stone-cold killer (ahem!) and the Austrian Oak donned the shades and leather jacket instead.

The rest is history and anyone who still thinks Arnie can’t act needs to pay closer attention to the details of his performance. He is the T-800, and completely sells the notion that he is a metal chassis covered in human flesh with his stiff, jerky movements without overplaying it – this certainly isn’t Peter Crouch doing the robot here. Even when he is still and expressionless there is something deeply unnatural about him, because let’s face it: no one else in the world looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger.

The fear factor comes from the idea that he “absolutely will not stop,” relentlessly pursuing Connor and Reese across LA. What elevates the material are the little touches of deadpan humour that Schwarzenegger brings to the role. His most famous line originally read “I’ll come back” until Arnie tweaked it and added that deathless beat before the payoff that made him a superstar.

26. Buffalo Bill in The Silence of the Lambs (1991)

Life as a serial killer isn’t easy. That woman suit made from real human skins isn’t going to sew itself, and it’s hard to concentrate when your latest victim takes your precious pooch hostage. 

This is the reality of the situation for Jame Gumb (Ted Levine), aka Buffalo Bill, in Jonathan Demme’s multi-Oscar winning horror thriller. Anthony Hopkins received all the plaudits for his performance as Hannibal Lecter (more on him later) but in many ways Levine’s portrayal of Bill is just as impressive. 

With little more than 10 minutes of screentime, the actor didn’t have much to work with. Even screenwriter Ted Tally feared that he had turned Gumb into a cipher compared to how he was written in Thomas Harris’s novel. Yet Levine committed fully to the character, researching the role by visiting the FBI headquarters in Quantico and improvising the infamous “Goodbye Horses” penis-tuck dance. The result was a killer equal parts pathetic and terrifying, and a screen moment that has been parodied almost as much as Lecter’s lip-smacking “fava beans and a nice bottle of Chianti” speech.

25. Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944)

Film noir is stacked with great femme fatales, but Barbara Stanwyck’s scheming Phyllis Dietrichson remains the one by which all others are measured. As a greedy and bored housewife stuck in a loveless marriage, Dietrichson seizes her chance when arrogant insurance salesman Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray) drops by the house one day to sell her husband a new policy. Why bump the old man off herself when she can dupe some poor sap into doing it?

Dietrichson cynically uses her allure to reel in her cocksure target, who makes the classic noir mistake of thinking with his dick and paying the price. What marks her as one of the great femme fatales is how much Dietrichson enjoys her cruelty, completely ensnaring Neff with a promise of sex, danger, and money. Stanwyck and MacMurray clearly delight in the insolent wordplay of the script, penned by Raymond Chandler and Billy Wilder.

24. General Woundwort in Watership Down (1978)

The life of a wild rabbit is a violent and dangerous one, as a generation of traumatised kids found out when the BBFC gave Martin Rosen’s animated classic a U certificate. This led many parents to believe they were taking their little ones to see a tale of cute bunnies, but they got something far more brutal.

In contrast to the gentle watercolour animation, rabbits ferociously fight, leaving their fur bloodied and ears tattered. One is snatched by a bird of prey, never to be seen again, while others are ripped to shreds by a dog. A warren is ploughed over, suffocating the rabbits within, and one of our heroes is almost throttled to death by a snare. Our main protagonist is shot and almost taken away by the Black Rabbit of Inlé, while his psychic brother has a terrifying vision of fields running with blood.

That’s all before you get to the film’s big baddie, General Woundwort. As the leader of the sinister Efrafra warren, the grizzled old rabbit is a fierce dictator marshalling his menacing troops. With his milky dead eye and gruff demeanour, he’s a seasoned tyrant who rules with an iron paw. We know straight away this is one cottontail not to be messed with and when he launches himself into mortal combat with a slavering farm dog in the final battle, it seems like he might actually come out on top.

23. Max Cady in Cape Fear (1962)

Sam Bowden (Gregory Peck) is an upstanding citizen with a plush home and a lovely wife and daughter, but their domestic bliss is thrown into turmoil when a very bad man comes to town. Max Cady (Robert Mitchum) is a convicted sex offender who Bowden testified against eight years previously. During his spell inside, Cady has learned a little law and knows how far he can bend the rules. Now he will take his sweet time exacting his revenge, setting his sights on the women in Bowden’s life.

J. Lee Thompson’s taut thriller unapologetically plays on our worst fears: That a despicable person will defile, brutalise, or murder our loved ones, and we might not be able to protect them.

Robert De Niro received an Oscar nomination for his version of Cady in Martin Scorsese’s hothouse 1991 remake, but it’s a gaudy take on the character. Nobody could mistake him for a normal human being, and that’s what makes Mitchum’s performance so disturbing. He's just a big regular-looking guy strolling around insouciantly plotting the right moment to strike.

He wants his vengeance to be slow and extract the maximum terror from his victims, and Mitchum’s performance is a realistic study in what we now call toxic masculinity. He overpowers and abuses women because he sees them as something he is entitled to, a trait that still unfortunately rings true in modern society.

22. Detective Alonzo Harris in Training Day (2001)

The great thing about Training Day is the casting of its villain. We know that something is off about LAPD narcotics veteran Alonzo Harris from his first meeting with rookie cop Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke), but he’s played by Denzel Washington. How bad can he really be?

Corrupt cops in Hollywood movies are ten-a-penny, but Harris constantly surprises us with just how evil he is. He has reached untouchable status on the streets and he acts more like a cartel boss than an officer of the law. He is completely unrepentant, enjoying his power as he shakes down low-level scumbags with impunity, brazenly pockets confiscated cash and drugs, and straight up murders anyone who stands between him and the next score. When the upstanding and naive Hoyt openly rejects Harris’s criminal activity, he only succeeds in painting a target on his own back.

Washington is one of those actors who carries an innate sense of dignity. Even when he is playing dangerous men, there is usually an undercurrent of wounded nobility. Harris has no such redeeming features and Washington is chillingly believable in the role, for which he won an Oscar.

21. Bricktop in Snatch (2000)

While the big talking point of Guy Ritchie’s Snatch was the high-profile stunt casting of Brad Pitt as a barely-intelligible bare knuckle fighter, the movie’s MVP was a lesser-known face: Alan Ford’s monstrous underworld boss, Bricktop.

Ritchie used the character actor’s rasping Cockney delivery to great effect as the narrator in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels. When Ford got the juicy part of the main villain in the follow-up, he sank his wonky yellow teeth into it with gusto. Equal parts comical and scary, Bricktop is a panto mobster and all the better for it, his out-sized performance perfectly matching the heightened reality of Ritchie’s fantasy gangland.

With his fondness for a nice cuppa and feeding his victims to the pigs, Bricktop makes his money through illegal boxing matches and dogfights. He’s totally at home in this seedy underworld, and his hateful eyes - magnified by chunky old specs - brim over with malice. Ritchie must have had fun writing Bricktop’s profanely baroque dialogue, and Ford wrings every last drop out of it. It’s a thing of beauty and, if you haven’t seen it already, this clip dubbing Darth Vader with Bricktop’s words may be the greatest thing on the internet.

So there you have it, the first part of our rundown of cinema’s greatest villains. Brace yourself for Part Two because we’ve got some proper wrong ‘uns still to come!