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Almost nothing’s more important than a first impression. It’s a chance to put your best foot forward and leave a mark that folks will remember. But what if you don’t want them to remember your best foot? What if the impression intended to be left is of five toes digging into their backsides—and crawling under the skin?
It’s a funny idea, yet for more than a hundred years filmmakers have reached for exactly such visceral reactions to character introductions and entrances. They have striven to create sequences, movie moments, and performances that promise or forewarn of terrible sights to come, and characters who will never be forgotten. But not all villain intros are created equal, and in this list we humbly attempt to figure out some of the most infamous and revered.
26. Sauron in The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001)
We begin with an introduction so visually intense and immensely threatening that it makes this list despite the character never really appearing again for the rest of his film trilogy. Sauron is indeed introduced and dispatched in a prologue largely invented for the screen in Peter Jackson’s Fellowship of the Ring, but his presence is so menacing that viewers are convinced the Dark Lord ever must never return to power or else it will spell doom!
Technically Sauron is just an impressive piece of armor work by costumer designers Ngila Dickson and Richard Taylor. He wordlessly appears for a few shots holding a ring in front of fiery volcano that might as well be the mouth of Hell and then later marches up to massacre some nameless men of Gondor, plus King Elendil. But in a strong lesson of visual storytelling, Sauron is always filmed from extreme close-ups with the camera looking up, or skewed canted angles of the camera peering down behind his shoulder as he looks upon the prey at his feet. Sprinkle in some breathless voiceover narration from Cate Blanchett as she recounts these events with the severity of scripture, and Howard Shore’s malevolent score, and you have an introduction fit for the Devil himself. But as we never see that devil in the flesh again, we cannot really put Sauron any higher.
25. Alonzo Harris in Training Day (2001)
Above we recognize the visual power of a villain who is introduced killing scores of men with each swing of his arm. However, the power of a single performance can move mountains. Consider then Denzel Washington’s deceptively quiet introduction in Antoine Fuqua’s Training Day. While the performance is rightly remembered these days for Washington’s supernova speechifying at the climax, he’s introduced silently attempting to savor his breakfast and read the newspaper. He also makes mincemeat of the film’s would-be hero, rookie cop Jake Hoyt (Ethan Hawke), between sips of coffee.
On Jake’s first day on narcotics, he meets legendary detective Alonzo at a diner where Washington completely bends the law of physics until Jake and the audience find themselves orbiting Alonzo’s center of gravity. He does this by forcing Jake, and ourselves, to wait while he finishes the paper. Every second of dead air adds to the unexpected tension. Then through a rapid barrage of sticks and carrots, classic Denzel grins interspersed with literally shouting “boom” unexpectedly to make his captive audience flinch, Washington dominates the scene and instantly begins his attempt to seduce us to a world of vice. In baby steps, he urges Jake to admit he fancied his female partner and slept with her while having a wife and child at home. In a minute, he’s corrupted the hero and the kind of film we’re watching.
24. Immortan Joe in Mad Max: Fury Road (2015)
Everything about Immortan Joe is an affectation as carefully scripted and designed as any performance for the screen and stage. And the designs this character—and by extension director George Miller and costumer Jenny Beavan—imagined are quite ingenious. Like a certain Dark Sith elsewhere on this list, Joe breathes through a mask that has painted on its countenance a screaming grin fit for the helm of a samurai or demon; his hair is long like a Viking god’s; and his eyes stare with a piercing redness out of a hulking frame. But once you squint closer, that same frame is squeezed into body armor that sculpts fake abs over Joe’s flabby, oozing tummy; and those red eyes actually look more bloodshot on the aged face of Hugh Keays-Byrne.
The brilliance of Immortan Joe’s introduction is we’re shown the truth first through a series of extreme closeups. Here is a sad, dying old man covered in sores and other ghastly skin irritations who is sickly clinging to life through a ventilator as weakly as he clings to power. We see the Leer in the lie before we get him going through the motions of typical villain bravado as he informs his thirsty subjects that they must not become “become addicted to water, because it will take hold of you and you will resent its absence.” We see at once a tyrant in decline, and one stupid enough to risk his entire kingdom by raising the banners because his “wives” (read: sex slaves) fled his grotesque countenance.
