As I was mentally drafting my last post, I took a little sidetrack and began thinking about the screen’s most chilling villains. Among them I’d list:
Donald Crisp in Broken Blossoms (1919)
Robert Mitchum in Night of the Hunter (1955) and Cape Fear (1962)
Patty McCormack in The Bad Seed (1956)
Anthony Perkins in Psycho (1960)
Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
There’s another tier in which I would include Edward G. Robinson in Key Largo, Jimmy Cagney in White Heat, and Conrad Veidt in practically anything but they really don’t rise (or descend, depending on how you look at it) to the level of the actors in that first group.
Much as I love Lon Chaney you always have some compassion for his monsters and villains which is why his performances are so great but it makes them less chilling than those on my list of most chilling screen villains.
Carl Boehm’s portrayal in Peeping Tom is in a class by itself. It’s not so much chilling as stomach-turning which is why he doesn’t make my list.
Who would you put on the list of most chilling screen villains?
Heath Ledger’s Joker, though maybe not so much the acting, but the role his character plays in pushing all of the right buttons to cause society breakdown.
Anthony Hopkins’ Hannibal Lecter. Intelligent, sociopaths are the scariest villains.
Robert DeNiro in TaxiDriver, unless one was to claim he is an anti-hero, but I think that’s why it’s chilling.
Of the top of my head:
Peter Lorre in M
Jack Nicholson in The Shining
Dennis Hopper in Blue Velvet
Also I think villains are less chilling than antagonists. Bates and Lecter are definitely antagonists and part of their effect as characters comes from the fact that they are not opposed directly to the evil in the story. Well, Bates is but the viewer doesn’t in theory know that.
I agree with all of your suggestions, MM. I may update the post to include them.
Hitler. In basically all his movies.
I don’t know whether I’ve mentioned this before but my dad spoke fluent German and spent most of 1937-1938 in Europe. He was a dedicated journalist and I have all of the journals he kept when he was over there. I really need to transcribe them and start publishing them.
He heard Hitler speak at one of his rallies. In person, not on the radio. He said he was electrifying.
My dad was in Munich on November 9, 1938. He wrote a couple of very oblique entries about strange and disturbing goings-on and very shortly after that returned to the States.
Perhaps because I am mildly dental phobic, von Sydow.
Steve