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fannish5: Scary Characters
List the five scariest characters ever.
As the question was about characters, not monsters, I shall try to avoid the obvious (i.e. an old reply of mine). (The Gentlemen from Hush or the Alien from Alien would fall under this category, as would Shelob from Lord of the Rings. That's the difference between monster and villain, too.)
1.) Caligula as interpreted by Robert Graves and John Hurt in I, Claudius. Making genuine madmen scary is more difficult than you think, because of that "oh, he's so funny, and the hero is smarter anyway, so what's to fear?" trap. What makes the Graves version of Caligula the often imitated and copied epitome of genuine mads cariness is, among other things, that Caligula even at his maddest isn't stupid. He's also mercurial and unpredictable so that a successful compliment from last week can be a death sentence this week. Particularly scary Caligula scenes in the tv version of I, Claudius: first of all, the one where he basically takes over as prime antagonist from the previous owner of the role, Livia (see below), in her near-death scene; he lies down next to the very old and dying Livia and while casually groping her as a way of humiliating her further, tells her that no, he won't make her a goddess as he had promised, and that he hopes she'll suffer in Tartarus for the rest of eternity. It's the first time he makes your skin crawl and reveals the depth of his sadism as well as long-term planning. (As he cultivated Livia before in order to keep her quiet about his secrets.) Secondly, in a scene set shortly after Caligula has become Emperor, Caligula states that he has found a way to "cure" the cough of his little cousin (and nominal co-ruler) Gemellus which has been irritating him before. By which the audience realizes he's killed the child. It's the offhand way he makes the statement that gives you the chills here. Thirdly, one of the out and out insane scenes which does all via hints and the imagination of the audience: Caligula has found out his sister and lover Drusilla is pregnant, concludes that as he's Zeus, the child will depose him, and decides to act out one particular Greek myth here. All the audience actually sees is Caligula tying Drusilla up (she thinks it's just another game), then Claudius knocking at the door, Caligula, with a bloody mouth, opening it, and Claudius responding to what he but not the audience sees inside. And it's probably the scariest moment in the entire series. Brrrr.
2.) Annie Wilkes, main character from Stephen King's novel Misery. The film to my mind while offering a great performance from Kathy Bates gets a few things crucially wrong, among them that this is a story about writing. And Annie isn't just Paul Sheldon's "number one fan" who when finding out he killed her favourite character does what online fans these day keep threaten to do, goes after him with an axe and forces him to write a new novel bringing that character back to life, no, she's actually also an attentive beta-reader (Paul's first attempt simply retcons the previous ending as in not having happened; she's not happy with that, she read it, it happened, so he has to find a way to bring her beloved character back that doesn't ignore what happened before) and a twisted, twisted version of the muse. (Because what Paul realizes in the novel but not the film is that the novel she makes him write is actually far better than the highbrow one she made him burn in the beginning. And one of the fascinating things in the book is how the passages he writes echo and metamorphize the situation he's in.) In conclusion: It from It is probably most people's choice for scariest King character, but I can't help it, it's the writer in me: Annie scares me more. Because I know her.
3.) Dolores Umbridge, from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Speaking of people I know: to my mind, Dolores Umbridge is the best villain JKR came up with in all seven Potter novels. Voldemort is your conventional Evil Overlord who keeps ignoring the Evil Overlord Rules. Bellatrix Lestrange is flashy fun as far as evil madwoman go. But Umbridge is the banality of evil personified. She's not mad, she's seriously convinced of her own goodness, and the petty kind of sadism she indulges in is so frightening because it's the type you find, minus magical means, in all kind of people in authority. Which is why the scene where she makes Harry write "I must not tell lies" again with his own blood and into his own skin carries hit home me in a way most Death Eater spectacles did not. She doesn't deliver a lengthy diatribe in that scene; she simply tells Harry to cotinue writing and smiles, and that's that, and it's scary as hell. (The aftermath, with Harry's unwillingness to report it and sense of rage and shame, also exudes an emotional reality of child abuse that's lacking in, say, the Roald-Dahl-esque set up with the Dursleys keeping Harry in a cupboard under the stairs until age 11.)