23. Eve Harrington in All About Eve (1950)
Some villains make their introduction by striking with an iron fist. Others intrigue and seduce with the velvet glove. Such is our run-in with the titular character of Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s All About Eve. A decidedly insider dark comedy about the sins and petty jealousies of show business, All About Eve begins at a gilded and prestigious awards ceremony where one Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter) is awarded a prize for being America’s darling and new It Girl. Yet more than Eve’s benign smile, what catches the eyes is the tepid applause of George Sanders’ Addison DeWitt and the entire absence of movement at all by Celeste Holm and Bette Davis—lest you count Davis’ eye daggers.
All About Eve begins with a question that Sanders’ voiceover makes explicit: Why do these people so clearly hate the pretty young thing? “Eve the cover girl, the golden girl, the girl next door,” Sanders mockingly intones. “The girl on the moon. Time has been good to Eve. Life goes where she goes… You all know all about Eve. What can there be to know that you don’t know?” The sinister implication of that tease makes the beginning of the film deliciously cynical and sets the stage for Baxter’s doe eyes to instantly betray a femme fatale interior during the movie’s many flashbacks.
22. Pennywise the Clown in It: Chapter One (2017)
Stephen King gained a fortune by figuring out how to make the mundane and ordinary creepy and dangerous. Yet there was always something creepy and dangerous about storm drains, no? It is where runoff and sludge dissipates into a sewer filled with even grosser, grayer waters. Most folks would even prefer to avert their eyes and minds from such practicalities. But not a child, especially one who is too young to be unnerved that someone might be spotted in such a location. And this one has a red balloon…
Director Andy Muschietti is not the first director to stage this infamous opening to Stephen King’s magnum opus. A TV movie beat him to the punch. Still, Muschietti gives it a crueler edge, and not just because we see the gore which drips from little Georgie’s arm after “Pennywise” rips it from its socket. Nay, it is in the anticipation and dread of the carnage that makes the sequence so effective, and the ominous way actor Bill Skarsgard’s icy blue eyes and yellowed teeth are spotlighted by cinematographer Chung Chung-hoon while the rest of the clown remains in shadow. Skarsgard brings a sing-songy nastiness to Pennywise that’s repellent but hypnotic enough that a viewer could believe it’d disarm a child. And then the real disarming (and dismembering) begins.
21. The Devil in The Exorcist (1973)
A funny thing about William Friedkin’s adaptation of The Exorcist is the demon never gets a name. Discovering this moniker is supposedly an important part of the ritual of exorcism, and it’s called Pazuzu in the books. But onscreen, we can take the malevolent force at its word when it insists “I’m the Devil” inside the body of a little girl. That scene is chilling, too, but it’s not the first time we see the evil’s presence.
That comes in a sequence filmed on location in the ruins of Hatra in modern day Iraq. Here, in a setting we personally suspect the mise en scene here helped inspire some of the filmic language of Indiana Jones, the evil entity is never seen but eminently felt in an extended prologue where our archaeologist/priest Father Merrin (Max von Sydow) recognizes its presence upon discovering a statuette of the demon (who we know from history is named Pazuzu). Afterward clocks stop, dogs chase the wind and begin fighting each other, and an old priest stares at ancient Mesopotamian statue and knows in his bones the Devil is coming back into his life. The eeriness comes from the fact that Friedkin does not initially shoot it as a horror movie. It’s all very matter-of-fact travelogue images until we see that giant statue, and the look of terrible purpose in von Sydow’s eyes, and know something truly sinister is in our presence. The scene then becomes apocalyptic, even though it’s just an old man staring at a piece of art.
20. The T-800 in The Terminator (1984)
Arnold Schwarzenegger did not have high hopes for The Terminator when he was cast. In fact, he originally met writer-director James Cameron for the part of the future’s heroic f*** boy Kyle Reese. Cameron, however, immediately began imagining the actor as the hulking killer cyborg at the center of the story. Schwarzenegger thought it would be a paycheck B-movie that would come and go. Instead it defined his career and created one of the most unforgettable (and prescient) depictions artificial intelligence in cinema.
That begins with Schwarzenegger’s first scene in the film as a robot constructed like an Austrian bodybuilder. He arrives completely in the nude at the famed Griffith Observatory in Los Angeles, a killing machine from the future sent to snuff out a messiah before he can save us from our robot overlords. Unlike the roles Schwarzenegger would become famous for, the T-800 is practically mute. The part complements the star’s immense physicality (and frankly wooden line delivery), and when he walks in the buff up to a young Bill Paxton and some other central casting “punks,” it’s both humorous and intimidating. They laugh when he says, “Give me your clothes,” but it’s whistling past the graveyard.
