I have always considered Uriah Heep from Dickens’ David Copperfield to be evil incarnate, masked with false humility, slithering like a snake of unethical cowardice, striking to expose your weakness and then to blackmail you with the consequences thereof.
A very real villain like those we have all known of.
Such a person is more likely to tangibly affect us than would those who would exemplify more rarefied aspects of evil (i.e. Serial-Killer, Stalker-Rapist, Asshole-Boss).
From the movie Dangeous Liasons:
Marquise Isabelle de Merteuil (Glenn Close)
Vicomte Sebastien de Valmont (John Malkovich)
I love the movie, and I love hating those 2 characters. French aristocrats screwing with other peoples lives just because they are bored.
Percy Wetmore (Doug Hutchison) in the movie The Green Mile. Thinking about him right now makes me want to stomp him. No matter what other roles I see him, to me, he’ll always be Percy Wetmore.
Verger, now unable to physically molest kids, screws with their emotions (i.e. the little boy he tries to entice to poison his kitty but the little boy drinks the poison himself)- and I was comparing him to the revised Hannibal character in HANNIBAL who now only kills & eats assholes.
I disagree about this scene being the epitome of evil – the Hungarions drew first blood, and Keyzer Soze reacted with vengeance. A truly evil person would have laughed and turned his back while his wife and children got raped.
On the other hand, Cullen Crisp’s mother from Kindergarten Cop was a truly evil person, teaming up with her drug dealer son to kidnap and/or kill a six year old child.
To an extent, I agree. But the part where Soze kills his wife and kids (albeit to “spare” them, in some twisted sense) isn’t about vengeance. It’s a cold-blooded individual that can execute his wife and children. Especially after his wife has just been raped.
And no one has mentioned any characters from Iain M. Banks? His novels seethe with horrible characters. Off the top of my head:
Look to Windward: the E-Dust assassin
The Algebraist: Archimandrite Luseferous
Consider Phlebas: Fwi-Song the prophet
Surface Detail: Joiler Veppers and Virtual Hell’s Lucifer
The Player of Games: anonymous Azadian apices, also the decrypted video scene
Can’t believe no one has yet mentioned Messers Croup and Vandemere from Neverwhere.
And a second vote for Aarfy from Catch-22. All the more horrifying as he is initially presented as a merely annoying minor character; then he rapes and kills the maid Michaela, and cannot see that he’s done anything wrong, since she’s just a whore. That the MPs show up and arrest Yossarian for being AWOL merely adds to the bleak despair of the whole chapter. Milo might count, but I’ve always read him as merely a bitter satire on “profit-is-all” corporations.
Soze didn’t stop at killing the people who threatened him and his family. He killed the entire gang, their relatives, indirect business associates - total scorched earth.
“Verbal Kint” controls all information to Agent Kujan other than corpses. Either Soze really did kill his own family, and every other person involved in the incident, or he wants Kujan to believe that Soze is that cold blooded, and bloody-minded.
The Soze thing is getting played out. I recognize some other names in this thread that are quite evil. Soze is still down there, IMHO.
Good pick. Reminded me of Christian Bale’s character in ‘American Psycho’, wherein he was both literally (serial killer) and metaphorically (the epitome of vainglorious yuppie assholery) evil.