10. Ghostface from Scream (1996)

One of the most recognised characters in recent horror history, the Edvard Munch inspired killer from the Scream movies would’ve placed way higher on this list if not for one thing: lazy people. Go to any Haloween party anywhere in the world and you’ll see at least nineteen thousand lazy assholes who bought a 5.99 Scream costume and a rubber knife. It’s been done to death and I’m sick of seeing it. If at any point in your life you’ve gone to a Haloween party dressed as Ghostface, then begone from this site and never darken my door again.

9. The Robot Gunslinger from WestWorld (1973)

Ok, this might be a wierd choice, but hear me out. A silent, black clad, sinister figure with inhuman strength and resiliance who has a single minded determination to kill and no matter how many times you think you’ve killed him he keeps on coming back to get you. Is that Michael Myers or the Robot Gunslinger? I rest my case. Yul Brynner’s brilliantly sinister send up of his heroic man in black from The Magnificent Seven, the Robot Gunslinger from WestWorld is a proto-slasher villain. As is…

8. The Xenomorph from Alien (1979)

Again, supernaturally strong and resiliant, black in colour, fucking terrifying and determinded to get the kill; a silent killer stalking the crew of the Nostromo down spooky corridors. Like the best slasher villains, the Alien eventually kills all but one of the crew – in classic slasher style, a resiliant young woman – before eventually being outwitted and killed.

7. Santa Claus from Silent Night, Deadly Night (1984)

Santa Claus, that jolly old elf who brings love and joy at Christmastime seems like an odd choice for a slasher villain, but that’s the point. Kinda like how the Joker (except in The Dark Knight) doesn’t seem scary at first, Santa Claus is a character that kids and adults instinctivley trust. Santa would never do anything bad, right? Wrong. In the US, there was public outcry when this film was released, with people picketing in the streets, complaining that the movie ruined Santa’s “good name.” Proof positive, ladies and gentlemen, that some people have way to much time on their hands.

6. Chucky from Child’s Play (1988)

Exploiting the same kind of dictomtomy that Silent Night, Deadly Night used (with a liberal dose of that Twilight Zone episode with the talking doll thrown in too) the evil doll from the Child’s Play series just misses out on a stop in the top five. Voiced by the emminently creepy Brad Dourif, Chucky has appeared in five movies as well as, bizarrley, a WCW pay-per-view. Played reasonably straight in the original, Chucky has, like Freddy Krueger, become more and more of a clown as the series progressed, with his last two outings in particular being played more for laughs than scares.

5. Leatherface from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)

Whilst many slasher movie badguys are blamed for inspiring real-life violence, only a handful have themselves been inspired by real-life events. One such fictional killer is Leatherface from the Texas Chainsaw series. Like, Chucky, later movies in the series were more comedy than horror, so let’s concertrate on the original movie in which Leatherface is less a human killer and more an elemental force of nature, bursting, chainsaw screaming, from doorways and hiding places, killing with an inhuman rage. Inspired by the killer Ed Gein (more on him later), Leatherface was played by Gunnar Hansen in the original Tobe Hooper classic. The remake, though not as good as the original, is still worth a watch, if only for Jessica Biel in a tight t shirt.

4. Jason Voorhees from Friday the 13th (1980)

Slasher villains seem to fall into two camps: the flamboyant wisecrackers like Freddy and Chucky and the silent but deadly types like Michael Myers and, of course, Jason Voorhees. Jason’s hockeymasked visage (the first two movies notwithstanding) is one of the most famous images of modern horror and it’s testament to the popularity of the character that he was chosen to face off against Fred Krueger in Freddy vs. Jason (which could easily have been Freddy vs. Michael). A lot of people tend not to give Jason a fair swing of the machette, probably due to memories of watching one of the pretty dire later sequels, but the original movie, and the second and third sequels (that’s parts 3 and 4 for those not paying attention) are well worth another look, especially if you’ve not seen them in a while.