19. Phyllis Dietrichson in Double Indemnity (1944)
When Barbara Stanwyck’s Phyllis Dietrichson—the not-so-loving housewife of a Los Angeles patsy—walked onscreen in nothing but a towel in Double Indemnity, it was like sex itself slithered into the frame for 1940s audiences. In an era of heavy censorship, director Billy Wilder and Stanwyck defined what a femme fatale was: blonde, bored, and perpetually in need of a cigarette.
We perceive her from the vantage of the film’s unreliable and not-so-clever narrator Walter Neff (Fred MacMurray), an insurance salesman more interested in closing the deal with a married woman than making a sale. He does neither, really, while he looks up toward Phyllis as an exquisite creature (or spider) out of reach and unattainable. He makes his move after she puts something on and comes down, but Stanwyck’s unsentimental depiction of a man-eater is sizing up her next meal. He’s doomed.
18. Count Dracula in Dracula (1931)
There’s a reason almost a hundred years after this movie when you see the word “Dracula,” you still think of Bela Lugosi. A theatrical but effective Hungarian actor who held himself in the highest of regards, Lugosi brought a heightened magnetism to a Transylvanian count who never drinks wine. He permanently transformed the image of Bram Stoker’s literary vampire—who was more accurately adapted in the silent film Nosferatu a decade earlier—into that of a suave and sexually predatory figure who is at his scariest when he nary says a word.
Perhaps that’s why his first scenes are the best. Directed by Tod Browning (but allegedly really helmed by cinematographer Karl Freund), the Transylvanian sequences are the finest bits of Universal Pictures’ original Dracula. Before the movie descends into drawing room clichés, there is a perverse pleasure in Dracula’s mannered gravitas and wordless arrival. Essentially a silent movie in these scenes, we meet him by way of a montage of images: close-ups of rats, bats, armadillos(?!), and the dirt and decay of the grave. We see coffins and corpses before Dracula and his brides silently rise from their deceased ranks, and the master vampire stares ominously into a camera that dollies into his face. This sequence is shortly followed by Dracula announcing his name and title to an unsuspecting victim and uttering one iconic line after another. “Children of the night,” Lugosi purrs, “what music they make!” So do you, Count. So do you.
17. Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood (2007)
Daniel Plainview is technically the hero of the story in There Will Be Blood. But as will be seen in a few other entries on this list, that does not mean he isn’t a villain through and through—in this case with a tenacity and single-mindedness that would be inspiring if it wasn’t also chilling to the bone. The first sequence of Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, adapted from Upton Sinclair’s Oil, illustrates that duality perfectly. Stretched across more than five minutes, the movie’s opening might even be called a montage if not for the fact each beat lasts for several quiet minutes.
Daniel Day-Lewis’ Oscar-winning turn as a ruthless oil man is defined early by a mini-silent film wherein Plainview broods and schemes entirely to himself while searching desperately for oil in some godforsaken patch of the American West. By rights he should die in his greedy pursuit since at the end of this montage, he seems to break his leg due to an accident deep in the earth. Instead we watch Plainview drag himself on his back across desert and rock, heat and untold miles of waste. But it’s not a doctor he seeks. Rather we next find him at the nearest bank to verify his claim on a newly discovered oil deposit. He is a manifestation of American capitalism’s bottomless hunger which accepts no denials. You’d almost admire it until you spend the rest of the movie watching that seem drive turned against the people around him.
16. Patrick Bateman in American Psycho (2000)
It might be a bit of a cheat to include the morning routines of Patrick Bateman in Mary Harron’s American Psycho. It’s technically the second scene featuring Bateman after the camera first meets him trading insults and bigotries at a luxury restaurant with other indistinguishable Wall Street trader yuppies. However, that scene is meant to illustrate just how nondescript Christian Bale’s darkly comic portrait of ‘80s greed and materialism appears on the surface. He is a man of his superficial moment.
