The 20 Best Villains From Non-Comic Book Movies Ranked

You ever notice that there aren't that many articles breaking down the best heroes in cinematic history? That's because, at some basic level, heroes are all similar: They all have the same noble inclinations and can usually be counted on to do the right thing. Otherwise, they wouldn't be heroes. Villains, on the other hand, are deliciously varied; every antagonist is evil in their own unique way. 

The baddies we list here run the gamut from the ultimately redeemable to completely unrepentant, from the manipulative and cruel to the hypocritical to the outright murderous. They all hurt people — and most of them enjoy it — but other than that, these villains have little in common. Heroes' motivations to do good are fairly simple and straightforward; the impulse to do ill can't be summed up nearly so easily. However, despite these differences, all these villains have done enough to make them memorable in the eyes of audiences, whether they're upsetting, frightening, or strangely charismatic.

Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich) is the quintessential gaslighting teen boyfriend. When Sidney (Neve Campbell) receives intimidating calls and has her life repeatedly threatened in "Scream," all signs point to her boyfriend Billy as the one responsible. He has access and there's circumstantial evidence, all the things that they would use in an episode of "Law and Order" to pin a crime on a person. But Sidney doesn't trust her instincts, and with the help of some serious manipulation from Billy, she doesn't push the issue. 

The fact that Billy is able to play everyone for so long (and for no particularly good reason) is genuinely frightening; it's always scarier when a villain is attacking without a clear motive. But Billy is also on this list because he's still a teenager, and his ultimate ineptitude gives "Scream" an added dose of sly humor. Watching him and Stuart (Matthew Lillard) psych themselves up to give each other non-fatal stab wounds so they can pass themselves off as victims is as legitimately funny as it is horrifying.

Philip and Brandon from Alfred Hitchcock's "Rope" are far from household names, but they are nonetheless terrifying in how they take upper-class white entitlement to a logical, if deeply disturbing, conclusion. When "Rope" begins, the two young men have just killed a former classmate, not because of any ill-will between them, but because they're interested in murder from an intellectual perspective. If they are truly as smart as they believe themselves to be, they should be capable of committing the perfect crime, a murder so well-executed that no one would ever be able to link them to it.

Philip and Brandon's perceived intelligence leads them to the conclusion that they are superior to everyone else, and from there it's an easy jaunt to the belief that the lives of others are less valuable than their own. We can see echoes of this in the crimes privileged young men commit today, believing that it is their birthright to evade the consequences of their actions.

The more interesting thing about "The Social Network" is that it came out at a time when Facebook was incredibly popular and Mark Zuckerberg was celebrated as a tech visionary, yet it still keeps its protagonist at arm's length. It doesn't know quite what to make of him, and its wariness towards Zuckerberg is one of the reasons why the film has aged so well. While "The Social Network" acknowledges Zuckerberg's accomplishments, it also lays bare his socially maladjusted tendencies. 

Rooney Mara's brief but memorable scene at the beginning of "The Social Network" highlights the truth about the chip Zuckerberg has on his shoulder: "You're going to go through life thinking that girls don't like you because you're a nerd. And I want you to know, from the bottom of my heart, that won't be true. It'll be because you're an a**hole." 

This informs the rest of the film, as Zuckerberg perpetually betrays colleagues over perceived slights, all while believing in his heart that he is the one who has been poorly treated. That Fincher was able to identify the villainy in Zuckerberg long before it was public knowledge and give him a biopic that depicts him as morally ambiguous (at best) at a time when he was at the peak of his fame is what makes "The Social Network" so great.

Maybe it isn't quite fair to consider Anton Chigurh a villain. After all, he doesn't actually mean anyone ill on a personal level. He's a picture of amorality, not wickedness. 

In "No Country for Old Men," Anton Chigurh is hired to retrieve a large sum of money from a drug deal gone bad, and to that end, he kills a lot of people. But not because he wants to — the scary thing about Chigurh is that he truly doesn't care either way. He's a textbook psychopath who flips a coin to decide the fate of those who cross his path. He never kills out of impulse, but always with a purpose. In this way, he can be considered the human incarnation of the inevitability of fate, an Angel of Death who cares little for the pleas of the humans he comes across.

Mr. Potter in the deeply melancholy "It's a Wonderful Life" is not just a bad guy. He's the human embodiment of everything that's wrong with American capitalism. The honorable George Bailey is kind, endlessly generous, and just can't seem to catch a break. Every time he seems to be on the verge of achieving his dreams, he's forced to make a choice between personal happiness and the greater good, and he always sacrifices himself. 

