At about the 41st minute of
this Con panel Jeff Davis, creator of
Teen Wolf, observes that:
We like to create bad guys who are fully dimensional; bad guys who actually believe that they are the heroes of their own story.
Villains are crucial to the success of tv and film dramas, especially the superhero-based ones, whether derived from comics or modern mythologies (such as
Buffy). Buffy had great villains (the
Mayor being my favourite). The villains in Teen Wolf work too.
Part of the fun is having an ambiguous reaction to the villain.
Heath Ledger's
Joker was splendidly creepy and chilling in
The Dark Knight.
Sir Ian McKellen's
Magneto provided an insidious classy gravitas to the X-Men movies.
Tom Hiddleston's
Loki was good charismatic wicked fun in
Thor and
The Avengers. Which is no doubt why he is returning in
Thor: the Dark World.
The Joker in The Dark Knight was a psychopath pretending to have reasons apart from joy in destruction. But you got where Magneto was coming from in the X-Men movies and, as for Loki in Thor, he had a point about Thor (as Odin dramatically conceded) and then had to cope with one damned thing after another. Part of what I liked about
Snow White and the Huntsman is that you so got where
Charlize Theron's Evil Queen was coming from. The commitment of Bruce Wayne's mentor "Ducard" (played by
Liam Neeson) in
Batman Begins to a notion of the good that had no connection to actual people is a form of villainy that has a particular resonance to the evils of our time. But fits in very well with Jeff Davis's notion about the villain being a hero in their own story.
Part of why I enjoyed the Fantastic Four TV series as a youngster is that I thought
Doctor Doom was rather cool, in an evil sort of way. He was uber-cool, in an evil sort of way, when played by
Julian McMahon in
The Fantastic Four and
The Fantastic 4: the Rise of the Silver Surfer.
In 2009, celebrating 75 years of comics, IGN published a list of the
100 top comic villains. It's top 10 villain list is:
(1)
Magneto (2)
Joker (3)
Doctor Doom (4)
Lex Luthor (5)
Galactus (6)
Darkseid (7)
Ra's Al Ghul
(8)
Loki (9)
Dark Phoenix (10)
Kingpin.
All of whom have had major role in film block-busters and/or long-running TV series. Though my vote for creepiest villains are both in books (in
The Hallowed Hunt by Lois McMaster Bujold and the
Ukiah Oregon books by Wen Spencer).
So, who is your favourite villain, super or otherwise?