Thus our real introduction, then, is the following scene where in voiceover we watch Bale’s statuesque body perform its exercises and rituals; its application of facial creams and moisturizers. It’s methodical, yet empty. The blankness on his face betrays the void of a human or perhaps a soul beneath the good looks. It sends a shiver down the spine as the potential rot within becomes manifest. In voiceover narration, Bale applies a benignly friendly affectation while citing the luxury brands and products he uses. But any feigned enthusiasm goes as dead as his eyes when he admits, “There is an idea of a Patrick Bateman, some kind of extraction. But there is no real me, only an entity, something illusory. And though I can hide my cold gaze, and you can shake my hand and feel flesh gripping yours, and maybe you can even sense our lifestyles are probably comparable, I simply am not there.”
15. Maleficent in Sleeping Beauty (1959)
The most wicked of Disney’s many animated villains and villainesses, Maleficent comes to us as a sorceress so petty that she’ll curse a newborn baby to death because she didn’t get a party invite. Indeed, the most lusciously animated of Disney’s features during Walt’s lifetime takes a break early in its opening faux-medieval pageantry to blind the screen in flashes of green and black. These are the colors of Maleficent (voiced by Eleanor Audley), a powerful witch who appears at a party in Princess Aurora’s honor to damn the little tyke to a sleeping death on her 16th birthday, and to cackle at the throngs of attendants who can do nothing to stop her evil deed.
One of the worst mistakes Disney ever made was to attempt to rehabilitate this all-time great bad’un.
14. The Wicked Witch of the West in The Wizard of Oz (1939)
The fact this sequence needs little in the way of explanation or superlative 85 years after The Wizard of Oz’s release speaks to the timeless magic of the film and Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West. Appearing in a puff of red smoke, and as green as an emerald, and twice as hard-edged, Hamilton defined the modern image of a witch in her big black hat and crone nose. She arrives to investigate the death of her sister and to confront little Judy Garland’s Dorothy Gale. Discovering Dorothy dropped a house on that sibling, and took her ruby slippers to boot, Hamilton cackles, “I’ll get you my pretty, and your little dog too!”
You probably just mouthed the words in Hamilton’s ascending falsetto, didn’t you?
13. John Doe in Seven (1995)
Ninety-four minutes. That’s how much time passes in the two hours that comprise David Fincher’s Seven before the film’s serial killer, a nameless reptile played by Kevin Spacey, finally appears onscreen. Before this moment, John Doe is a shadow that increasingly appears to take on the shape of a myth. We see his silhouette when he gets the drop on Brad Pitt’s cop in a rainy back alley earlier in the movie, and we know it could only be a mortal man who’d so grotesquely obsess over the Bible as he slaughtered people based on the seven deadly sins. However, we never see his face until the movie is almost over. It is then that “John Doe” gingerly walks into the police precinct and turns himself in.
Dressed in a generic white buttoned down shirt and short sleeves, John would even appear harmless if it wasn’t for the splash of fresh blood staining parts of the shirt. Spacey underplays the scene, presenting a mild-mannered figure who is soft-spoken as he pleads “detective” before finally raising his voice to a scream in order to get his coveted attention. Clearly the actor understands something of darkness, and teases reservoirs of pride and vanity beneath the false piety. That this mystery would seem to solve itself immediately puts the cops and audience on edge as the movie enters the third act… and a final descent into hell.
12. Norma Desmond in Sunset Blvd. (1950)
Spiders, bats, and other wretched things generally prefer the dark. It is the easiest place to avoid attention and to wait for prey. So it is with Gloria Swanson’s wasted movie star from days gone by, Norma Desmond. A bit like Double Indemnity, Sunset Blvd. is a noir directed by Billy Wilder in which a dunce (now William Holden’s hack screenwriter Joe Gillis) walks into the wrong house and seals his fate. However, Norma isn’t a femme fatale, at least not in the classical sense. She’s something worse: an actor out of work.
Played by a real-life former star of the silent era, Norma’s 1920s glory days are long gone with the wind, although Norma wouldn’t get that reference. She hisses, ““I am big. It’s the pictures that got small. They’re dead! They’re finished!” Sounding suspiciously like a 21st century social media user, Norma is a bitter, unhappy woman introduced living in the shadows of her forgotten mansion, afraid of the light of day. She also mistakes Joe for a guy arrived to bury her pet chimpanzee in what amounts to a royal funeral. At once both tragic and humorous, the final judgment of Norma becomes something far more perverse as she welcomes Joe into her web of dreams and delusions. She’ll have a comeback if it kills her… or someone, at any rate.
