Cinema has gifted the world with a number of memorable villains, with antagonists coming in all ways, forms, shapes, and sizes to make life a nightmare for the protagonists.

They can be cold-blooded, hilarious, violent, charismatic, grotesque, and many more unwanted superlatives beside, but there’s something extra off-putting about those who make being bloodthirsty a defining personality trait.

These are the bad guys who derive great pleasure and excitement from inflicting death and despair upon anyone who crosses their path, which elevates them into the rarefied air of villainy that renders them completely irredeemable.

To paraphrase The Terminator, these guys can’t be reasoned with. They don’t feel pity, or remorse, or fear. And they absolutely will not stop, ever, until a whole lot of people are dead.

10 most bloodthirsty villains:

10. Sauron (The Lord of the Rings, 2001-2003)

The epitome of a villain who wakes up and chooses violence every day, the fearsome antagonist of The Lord of the Rings doesn’t even need a physical form to prove himself the bloodthirsty sort.

When he did, he was, with Sauron, decimating entire armies and sending the body parts of his enemies hurtling across the battlefield in a relentless and ruthless display of dominance that saw Middle Earth in danger of falling.

Even when he was a gigantic eye at the top of an ominous tower, his single-minded quest to enslave the entire population and murder anyone who opposed the hostile takeover saw him rack up quite the monumental body count.

9. Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs/Hannibal/Red Dragon, 1991-2002)

Human flesh is in no way part of a healthy and balanced diet, which by default makes Anthony Hopkins‘ disarmingly charismatic cannibal one of cinema’s bloodthirstiest big bads.

There’s something to commend about people who are willing to try anything once, but once Hannibal Lecter crossed that final frontier and wrapped his laughing gear around a morsel of mortal, there was no turning back.

He doesn’t need to kill people or eat them for that matter, but it became his signature technique nonetheless. If that doesn’t fit the bloodthirsty bill, then questions need to be asked.

8. Hans Landa (Inglourious Basterds, 2009)

Quentin Tarantino called Hans Landa the single greatest character he’d ever written, and it’s easy to see why when it becomes very easy to forget just how twisted the iconic antagonist is.

Christoph Waltz’s masterful multilingual performance portrays Landa as a smooth, suave, sophisticated, and intelligent man, which he undoubtedly is. However, he’s also a complete and utter monster.

He derives great pleasure from hunting down and eliminating any rogue members of the Jewish population who slipped through his grasp, with citizens all over Europe living in fear that he could turn up at their door and drop in for an intense conversation.

7. Bruce (Jaws, 1975)

There’s no rule that says bloodthirsty villains need to be even vaguely humanoid, with the faulty mechanical shark from Steven Spielberg’s classic Jaws the perfect example.

One of the most fearsome and ferocious baddies ever depicted on the big screen, the shark lovingly dubbed ‘Bruce’ by the cast and crew belies his mundane nomenclature with a thirst for fresh victims.

Scaring an entire generation out of the water is a hell of an impact to leave behind, with Bruce racking up new meals on a regular basis to satiate an endless hunger for new people to turn into lunch.

6. Jang Kyung-Chul (I Saw the Devil, 2010)

Generally speaking, serial killers are bloodthirsty by their very nature, which has rarely been captured in a more unsettling form than it was by Oldboy lead Choi Min-sik in the psychological Korean classic.

Terrorising an entire city, the villain of I Saw the Devil rapes, murders, and dismembers to satisfy his harrowing urges, and the fact one of his only friends was a fellow murderer and cannibal speaks volumes to who Jang Kyung-Chul is as a person.

An incredible thriller that doesn’t skimp on the blood, guts, or depravity, few cinematic mass murders burrow under the skin and refuse to leave quite like Kyung-Chul.

5. Leatherface (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, 1974-present)

Villains have developed a habit of monologuing their intentions through reams of exposition that help explain and justify their motivations, but horror icon Leatherface isn’t interested in dialogue.

Instead, he’s just a bloody great brute who wields his weapon of choice with recklessly maniacal abandon, cleaving his chainsaw through so many bodies that he’ll never be short of a new mask to stitch together.

The figurehead of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and its associated sequels, remakes, reboots, and sequels to those remakes and reboots doesn’t need to explain himself; he’s just there to fuck shit up and notch as many kills on his bedpost as possible.

4. Captain Vidal (Pan’s Labyrinth, 2006)

Guillermo del Toro was hardly subtle in the messaging at the heart of Pan’s Labyrinth, but that didn’t make it any less effective in shining a light on the horrors of man.

Whereas Ivana Baquero’s Ofelia encounters plenty of terrors during her descent into the fantastical underworld, there’s nothing more nightmarish than her new stepfather, Sergi López’s Captain Vidal.

Revelling the atrocities he’s being allowed to commit, Vidal strikes terror into the hearts of everyone around him, whether they’re friends or foes. Embracing his duty in the worst way possible, his brutal methods exist almost entirely to entertain his own disturbing urges.

3. Art the Clown (Terrifier, 2016-present)

When a movie is so gruesome that people end up losing consciousness and throwing up in the cinema, then it would be an understatement to suggest the person responsible is doing some truly crazy things.

The entire modus operandi of the Terrifier series so far has been pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable to be realised on-screen to the absolute extremes, with Art the Clown never losing that shit-eating grin of his.

An experience most definitely not for the faint of heart, Art’s bloodlust is so pronounced and provocative that even seasoned gorehounds find themselves compelled to look away, which pretty much says it all.

2. Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men, 2007)

While Javier Bardem hardly notched a sky-high body count in the Coen brothers classic, Anton Chigurh fits the bloodthirsty criteria by way of his gallingly cold response to the pain he inflicts.

Quite possibly the most convincing psychopath ever enshrined in celluloid, Chigurh’s dead-behind-the-eyes expression and Terminator-like approach to his latest quarry is both a thing of beauty and abject terror at the same time.

Not exactly the easiest thing for any actor to pull off, but it’s that combination of total nothingness juxtaposed with unbridled ferocity that makes No Country for Old Men‘s iconic killer so goddamned terrifying.

1. Amon Goeth (Schindler’s List, 1993)

While Ralph Fiennes does an eerily convincing job depicting a truly reprehensible and despicable human being in the Steven Spielberg classic, what makes it exponentially more fear-inducing is that he toned it down.

The erstwhile villain of Schindler’s List does a number of awful things in the movie, but Spielberg was actually forced to sand down the edges of the atrocious acts he commits because the filmmaker thought audiences would find him too cartoonishly evil if it hewed exactly to historical fact.

This is the light and sunny version of the character, then, which is troublesome stuff. Sick, twisted, sadistic, and exacting perverse pleasure from his unconscionable actions, Fiennes’ Goeth is virtually the definition of bloodthirsty. What makes it worse, though, is that he’s being encouraged to do the things he does.