4.) Livia from I, Claudius. Another I, Claudius entry is inevitable because Livia isn't just that great but that scary as well. In a very different way than Caligula. Livia isn't insane, for starters. She's smart, cruel, and when telling her dying husband after decades of pulling strings behind the scenes, killing and/or ruining everyone standing in her way, "All I ever did was for Rome", honestly convinced that this is true. As opposed to the banality-of-evil type of vllain Umbridge is, Livia isn't petty, though, and she's also very witty; with just enough vulnerability flickering up very new and then to remind us she's human in addition to being a mastermind. And a master manipulator till her last breath; the scene I mentioned in the Caligula entry isn't her last one, it's the last-but-one; in her last one, she pulls off another victory, to wit, making Claudius, who has seen her destroy several people he loved and who has been casually humiliated by her through much of his life, promise he'll make her a goddess regardless. In the tv version of the novel, the most frightening Livia moment to me was when Augustus asks her to pose with his two grandsons Gaius and Lucius, Julia's sons whom he has adopted and sees as successors. Livia doesn't say anything, she obliges, and when she puts a benevolent arm around each of the boys, you know they'll never make it to the (not literally existing) throne.
5.) Dream of the Endless, from Sandman. Morpheus might not be the most obvious candidate, given his narrative regularly makes fun of his Byronic tendencies, and also, he's the hero of same. But he can be scary as hell. In the first Sandman volume, Preludes and Nocturnes, at the end of his debut story, he condemns the only surviving person who participated in his decades-long imprisonment, Alex Burgess, the son of his original captor, to "eternal awakening". Which means Alex goes through nightmare after nightmare, wakes up, realizes he's actually not awake but trapped in another dream, thinks he finally woke up, finds out, etc. The horror of that remained with me through the saga and I was very relieved when at the end of it Alex was forgiven and could wake up for real. (And spend what remained of his life with his boyfriend who had remained with the comatose Alex through the years Sandman takes place.) In Dream Country, he punishes the writer who has kept and raped the muse Calliope for years by overflooding non-stop inspiration (this means the writer in question ends up writing in his own blood and still can't stop). In A Doll's House, we find out that Dream himself is responsible for a lover who turned him down being trapped in hell for millennia. (Dream's love life: not an inspiring tale. There's a reason he's feuding with his sibling Desire.) In conclusion: when Dream at the end of Preludes and Nocturnes observes that his sister Death, whom mortals fear more, is far gentler and less to fear than he is, he's not kidding.
As the question was about characters, not monsters, I shall try to avoid the obvious (i.e. an old reply of mine). (The Gentlemen from Hush or the Alien from Alien would fall under this category, as would Shelob from Lord of the Rings. That's the difference between monster and villain, too.)
1.) Caligula as interpreted by Robert Graves and John Hurt in I, Claudius. Making genuine madmen scary is more difficult than you think, because of that "oh, he's so funny, and the hero is smarter anyway, so what's to fear?" trap. What makes the Graves version of Caligula the often imitated and copied epitome of genuine mads cariness is, among other things, that Caligula even at his maddest isn't stupid. He's also mercurial and unpredictable so that a successful compliment from last week can be a death sentence this week. Particularly scary Caligula scenes in the tv version of I, Claudius: first of all, the one where he basically takes over as prime antagonist from the previous owner of the role, Livia (see below), in her near-death scene; he lies down next to the very old and dying Livia and while casually groping her as a way of humiliating her further, tells her that no, he won't make her a goddess as he had promised, and that he hopes she'll suffer in Tartarus for the rest of eternity. It's the first time he makes your skin crawl and reveals the depth of his sadism as well as long-term planning. (As he cultivated Livia before in order to keep her quiet about his secrets.) Secondly, in a scene set shortly after Caligula has become Emperor, Caligula states that he has found a way to "cure" the cough of his little cousin (and nominal co-ruler) Gemellus which has been irritating him before. By which the audience realizes he's killed the child. It's the offhand way he makes the statement that gives you the chills here. Thirdly, one of the out and out insane scenes which does all via hints and the imagination of the audience: Caligula has found out his sister and lover Drusilla is pregnant, concludes that as he's Zeus, the child will depose him, and decides to act out one particular Greek myth here. All the audience actually sees is Caligula tying Drusilla up (she thinks it's just another game), then Claudius knocking at the door, Caligula, with a bloody mouth, opening it, and Claudius responding to what he but not the audience sees inside. And it's probably the scariest moment in the entire series. Brrrr.