3. Norman Bates from Psycho (1960)

The grandaddy – or, more accuratley, the grandmother – of them all. Every deranged wierdo who ever grabbed something sharp and slaughtered some hotties in the woods owed his very existence to Norman Bates. Or, to give the devil his due, to Ed Gein, who provided the inspiration for young Master Bates (couldn’t resist). A killer from the backwoods of Wisconisin, Gein’s catalouge of atrocities included using human bones and skin to make furniture, keeping a collection of female naughty bits (including his mother’s painted silver) in a shoebox under his bed and, most disturbingly, dancing in the moonlight wearing a suit made out of the skin of his victims. Norman Bates never went quite that far, but, for better or worse, he still gave birth to the slasher genre.

2. Michael Myers from Halloween (1978)

Probably the first slasher villain of modern horror, John Carpenter’s silent, deadly and seemingly immortal creation Michael Myers has made the 31st of October a pain in the arse for the resisdents of Haddonfield since 1978. Originally known as “The Shape” Myers immediatley became a sensation and an icon of horror, wisely being kept mostly in the shadows or around the edge of the frame in the original to build up his mystique, but even the overexposure of the later films (not to mention the travesty that was the Rob Zombie remake) cannot tarnish his reputation as silent killer per excellence.

1. Freddy Krueger from A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984)

“Welcome to prime time, bitch!” When Wes Craven cast Robert Englund as the villain in A Nightmare on Elm Street, the horror gods smiled and the planets alligned and history was made. Not since the days of Karloff and Lugosi had a horror actor meshed so perfectly with the character he played and, until the end of time, one would not be the same without the other. This fact was borne out by the recent remake which saw Jackie Earle Haley fail to achieve the sort of instant iconic-ness that Englund achieved so effortlessly. Starting life as a more-or-less serious killer, the Nightmare on Elm Street franchise saw the evolution of Freddy from evil bastard to evil-but-damn-funny bastard as he cracked wise and quipped his way through the teens of Elm Street. Whether you prefer serious Freddy or funny Freddy, you always have to remember one thing: whatever you do, don’t fall asleep…

Slasher movies tend to polarise horror fans. As I mentioned in the intro, I was a classic horror snob for many years and refused to even give slasher movies the time of day, but when I finally got off my high horse I realised that there’s not only some really good filmmaking on display (well, sometimes) but also a lot of fun to be had. If you’re like I once was, check out a few of the more well known titles like the original Nightmare or Halloween, or if you’re the exact opposite and you love modern horror but aren’t so keen on the classics, Psycho is probably a good place to start. Either way, gimmie your thoughts in the comments and stick around for our next list. End transmission.

10. THE PENGUIN

Any love I have for the Penguin comes soley from Burgess Merideth’s brilliant comic performance as the big nosed, umberella carrying waugh waugh waugh-ing badguy. Nothing in comics makes me laugh more than when writers try to paint the Penguin as a geniune threat to Batman, retconning his origin story to make him a martial arts expert. A martial arts expert? You’ve gotta be shitting me. As a comedy bad guy I like the Penguin, but as a serious threat to Batman? Come on.

9. RA’S AL GHUL

Created by the great comics team of Denny O’Neal and Neil Adams, Ra’s al Ghul is an international terrorist who doesn’t mind too much who gets in the way of his mad plan for environmental perfection. One of the very few villains to have worked out that Bruce Wayne and Batman are one and the same and founder of a vast criminal empire (not to mention discoverer of the Lazarus Pit), Ra’s al Ghul’s name when translated into Arabic means “The Demon’s Head.” That alone earns him a place on the list.

8. BANE

After DC had Doomsday kill the Man of Steel in the 90s, the next logical step was to have someone “kill” the Dark Knight – and who better than Bane? Introduced for the Knightfall arc, Bane – despite his misuse in Batman and Robin – is one of Batman’s most intelligent foes and is certainly his most physically powerful. Remembered forever as the man who broke Batman’s back and forced him to hang up the cape (at least for a while.)