11. The Joker in The Dark Knight (2008)
There are a number of great comic book movie villain performances. Several have been drastically different takes on Batman’s arch-nemesis. But there’s only one Joker played by Heath Ledger, and that personification of chaos and nihilism is in a class of its own. One of the most thrilling and seductive portraits of the abyss ever caught on celluloid, Ledger’s Clown Prince of Crime tears through Christopher Nolan’s superhero movie masterpiece like a hurricane barreling down on the Gulf Coast. And those gale force winds are blowing in the very first scene, an extended prologue built entirely around introducing us to Ledger’s omniscient terrorist in comic book drag.
In the finest onscreen bank robbery this side of Heat, a band of masked goons descend from the Chicago skyline onto a bank that we’re quickly told is mobbed up—complete with William Fichtner’s banker wielding a shotgun in retaliation to the intrusion. One by one, the thieves turn on each other, each revealing they have orders to take the next guy out, until at last there is only one. In extreme IMAX close-up, Ledger’s prosthetic scars and self-applied pancake makeup are unmasked and overwhelm the frame. “Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you… stranger,” he smiles after inexplicably deciding to spare the combative banker’s life. There seems to be no rhyme or reason to his methodology, but his cunning and execution is flawless. It’s a promise the rest of the movie delivers on in spades and a Joker’s Wild.
10. Frank in Once Upon a Time in the West (1968)
The McBain family is mostly dead before we ever see Henry Fonda’s Frank or his accomplices. Mother, father, and adult son are all slain in distant wide shots by invisible assailants when Sergio Leone stages this fateful massacre. One son, however, who is not even an adolescent, is alive when Fonda at last comes into view. Leone savors revealing Frank’s face with a spinning camera that lands on unexpectedly kind, watery eyes. These are the same eyes that gave a soul to John Ford’s Tom Joad and Wyatt Earp, and they look just as empathetic as they stare down at this child. He might even be straining a half-smile as he recognizes something of himself in the lad.
“What should we do about this one, Frank?” an underling asks. Frank spits tobacco from his teeth before his first line of dialogue. “Now that you’ve said me by name,” he says in a trailing voice while drawing gun. The eyes never stop smiling, even after the child is murdered. To turn Hollywood’s young Abraham Lincoln into a child-killer shows in an instant that the past is dead, and the future of cinema has become a lawless land.
9. Alex DeLarge in A Clockwork Orange (1971)
It’s just another Friday night at the Korova Milk Bar when we meet Alex DeLarge, Malcolm McDowell’s chipper sociopath and demon spawn in A Clockwork Orange. Living in a vague and soon-to-come dystopia in Britain’s future, the slang Alex uses in voiceover is foreign yet immediately familiar. All the while, the character stares unblinking into the frame. In the hands of director Stanley Kubrick, this future is at once hypnotic and repellent. The camera dollies out from McDowell’s impish face to reveal a “bar” filled with nude statues and mannequins, as well as other misspent youths clad in all white.
This is a heavily stylized rendering of youth in revolt. Even so, Alex’s satanic smile feels uncomfortably real as he peers into our souls, perhaps searching for the next meal. The voiceover tells us the milk is laced with various drugs that “sharpen you up and make you ready for a bit of the old ultra-violence.” But no amount of milk can excuse what the rest of A Clockwork Orange’s early sadism reveals: murder, rape, and home invasion appear to all be just another night on the town for Alex’s droogs. Kubrick shoots it with a feigned frivolity, including some classical Henry Purcell samplings. Their gaiety makes the actual horror of what these monsters inflict absolutely terrifying.
8. Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds (2009)
In practice, the opening of Inglourious Basterds functions like those of a dozen other Spaghetti Westerns (see above). A bad guy in a bad guy hat arrives on a farm where he massacres a family of innocents. But when that farm is in Nazi-Occupied France, and the hat is shaped like that of a German officer, it takes on an added hint of menace in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. Which makes Christoph Waltz’s conviviality and friendliness evermore disorienting.
Waltz’s Col. Hans Landa of the SS is a tour de force in bold and idiosyncratic acting choices. Like the performer, Landa is a polyglot who speaks four languages fluently, and each with more florid charm than the last. For more than 12 minutes, Hans flatters, teases, and implicitly threatens a French farmer before arriving to the obvious point of his visit. He knows there is a Jewish family hiding on this land, and most likely beneath the very floorboards they’re walking on. And if the farmer doesn’t confess as much, he’ll kill the gentile family after he’s done slaughtering the Jewish one. When the smile finally drops, so does the temperature of the movie. Tarantino then recreates the classic final shot of The Searchers as Landa intentionally lets one young Jewish woman escape. Like the characters of that John Ford classic, Hans knows there’s no salvation or civilization waiting out there for anyone in this tale.