2.) Annie Wilkes, main character from Stephen King's novel Misery. The film to my mind while offering a great performance from Kathy Bates gets a few things crucially wrong, among them that this is a story about writing. And Annie isn't just Paul Sheldon's "number one fan" who when finding out he killed her favourite character does what online fans these day keep threaten to do, goes after him with an axe and forces him to write a new novel bringing that character back to life, no, she's actually also an attentive beta-reader (Paul's first attempt simply retcons the previous ending as in not having happened; she's not happy with that, she read it, it happened, so he has to find a way to bring her beloved character back that doesn't ignore what happened before) and a twisted, twisted version of the muse. (Because what Paul realizes in the novel but not the film is that the novel she makes him write is actually far better than the highbrow one she made him burn in the beginning. And one of the fascinating things in the book is how the passages he writes echo and metamorphize the situation he's in.) In conclusion: It from It is probably most people's choice for scariest King character, but I can't help it, it's the writer in me: Annie scares me more. Because I know her.
3.) Dolores Umbridge, from Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Speaking of people I know: to my mind, Dolores Umbridge is the best villain JKR came up with in all seven Potter novels. Voldemort is your conventional Evil Overlord who keeps ignoring the Evil Overlord Rules. Bellatrix Lestrange is flashy fun as far as evil madwoman go. But Umbridge is the banality of evil personified. She's not mad, she's seriously convinced of her own goodness, and the petty kind of sadism she indulges in is so frightening because it's the type you find, minus magical means, in all kind of people in authority. Which is why the scene where she makes Harry write "I must not tell lies" again with his own blood and into his own skin carries hit home me in a way most Death Eater spectacles did not. She doesn't deliver a lengthy diatribe in that scene; she simply tells Harry to cotinue writing and smiles, and that's that, and it's scary as hell. (The aftermath, with Harry's unwillingness to report it and sense of rage and shame, also exudes an emotional reality of child abuse that's lacking in, say, the Roald-Dahl-esque set up with the Dursleys keeping Harry in a cupboard under the stairs until age 11.)
4.) Livia from I, Claudius. Another I, Claudius entry is inevitable because Livia isn't just that great but that scary as well. In a very different way than Caligula. Livia isn't insane, for starters. She's smart, cruel, and when telling her dying husband after decades of pulling strings behind the scenes, killing and/or ruining everyone standing in her way, "All I ever did was for Rome", honestly convinced that this is true. As opposed to the banality-of-evil type of vllain Umbridge is, Livia isn't petty, though, and she's also very witty; with just enough vulnerability flickering up very new and then to remind us she's human in addition to being a mastermind. And a master manipulator till her last breath; the scene I mentioned in the Caligula entry isn't her last one, it's the last-but-one; in her last one, she pulls off another victory, to wit, making Claudius, who has seen her destroy several people he loved and who has been casually humiliated by her through much of his life, promise he'll make her a goddess regardless. In the tv version of the novel, the most frightening Livia moment to me was when Augustus asks her to pose with his two grandsons Gaius and Lucius, Julia's sons whom he has adopted and sees as successors. Livia doesn't say anything, she obliges, and when she puts a benevolent arm around each of the boys, you know they'll never make it to the (not literally existing) throne.
5.) Dream of the Endless, from Sandman. Morpheus might not be the most obvious candidate, given his narrative regularly makes fun of his Byronic tendencies, and also, he's the hero of same. But he can be scary as hell. In the first Sandman volume, Preludes and Nocturnes, at the end of his debut story, he condemns the only surviving person who participated in his decades-long imprisonment, Alex Burgess, the son of his original captor, to "eternal awakening". Which means Alex goes through nightmare after nightmare, wakes up, realizes he's actually not awake but trapped in another dream, thinks he finally woke up, finds out, etc. The horror of that remained with me through the saga and I was very relieved when at the end of it Alex was forgiven and could wake up for real. (And spend what remained of his life with his boyfriend who had remained with the comatose Alex through the years Sandman takes place.) In Dream Country, he punishes the writer who has kept and raped the muse Calliope for years by overflooding non-stop inspiration (this means the writer in question ends up writing in his own blood and still can't stop). In A Doll's House, we find out that Dream himself is responsible for a lover who turned him down being trapped in hell for millennia. (Dream's love life: not an inspiring tale. There's a reason he's feuding with his sibling Desire.) In conclusion: when Dream at the end of Preludes and Nocturnes observes that his sister Death, whom mortals fear more, is far gentler and less to fear than he is, he's not kidding.
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