Admittedly, as soon as I post this, I will probably realize that I have done a horrible disservice and left out a more-fitting villain. But you know what? Screw it. No one is perfect.
We'll call this version 1.0.
Of course, I'm not making some claim of absolute truth here. These are just my favorites. If you don't agree with my choices, feel free to say so in the comments. Or you could write your own blog.
Here we go...
Training Day
Leave it to Denzel Washington to take what would otherwise be a cut-and-dry bad guy and make him seem almost virtuous. From the moment we meet Alonzo Harris, we are snared by his sticky ethics. Contrasted against the harshness of the world that he must move through, we begin to question what we know to be right. His arguments make sense, especially in the context of where he works. On the unforgiving streets, forfeitures of purity become forgivable. We feel uncertain of what once was easy. When Alonzo speaks, a world that was once comfortably black and white suddenly turns maddeningly grey. And that's when it happens. We relent. We surrender our doubt and begin to trust this man. What choice do we have? Out here, it's kill or be killed. We must become the wolf in order to catch the wolf. And that's where this villain, with his arm around our shoulder and his ice cold beer in our hand, gets us to dig our own grave.
E.T. - The Extra Terrestrial
Any bad guy who can singularly wield his ominous weight with nothing more than the keys on his belt is a supreme bad ass. Quite frankly, it points to the best part about bad guys – that they exist first in our minds. That's where my hat comes off to Melissa Mathison, the screenwriter. This bad guy was no happy accident. Mathison knew how frightening he was, so much so that Keys was actually named Keys in the screenplay. The thing I love the most about Keys is that he morphs from being a bad guy into being an ally in the most what-just-happened sort of way. In that sense, he represents a child's journey into adulthood. Early on, the world is frightening and simple. As we grow older, we recognize that the things we are often terrified of are not horrible after all. In many cases, they are meant for our good. That's just some beautiful bad-guy stuff.
Toy Story 3
With all of the twisted darkness of Colonel Kurtz (Apocalypse Now) and approachability of Willy Wonka, this strawberry-scented teddy bear has all the right ingredients for a psychopathic madman. Honestly, this has to be my favorite bad guy of all time because he is so useful to the audience. First of all, it's a kids' movie. Second, this is the exact kind of sinister troll that tries to harm little children in the real world. He's the gift-giving, soft-spoken, attractive looking child molester. He's the familiar face who gets away with harming kids because his apparent goodness makes it nearly impossible to convince others to the contrary. But it's more than our inability to make others believe the evil that we see in him. More frightening is our own confusion about whether he is evil or not. It's just so damn hard to say. Beyond the fact that he fit this role in this particular movie like a glove, Lots-o'-Huggin Bear actually teaches kids about the truly gray nature of evil, leaving them all the wiser when they walk out of the theater.
Breakdown
That moment when Jeff Taylor (Russell) manages to track Barr down and get him pulled over in his eighteen-wheeler only to find that Barr acts like he has never even seen Taylor before… and quite convincingly so… is perhaps one of the most terrifying moments in bad-guy history. Adding Sheriff Boyd to the mix only served to creep-up Barr's innocence-suggesting-compliance even more. Jump forward to that moment in the kitchen when Barr wields his fatherly authority to tell his son, Deke, to go ahead and kill Taylor at point blank range. Shiver me timbers, this dude is one evil sunuva bitch.
28 Days Later / 28 Weeks later
Sprinting zombies. Certainly not a novel idea anymore, but this is where I was first exposed to the idea of a sprinting zombie. Honestly, for a guy who thinks himself capable of out-thinking a sluggish oaf of an ankle-dragging zombie, these flesh-eating bastards have me beat.
Seven
I remember the first time I heard John Doe give his speech from the back seat of the squad car. I remember agreeing with him more than I didn't. I remember how much that bothered and intrigued me. Let's face it, it's hard to dislike a bad guy that says what we are already thinking but too afraid to say and then owns his own weakness, even sending himself to his own punishment - all the while ravaging his victims in the most unrelenting ways. He's the one who can judge because he does not mind being judged (and, in fact, does it to himself). He isn't as hypocritical as we wish he were. He is openly guilty. In the end, this bad guy is great because it is difficult to find pleasure in vengeance against someone who openly welcomes it. In a way, that's giving him what he wants. And when we want what he wants… well, that's just a big hot mess.
The Neverending Story
There is hardly anything more frightening than an ominous void that is closing in, consuming the world as it does. In some ways, I think the Nothing embodies the Universe beyond our control. It is fate. It's the unavoidable end of all things. In the film, our protagonists defeat it, but in my mind, The Nothing is truly horrifying because each of the characters who supposedly win will eventually die. This means that it is The Nothing that ultimately wins.
The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
There aren't too many movies that tell you how it's going to end right in the title. As this particular film is born of history, I suppose it's no big secret that Jesse James gets it in the end and that Robert Ford is the one whodunnit. Nonetheless, the title of this film dishes out the mystery before you ever step foot in the theater. It does this precisely because the moment of the assassination isn't why the film was made. This is a character study if ever there was one and the precious minutes of this film make superb use of that objective. Robert Ford is a wonderful bad guy because you know exactly what he is going to do long before he does. Even more glorious is Casey Affleck's portrayal of Ford. I cannot think of a time when an actor so completely displayed the frayed fabric of a character's soul as Affleck does in this film. While it did manage to earn him an Academy Award nomination, Affleck was not the winner of the Oscar. At least, not in the formal sense. For my money, Affleck gave us a nightmarishly broken and unpredictable character that made a totally predictable outcome seem twisted and uncertain.
Crimson Tide
"In the nuclear world, the true enemy can't be destroyed. In the nuclear world, the true enemy is war itself." Sounds easy, right? Watching the truth of that statement unfold under the surface of the Mediterranean sea is nothing short of nail-biting in this gritty drama that stands as more of a testament to the futility of human conflict than anything else. The thing that is so great about this bad guy is that it lives inside of us all. We understand the arguments both for and against war on such a primal level that we're honestly not sure which side is right and which is wrong. In the end, this film leaves us holding our very nature in our hands, without so much as a nod toward what we ought to now believe. Both arguments are right. Both arguments are wrong. It's a humdinger of a conundrum and makes Crimson Tide one of my favorite films of all time.
2001: A Space Odyssey
Before there were War Games, Terminators or any mention of The Matrix, HAL 9000 was there to terrify us of technology gone awry. To this day, the horror of HAL holds strong in Stanley Kubrick's absolute masterpiece of a film, 2001: A Space Odyssey. HAL 9000, that soft-spoken monster with the red glowing eye, turns terror onto itself by managing to behave in the most violent of ways, all while speaking in a neutered, near-whisper. This stripping away of emotion makes HAL 9000 particularly terrifying because, in the most primal sense, it robs us of the human cues that help us understand motivation and offer us some hope of solving the problem. With those cues missing, we are trapped in a maddening loop of weakness and uncertainty from which there is no escape, all the while knowing that, with the vacuum of space all around us, our survival absolutely requires the very same monster that we fear.