7. Michael Myers in Halloween (1978)
Michael Myers is famously not credited by his character name in the closing titles of Halloween. Actor Nick Castle is simply listed as “the Shape.” But that iconic Shape—defined by its seemingly innocuous silhouette and a William Shatner mask spray-painted ghostly white—is not how we’re introduced to Michael. That comes later.
Michael’s introduction is instead the film’s depraved opening sequence: a genuine, no-tricks four-minute oner wherein the camera is the eyes and ears of an unseen killer as he gathers his tools on Halloween night. Slowly he applies a mask and then collects a large kitchen knife. Finally he falls upon the prey he’s been watching like a peeping tom voyeur; it’s a nude teenage girl in her bedroom who recognizes her murderer before being gutted. Finally, the camera exits the unhappy home where it is promptly unmasked and absently chastised by the victim’s two parents. See, the killer is neither a man or shape. He’s a little boy named Michael holding a knife and totally unfazed by the sister he murdered upstairs. A tone is thus set by director and co-writer John Carpenter, and it’s never lost once over the following 90 minutes.
6. The Star Beast in Alien (1979)
It’s an urban legend that the cast of Alien didn’t know what was going to happen when they filmed the iconic chestburster scene over a dinner table. After all, they read the script. Nonetheless, director Ridley Scott and his producers might have intentionally omitted how elaborate and grotesque the day’s filming would be when they arrived on a set where the camera and crew were covered in tarp, and actor John Hurt was rigged up with some type of apparatus.
So was birthed one of the most ingenious and horrible moments in film history. The million-dollar idea of Dan O’Bannon’s original Alien script is that a man, instead of a woman, is forced to carry to term a child born of rape—a child that will kill him as it literally claws its way out. The sexual and even feminist implications of the idea are amplified to a Freudian fever pitch when Scott and designer H.R. Giger envisioned that alien to burst from Hurt’s chest like an erect penis with fangs. While the other actors, including Sigourney Weaver, Tom Skerritt, and Yaphet Kotto, knew what was coming, their bewildered reactions at the amount of blood and viscera erupting from Hurt’s chest (or an approximation of it) is all too real and immortalized on celluloid. It’s a visual assault on the characters and the audience that has left lasting scars on the zeitgeist.
5. Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949)
Orson Welles relished the role of Harry Lime. Here is a character who for more than an hour—and two-thirds of The Third Man’s running time—has been talked up, eulogized, chided, and generally anticipated. The setup is Joseph Cotten’s novelist, Holly Martins, arrives in post-WWII Vienna beleaguered and cynical. Still, he’s naive enough to believe his childhood friend Harry Lime was A) a good man, and B) dead as a door nail. Everyone, including Harry’s girlfriend who is desperate not to be sent over to the Soviet-controlled part of Vienna, says Harry is six feet under.
Yet at the 65-minute mark, upon realizing he’s being followed by someone in this war-torn city, Holly gets a moment of luck when at night a neighbor turns on a light in their window. For a moment, Holly sees the face of his stalker in a darkened doorway… and it’s Harry. With a devilish grin, Welles nods before vanishing again into the dark. This is the ultimate build-up to a nefarious villain who can be both a friend and rake, for much to Holly’s horror, it turns out Harry has become rich in post-war graft by stealing and selling watered down penicillin on the black market—penicillin that in turn sickens already dying children. Carol Reed’s film is the ultimate post-war noir with a downbeat ending wherein a friend must murder a friend, but in the dark of night that adversarial rivalry cannot begrudge a wink.
4. Darth Vader in Star Wars (1977)
Any movie can introduce its villain wearing a dark hat and with music ominous enough to signal the kids to boo. But it takes real talent to make such a moment rise to the level of (space) operatic bliss. Such is the first time we glimpse Darth Vader in George Lucas’ Star Wars. Clad head-to-toe in black armor, a black cape, and a black helmet/mask combo, Vader might as well be wearing a sign that says, “please, hiss.”