Having spent the better part of his life desperate to get out of Bedford Falls and see the world, George finds himself a middle-aged man with a family that he loves, but that also makes him feel trapped. And when his absent-minded uncle loses a considerable amount of money that was intended to keep the family business solvent, it's one disappointment too many. 

Some of the struggles George faced throughout his life were pure fate, and couldn't have been avoided. But a lot of them had something to do with Mr. Potter, the ruthless bank owner who has made it his life's work to make George as miserable as possible. Any time there's a choice between profit and charity, Mr. Potter choses profit. Nearly 80 years after the film was released, Mr. Potter still stands as an example of ultimate corruption and corporate cruelty.

Entitlement, thy name is Louis from "Kind Hearts and Coronets." This kid is obsessed with his noble matrilineal heritage and is so offended at the idea that his family scorned his mother for the crime of marrying beneath her that he decides to kill off every single relative that stands in the way of his family's dukedom. The quintessential poor relation, Louis is insecure and particularly prone to perceiving slights at every turn. It's maybe not the easiest jump to go from that to actively homicidal, but Louis does it without a care in the world. 

"Kind Hearts and Coronets" is a dark comedy, so there's a certain gleefulness in how Louis dispatches his various relatives, but that doesn't change the fact that he is a verifiable mass murderer. The number of times he kills Alec Guinness in this movie (Guinness, of course, plays every single member of the extended family, from a kind-hearted young photographer to a matronly aunt) is frankly impressive. We must give points for sheer determination.

For someone who is very concerned about going to hell, Claude Frollo in "The Hunchback of Notre Dame" commits an impressive array of sins. Not only does he try to kill a baby in the opening sequence (and does have the baby's parents killed), he serves as a representation of the hypocrisy of religious zealots, calling out and punishing the sin that he sees in the world without considering his own evil actions. 

Despite his prejudice, Frollo lusts after the beautiful Romani girl Esmerelda. But he won't take responsibility for his own sinful feelings. No, it couldn't be Claude Frollo's fault that he wants this woman. She must be using witchcraft and devilry to turn his eye towards her. Frollo's unflinching belief that all of his actions are justified — and even sanctified by God — makes him one of Disney's more complex and fascinating villains.

The members of the Addams Family are known for the fact that, despite their dark and macabre nature, they are genuinely loving to one another, and have probably the healthiest family dynamic in film. So, it makes a strange sort of sense that, in the family where everyone looks like the stereotype of a villain, the actual antagonist is the sunny blonde who joins their clan by marrying Uncle Fester (for nefarious reasons). 

Debbie is a profoundly unstable widow several times over, having left behind a string of husbands who all died under mysterious circumstances. She hopes to add Fester to the list, but his cartoonish ability to withstand injuries that would normally be fatal continually disappoints her. Debbie's on this list for one reason and one reason only: the impeccable performance of Joan Cusack in the role. Her line readings are genuinely Oscar-worthy, especially when she gets her final villain monologue and she uses it to present the Addams Family with a literal slideshow detailing her life-long list of grievances.

Nurse Ratched, to be fair, has a lot to put up with in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" after R.P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson) turns up in her ward. Indeed, for a good part of the film, the argument can be made that, although she is cold and rigid, Ratched is acting with the best of intentions towards the men in her change. All mentally unstable, they genuinely benefit from having a routine, and McMurphy comes in and disrupts all of that. 

However, we naturally take McMurphy's side, because he is framed as our protagonist and has oodles of charm. By contrast, Ratched is easy to dislike, even if she's doing her job the best she can under difficult circumstances. That is, until her youngest charge, Billy Bibbit, defies her, and Ratched uses her familiarity with his personal life to say the one thing that she knows will break him. Then the mask falls, and we can see both that Ratched's desire to keep the ward running smoothly has always been about control, and as well as the destructive lengths she'll go to in order to keep from losing it.

Colonel Hans Landa is called the "Jew Hunter" by his fellow SS officers, but his behavior isn't so much in line with a human hunter as it is with an animal playing with its prey. The slow, agonizing opening sequence of "Inglourious Basterds" stands as proof of this, in which Landa draws out the conversation with the French farmer seemingly for the fun of it. So does the considerable pleasure Landa draws from playing with Shoshannah, a Jewish woman hiding in plain sight. He constantly wrongfoots her, leaving her to guess if he's discovered her secret.

Landa disguises his cruelty under a veneer of easy pleasantries and good humor, but there are psychological mind games to be played and people to be tortured. It's rare that we catch glimpses of the dark side that Landa hides within, but when we do, we see that he strikes like a snake: sudden, deadly, and without mercy.