7. THE SCARECROW

Created during the Golden Age by Kane and Finger, the Scarecrow is undoubtedly the most physcological of Batman’s rouge’s gallery, Dr. Jonathan Crane uses something he decribes as “fear gas” to cause his victims to hallucinate, seeing their worst nightmares standing before them. It’s awfully easy to rob a bank when the security guards are fighting off imagined snakes and the tellers are surrounded by imaginary spiders.

6. HARLEY QUINN

The first female to grace our list and the only character not to originate from a comic book, Harley Quinn was created by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm for Batman: The Animated Series and proved so popular that she was introduced to the comic book continuity. The on again-off again squeeze of the Joker, Harley was Mr. J.’s psychiatrist in Arkham who fell for him and turned to a life of crime. As you do. Voiced by the inimitable Arlene Sorkin, Harley was just one of the many reasons B:TAS was fucking awesome.

5. MR. FREEZE

Sometimes the best villains are the tragic ones, and they don’t come much more tragic than Mr. Freeze. Ignoring the original conception of the charcter, his apperences on the sixties TV show and Arnold Schwarzanegger’s gurning performance in Batman and Robin, and instead concentrating on the mythology created by Paul Dini and Bruce Timm, Mr. Freeze is one of the more pitiable villains in comics. After his wife is killed in a cryogenic freezing experiment gone wrong, Victor Fries tries to kill the man who caused his wife’s death, but Batman intervines. Fries takes on the name Mr. Freeze and swears vengance on Batman and everything he loves.

4. CATWOMAN

First introduced in Batman #1, Catwoman is one of the best female supervillains in comics, thanks in no small part to her oh-so-awesome costume. Created by Kane and Finger but made iconic by Julie Newmar and Lee Meriweather in the sixties TV show and movie, Catwoman serves many different roles in Batman continuity. First and foremost, of course, she is a criminal, but in more recent years she has taken on a sort of Robin Hood role, as well as providing an on/off/on/off love interest for Batman and Bruce Wayne. Just pretend the Halle Berry movie never happened.

3. THE RIDDLER

Riddle me this, riddle me that… Obsessed with riddles and puzzles and compelled to warn Batman about the crimes he intends to commit by leaving complex clues, the Riddler is the most egomaniacal of the Batman rogue’s gallery and one of the few who isn’t a psycopathic killer. Frank Gorshin’s Emmy winning performance in the TV show is yet to be bettered, but Jim Carey did a decent job in Batman Forever. Word on the street is that Christopher Nolan is planning to include the Riddler in his next installment of his “let’s make Batman boring” film series, so let’s live in hope that he doesn’t fuck him up as badly as he’s fucked up almost every other character he’s included so far.

2. TWO FACE

Harvey Dent was once the handsome Gotham DA, friend of Bruce Wayne and ally of Batman but fate conspired against him and made him the conflicted and deformed Two Face. Letting fate make his descisions for him, Two Face flips a double-headed coin to decide his actions; one side of the coin is unblemished, the other is scarred. If the clean side comes up, it’s safe to walk the streets, but if the scarred side comes up, blot your fucking doors, lock your fucking windows and switch on the fucking Batsignal.

1. THE JOKER

Anyone who knows me knows my feelings towards the Heath Ledger interpritation of the Joker, but the character is so great and so iconic, that I can overlook his performance and appreciate that, despite his best attempts to fuck the character up, the Joker is the ultimate comic book bad guy. His origin story has been retconned more than almost anyone elses and he has more facets to his character than any other comics villain. Sometimes he’s little more than a shrill nuscance, sometimes he’s a brutal and vicious killer and sometimes he’s somewhere in between – and that’s what makes him great. His mental unstability makes him truly dangerous and the intriguing dichotomy of a clown who kills makes him truly iconic.

Honorable mentions to Man-Bat, Clayface, Poison Ivy, the Cavalier, Egghead and Film Freak. But anyway, leave a comment if you have anything to say. End transmission.

