Seductive Movie Villains

Hell hath no fury like Amy Dunne, a vengeful vixen who manages to be both a man’s best dream and worst nightmare all rolled into one. After her husband (Ben Affleck) spurns her, she goes “missing,” leaving an manipulative trail of “evidence” that climaxes in the mid-coital slashing of her ex-boyfriend (Neil Patrick Harris). Like a volcano, she’s great to look at, as long as you’re doing it over your shoulder as you run the other way.

Patrick Bateman has almost everything: Money, women, and abs you can cut diamonds with. Unfortunately, what this unhinged Wall Street yuppie likes to cut most is flesh, proving that the only thing he seems to be missing, other than a single ounce of body fat, is any semblance of a conscience. What a guy!

Eve’s eyes don’t shine in this classic Broadway behind-the-scenes bitch-fest. They burn hungrily, and, like her character, threaten to devour everything and everyone (including the formidable Bette Davis as Margo Channing) in the maniacal actress’s path to stardom. She’s seductive, and she’s a winner, but at what a cost.

Only a delightful droog like Alex DeLarge could make a dystopia so much fun! As this fabulous, fedora-sporting, mascara-wearing thug brawls, rapes, and murders his way through a near-futuristic London—in Stanley Kubrick’s sardonic and sadistic vision—you might actually find yourself rooting for the guy. Unlike the other villains on this list, Alex has no hero posed against him, just the machinery of the state. Is that so wrong?

Shedding her good-girl image in glorious fashion, Rachel McAdams stuns as the Machiavellian high-school It Girl, Regina George, in this classic coming-of-age comedy (oh, yeah, she’s funny, too), with Lindsay Lohan as the good girl and a pitch-perfect screenplay by Tina Fey. Never has bright pink looked so good on a person behaving so badly.

In the first Die Hard, Rickman’s Hans, a slick mastermind with a killer heist up his sleeve, brought an unprecedented level of sexy sophistication and intelligence to the action-movie heavy. In the ensuing two decades, we’ve seen countless cheap copies of McClane’s classy nemesis, but there will only be one Hans. Rest in peace, Alan.

In Quentin Tarantino’s epic, two-part, female-driven tale of revenge, O-Ren Ishii is the cold, dead-eyed, head-collecting assassin that our heroine, Beatrix (Uma Thurman), is ultimately gunning for. After attempting to murder Beatrix on her wedding night, O-Ren has moved on to bloodier pastures and is running the Yakuza when Beatrix unleashes the chop-socky, sword-slicing extravaganza that caps Vol. 2.

Few things are more despicable than a crooked cop—and one of them is Denzel as a crooked cop. In this Oscar-winning performance, he gives us the fastest-talking, best-looking and, above all, most creepily charismatic dirty narco in cinema history. Although he spends a whole lot of time being wrong, at the end of his incredible monologue, he’s dead right when he declares, “King Kong ain’t got shit on me!”

Most people, when interrogated for murder, are at the mercy of the police. But most people aren’t Catherine Trammell, who, by simply uncrossing her legs in the most legendary flash in cinema history, shows us where the real power resides. Sharon Stone and her director, Paul Verhoeven, turn a psychopath into a tantalizing master of lust.

It’s not every day that an actor can upstage Batman and (former Gotham gangsta) Jack Nicholson in just one stint. Heath Ledger, mostly known as just another pretty face until TDK, managed not only to bring nuanced, naturalistic chaos to an otherwise cartoonish character but also to cement his enduring legacy on the cusp of his tragic death.