Top 10 Tuesday: Favorite Villains

Top Ten Tuesday is a weekly meme hosted by The Broke and the Bookish. This week’s topic is top 10 favorite villains.

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Dr. Chilton (Silence of the Lambs)
Genre: Thriller

I love Lecter as a villain, but he’s so contained here that he’s not much of a threat. Instead, I found Dr. Chilton and his machinations much more menacing in “Silence of the Lambs”. It’s his self-serving nature and his complete lack of caring of who he effects with his actions that made me want to see Lecter eat Chilton’s face off at the end.

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Nurse Ratched (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest)
Genre: Classic

Nurse Ratched is one of the most classic villains. She’s a tyrant to the patients in the mental hospital and has a complete lack of empathy for the people in the institution. She has authority over everyone’s access to medications and basic necessities, which she views as privileges. She’s not shy about taking away those privileges anytime she thinks one of the patients are stepping even remotely out of line.

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Dolores Umbridge (Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix)
Genre: Young Adult

Dolores Umbridge was so much more terrifying to me than Voldemort. I think it was her cheery demeanor and the overabundance of frills she surrounded herself with that made her abuse so disturbing. She’s someone who would push you onto the train tracks with a giant smile on her face.

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The T-Rex (Jurrasic Park)
Genre: Sci-Fi

The T-Rex is a lot more terrifying in the book than it is in the movie. Mostly because they have a weird intelligence that is pretty creepy. Not to mention the way she stalks the characters all over the park.

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Agatha Trunchbull (Matilda)
Genre: Middle Grade

Terrifying in both the movie and book, Trunchbull is on the same level as Dolores Umbridge for me. I’ll admit I don’t remember much about her from the book (since I read it back in 6th grade), but the movie version has really stuck with me. Especially the scene where Trunchbull shot-puts one of the girls by her pigtails.

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Dracula (Dracula)
Genre: Classic

While Dracula isn’t exactly terrifying, I really appreciate his place in classic literature. He’s a fascinating creation and the multiple analyses of what he symbolizes are some of my favorite things to read.

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Iago (Othello)
Genre: Classic

Dear “honest Iago” is one of the best Shakespearean villains.It’s the blind trust many characters put in him and his Machiavellian manipulation of them all that makes him such a great villain. Not to mention that he did it all because he got passed over for a promotion.

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Jean-Baptiste Grenouille (Perfume)
Genre: Horror

Grenoulle’s extreme lack of humanity is what makes him so creepy. The narrator in “Perfume” likens him to a tick, a person with cold detachment from anything remotely resembling human emotion and with a self-serving drive that is the only thing spurring him onward through life. When Grenouille decides on a path he wants to pursue he does so in a methodical and ruthless style that is chilling.

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Magneto (New X-men)
Genre: Comics

I wasn’t a huge fan of Morrision’s New X-men run, but I did love Magneto in it. I really enjoyed the arc of him as this aging and outdated radical activist that didn’t know how to connect with the people he was trying to sway anymore. It was almost heartbreaking watching him struggle to gather people to him like he was once able to do. I loved the internal conflict we kept seeing as Magneto tried to be the man he once was.

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Nazgûl (Fellowship of the Ring)
Genre: Fantasy

Sauron is a great villain but I found the ringwraiths’ particular brand of menace creepier in “Fellowship of the Ring”.