10. Roy Batty from Blade Runner

I gotta admit, Blade Runner is not one of my favorite films. It’s awfully involved and it’s not a film you can watch passivley, which is perhaps the reason it’s not as well liked as it might be. I’ve watched it four or five times, and every time I leave feeling like I’ve somehow missed something; like I’m not “getting” it somehow. Regardless, Roy Batty is a fascinating villain and the “I’ve seen things you people wouldn’t beleive” speech alone earns him a place on this list. “Time to die…”

9. T-1000 from Terminator 2: Judgement Day

A “mimetic poly-alloy,” ten times as advanced as the T-800 and therefore ten times as awesome, the T-1000 is played by the always cool Robert Patrick in Terminator 2. I’ve always maintained that T2 isn’t as good as the first one, but it’s still undeniably brilliant. CGI was still in its infancy when T2 was made, so when you see a truck drive over a bridge or a motorcyle drive through a window onto a helicopter, that’s exactly what you’re seeing – no cop out pixelated bullshit. Except when it comes to the T-1000, of course, who sometimes appears as CGI and, like Jurrassic Park, it’s CGI that looks a million times better than 99% of shit that’s out there now.

8. The Alien from Alien

I don’t understand people who claim that Aliens is better than Alien. It’s bigger, louder, dumber, more things blow up, there’s more smart mouthed John McLaine dialouge and the alien is bigger. If that adds up to a better film, then I must know nothing about film. But anyway, the Alien (or Xenomorph, if you’re a big Alien geek) is a great villain: utterly terrifying and damn near unstoppable. In classic monster or slasher movie style, the Alien keeps mostly in the shadows, picking off crewmembers one by one and ratching up the tension to damn near unbearable levels. Brilliantly designed and realised, the Alien is as instantly recognisable and iconic as any of the classic movie monsters.

7. Count Baltar from Battlestar Galactica

No not the guy with the long hair and the suit, we’re talking original Battlestar Galactica here, bitches. In the slimy and despicable tradition of villainous actors such as James Mason, former Klingon John Colicos made Baltar the perfect boo-hiss badguy. After selling out the human race to the Cylons causing the destruction of Caprica and the deaths of untold millions (and being an utterly remorseless bastard about it), Baltar makes it his mission to kill Adama and destroy the Galactica. Fans of nuBSG will undoubtedly point out that Baltar and the rest of the the original run characters are more one dimensinal and less interesting than their reboot counterparts, but you know what? If I want realism and hard hitting emotional drama, I wont watch a show involving spaceships and robots.

6. Doctor Zaius from Planet of the Apes

Given the wonderfully contradictory title of Minister of Science in Charge of Advancing Ape Knowledge and Chief Defender of the Faith, Zaius is, like his job title, one of the biggest bastards in sci fi and yet his motives are entirley understandable and almost commendable. Carrying the knowledge of the true history of ape civilisation around with him whilst trying to maintain the status quo is hard enough, but when Charlton Heston shows up and uncomfortable questions start being asked, it seems fair enough that he would want to supress the true facts. It’s when he starts resorting to lobotomies and vasectomies for Taylor’s crewmates that he stops being a little over zealous and starts being a bit of a bastard. Plus, he’s an orangutan, undoubtedly the shittest of the great apes. That said, he did get his own TV special, so what do I know?

5. The Thing from The Thing From Another World! and The Thing


Released in 1951, the original Thing movie – The Thing From Another World! – is a masterpeice of Cold War paranoia, second only to Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. Likeable characters, snappy dialouge and a great, if cheesy alien, this brilliant film was remade (though, it could be a sequel, depending on how you look at things) and perfected by John Carpenter’s 1982 The Thing. The original, though great, fails on one point – the alien does not shapeshift as it does in the original short story. Carpenter remied that and gave us not only one of the best sci fi villains, but one of the best aliens and monsters in cinema history. The air of mistrust and paranoia and the tension that Carpenter creates is every bit as nail bitingly awesome as anything Hitchcock created.

