The important thing about the best baddies is, they need to be all-the-way bad. Not a little bit bad. Not with some form of understandable backstory, or with a sympathetic rationale for what they’re doing. They need to be Bad To The Bone. And you need to hate them. Ideally, that means they should also get their comeuppance, which is then all the more satisfying, given their complete lack of redeeming characteristics. And lastly, they should be fun to watch! We’re not talking about just irredeemable-but dull-serial killers here. This is the best of the best. Or rather, the worst of the worst.

1. Alan Rickman as the Sheriff of Nottingham, Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves.

Alan Rickman is The Man when it comes to over the top, hateable villains. For me, this trumps Hans Gruber, and I’ve only allowed myself one Rickman. (Two is clearly too many).

He is just so over-the-top, amazingly, brilliantly awful, and revels in it.

“Cancel the kitchen scraps for lepers and orphans, no more merciful beheadings, and call off Christmas.” Need I say more?

2. Strother Martin as The Warden in Cool Hand Luke.

Luke is so pure, charismatic, handsome, entertaining, to the point where he’s a son-of-God-like caricature who’d potentially be insufferable if not played by the perfectly-cast Paul Newman. But he needs a foil, someone the complete opposite- cruel, relentless, and has power he can wield over Luke and the other prisoners at will. He’s so awful, you hate him and what he represents. He tortures Luke, puts him in the box and so on. And makes an example of him. I think he’s similar to Nurse Ratched in Cuckoo’s Nest, but more quotable…

“What we got here… is failure to communicate.”

(I like that Strother Martin and Paul Newman were friends in real life. He shows up in a small part in Butch Cassidy as well.)

3. Lionel Barrymore as Mr Potter in It’s a Wonderful Life.

For such a famously uplifting Christmas film, it’s super-grim for much of the runtime as Jimmy Stewart’s George Bailey’s life just takes one bad turn after another, with Potter lurking in the background and pulling key levers. In a film which explicitly has angels in it, I’ve always viewed Potter as an embodiment of the devil, as he is venal and malicious, doing evil things and causing pain for little reason other than that he can, and wants to.