Crafting an iconic horror movie villain is incredibly difficult, and it’s rarely something that happens intentionally, but because audiences latch onto a character with a distinct design or personality.
And it’s fair to say that the 21st century is relatively low on truly statuesque horror villains who can live up to the genre’s classics – Halloween’s Michael Myers, Friday the 13th’s Jason Voorhees, A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger, Child’s Play’s Chucky, and so on.
Even with hundreds of horror films being released every single year, precious few manage to break through and deliver a villain with genuine staying power that fans want to see more of.
But every so often, creative filmmakers strike gold and give us a villain who joins the pantheon of the greats, whether due to their novel motivation, brutal method of killing, neat design, or the performance of the actor playing them.
Over the last near-25 years, these are horror movie villains who have ruled the genre, and proved to us all that horror is absolutely capable of crafting new antagonists to stand tall among the most beloved greats…
Let’s kick things off with perhaps the most iconic horror villain of the last quarter-century – John Kramer aka Jigsaw (Tobin Bell) from the Saw franchise.
The big hook of the Saw movies is that Jigsaw isn’t merely another supernatural monster listlessly slashing up his victims – he’s a flesh-and-blood person who wants to test people’s will to live.
That is to say, while Jigsaw is undeniably a mass murderer – despite his own deluded claims to the contrary – some of his victims have survived their encounters with him.
The sick creativity of Jiggy’s various traps helped prop the series up even during its lesser installments, but what would the franchise really be without Tobin Bell’s fantastically ominous performance as Kramer, and his iconic utterance of the phrase, “I want to play a game”?
It’s also impressive that Kramer has had so much staying power with audiences despite being killed off way back in Saw III almost 20 years ago, enough that he was brought back for the shockingly good interquel Saw X last year.
In fact, Kramer’s such an incredible character that the series has basically struggled to create a worthy successor to him ever since his demise.
And so, when an 82-year-old Bell eventually ages out of the role, the filmmakers will have some tough decisions to make.
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