4. Ming the Merciless from Flash Gordon

“Foolish Earthlings! Who will save you now?” The oldest villain on the list, the Emperor of Mongo made his first apperance in 1934. His first major non-comics apperance was in the Flash Gordon: Space Soldiers serial in the late 30s, but the incarnation of the character we’re concerning ourselves with is Max Von Sydow in the 1980 Flash Gordon. Von Sydow is one of those actors not afraid to risk making himself look silly and so he threw himself with reckless abandon into the part of Ming and made a stock villain into the most leering, most over the top villain this side of Skelator. The film goes every bit as over the top as Von Sydow’s performance and everybody plays their parts to the hilt – well, everybody except Timothy Dalton, who apparently never noticed it was supposed to be satire. In any case, Von Sydow’s performance alone puts him on the list. And just look at those eyebrows!

3. Darth Vader from the Star Wars Saga

Want a reason why the Star Wars prequels suck? If not for them, Vader would probably have made the number on spot on his list, but after seeing him as an annoying kid and a whiney emo teenager, he just doesn’t seem so awesome. But sticking with the Original Trilogy for the time being, Vader is pure concentrated badass, remoselessly choking his own officers and trying to kill his own son with equal abandon. Not the kind of villain who’s scared to get his hands dirty, Vader is just as happy orchestrating attaks or taking part in them in his oh-so-aweome custom TIE fighter. Taking the Prequel Trilogy into account though, we see that Vader isn’t the be all and end all of galactic evil, but merley a puppet; his strings being pulled by Emperor Palpatine, the real power behind the dark side of the Force. But that aside, Vader as he is presented in the OT is fucking killer. The black mask, the cape, the red lightsaber, the oh-so-ominious heavy breathing and the sonorous tones of James Earl Jones all add up to a great sci fi villain. Plus, his offical title is Dark Lord of the Sith, and that just sounds fucking cool.

2. Khan Noonien Singh from The Wrath of Khan

“KHAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAN!” The only villain on the list to have his origin in a TV show (Baltar was in a movie first, albeit one only released in Canada), Ricardo Montalban’s Khan made such an impression on Nicholas Meyer that he decided to bring him back as the villain in the movie The Wrath of Khan. Khan is an Ahab-esque obsessive who has spent the last 15 years of his life plotting revenge against Captain Kirk for imagined wrongs against him, stopping at nothing to avenge himself upon him. He hijacks a starship and steals the Genesis device, planning on using it to destroy Kirk and the Enterprise. Operatic and grand without becoming parody, Montalban’s perfomance is a masterclass of villanous acting. So sad that when he died last year it caused barely a blip on the British media radar. “Do you know that old Klingon proverb, Kirk, that says revenge is a dish best served cold? It is very cold… in space!” Brilliance.

1. Emperor Palpatine from the Star Wars saga

If Darth Vader was the puppet, then Emperor Palpatine is the puppet master. And when Darth goddamned Vader is your puppet, you’re one powerful fucking puppetmaster. The man behind Order 66, the Great Jedi Purge that saw all but two Jedi killed and the man who turned the conflicted Anakin Skywalker into the brutal cyborg Darth Vader, Palpatine is an almost soley behind-the-scenes villain, conspring to take over first the Senate, and then the universe, all the while amassing an army the likes of which the universe has never seen. This is, after all, the man who decided to build a space station with the ability to destory a planet for no other reason than he thought it would put the shits up people, a man who decided to encase his apprentice in an imposing black metal suit rather than something less terrifying for no other reason than he thought, once again, it would put the shits up people. Evil, cunning, conniving, treacherous, vindictive, feindish, conspiratorial and bowling shoe ugly, Palpatine is the perfect bad guy. Plus, he can shoot lightning out of his fucking fingers. If you don’t think Palpatine is the best sci fi villain, well then “my young Jedi, you will find that it is you who are mistaken… about a great… many… things.”

So there you have it. Comments below if you feel the need. End transmission.