Yet the character also taps into a primal fear of corrupt authority and oppression—ironic given we learn later he is the heroes’ father. And at the start of Star Wars, he arrives after Nazi-coded stormtroopers have massacred a bunch of ‘70s, disco-ready heroes in plastic helmets. In the smoking ruins of their corpses, Vader walks onto the screen to looming John Williams music and Ben Burtt sound effects of heavy breathing that seethes in your ear to this day. An icon is born.
3. Vito Corleone in The Godfather (1972)
You’re probably thinking right now, “but Vito Corleone wasn’t a villain?” He’s a loving father and grandparent who provided for his large family, helping them attain the American dream. For a while there, it was not unreasonable to even wonder if his favorite son would one day become Senator Corleone, or Governor Corleone. A somebody. Therein lies the evil of Vito. In order to provide respectability, wealth, and safety for his family, he also doomed them to an illusion that would leave multiple sons murdered—one by his brother’s hand—and his family split up and alone after earning their wealth from the suffering of others.
But you don’t feel that evil when you spy Marlon Brando shrouded under makeup in The Godfather. Despite cinematographer Gordon Willis drowning Brando’s eponymous character in shadows (and on the sunny day of his daughter’s wedding, no less), Vito appears onscreen as a stoic but caring man who is perpetually thinking. As he pensively broods in the first scene, he even holds a kitten on his lap, scratching its ears as it purrs.
Before him, another hard-working Italian immigrant speaks of how “I love America,” but he is here, hat in hand, because there is no justice in America. Not for immigrants and others deemed to be second-class citizens. In the context of this undertaker’s tragic plight, Vito comes across as empathetic and kindly…. yet he demands “a favor” for providing justice to another father. And he seals this act of promised violence with a kiss while his own newly wedded child dances outside. The veneers of kindness and civility disguise the violence and extortion from which Vito has built his dynasty—and his sins will be paid by his daughter and sons, and their children in turn, with interest.
2. Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
Anthony Hopkins is totally still. In his first scene of The Silence of the Lambs, Dr. Hannibal Lecter is introduced center of frame and motionless. It’s immediately unnerving—like coming across a snake in the wild coiled before a strike. And in the handful of minutes ahead of breathlessly rushes us into Hannibal’s windowless, subterranean cage, Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs promises something just as deadly as a cobra. Lecter chewed off the face of a nurse, we’re told, and elsewhere it’s confirmed he was nicknamed “Hannibal the Cannibal” in the press. Yet when Demme finally introduces the monster, his genuine courtesy mixed with a false smile makes for something far creepier than any hissing and teeth-bearing combo… though he does that too a few minutes later.
Hannibal Lecter is onscreen for less than 20 minutes in Silence of the Lambs, but he remains one of cinema’s greatest boogeymen, a fiend whose niceties and vanities walk hand-in-hand with a barely concealed malevolence. It’s all there in the first moments of the movie. He says “good morning” with Hopkins’ erudite charisma in the wide shot, but in extreme closeup the eyes glisten with ill-intent, and the teeth resemble fangs in that wicked smile. He breaks Jodie Foster’s FBI trainee down in seconds, and when she attempts to turn the tables he finally indulges in some theatrical villainy by recounting what happened when a census taker tried to test him before a liver and fava bean dinner. Before the scene is over, Foster’s Clarice Starling and the audience are under his spell, and it feels strangely cozy.
1. The Shark in Jaws (1975)
Even if it is parodied, imitated, and deconstructed for the rest of time, the opening of Steven Spielberg’s Jaws will forever have bite. This is because the then 27-year-old filmmaker understood it is far scarier when you do not see the monster beneath the waves. While legend has it Spielberg was forced to invent the conceit of rarely showing the shark in the film because of infamous technical difficulties with their mechanical shark, the truth is many of the early scenes, including this one, were always intended to keep the shark mostly or entirely off-screen.
In Jaws, the Great White is an unseen force; an entity as unrelenting and unforgiving as any demon or nefarious deity, and like so much of the natural world, it can destroy you before you even know it is there. When young Chrissie Watkins (Susan Backlinie) takes a seaside dip at dusk, her final moments are filmed entirely from a swimmer’s perspective. The camera treads water with her as smiles turn to panic, and she is dragged screaming for her God beneath the surface, never to be seen in one piece again. She’s been gobbled up and consumed by a force that could grab us all in the water or anywhere else. Recognizing that defenselessness against oblivion will make Jaws’ first five minutes one of the scariest movie moments ever committed to film in any era.
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