19 Great Female Villains Who Were Wolves In Sheep's Clothing

Never trust your No. 1 fan. Novelist Paul Sheldon learns that lesson the hard way in this 1990 adaptation of Stephen King's 1987 novel of the same name. After a car crash, Sheldon is rescued and nursed back to health by his self-professed "No. 1 fan," Annie Wilkes. Kathy Bates won an Academy Award for her role as the unhinged Wilkes, who seems normal enough at first, but flies into a rage when she learns that Sheldon has done in the main character of his long-running novel series in favor of writing "more serious" work.

In one of the most chilling scenes in the history of horror cinema, Wilkes calmly explains what she's doing to Sheldon as she breaks his ankles with a sledgehammer to keep him from running away.

A cold, calculating sociopath - called by her own creator, author Gillian Flynn, "pragmatically evil" - Amy Dunne initially appears as the victim in both Flynn's novel and the movie of the same name. It isn't until the pieces begin to unravel that we see the depths of her nefarious plan. How nefarious are we talking? She spends months creating an elaborate frame to implicate her husband in her disappearance and apparent demise, and that's just the beginning.

There are plenty of examples of Amy's chilling premeditation littered throughout the film, where she is played by Rosamund Pike, but one of the most memorable is a sequence in which she repeatedly hits herself in the face with a hammer in order to make it look like she's been abused.

Creepy kids are a staple of the horror genre, but 9-year-old Esther, played by Isabelle Fuhrman in the 2009 film Orphan, is something else. Literally. The film's big twist reveals that the apparently homicidal tyke is actually a 33-year-old woman with a rare genetic disorder that causes her to look like a child. She's been masquerading as one in order to infiltrate the family and seduce her adopted "father." And she's willing to knock off anyone who gets in her way.

Since its release, the film has gone on to achieve cult classic status, thanks in no small part to the quality of its memorable antagonist.

Winner of the Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay, Get Out is a modern horror classic. And to be a horror classic, you need some great villains. In Jordan Peele's feature debut, those come in the form of the Armitage family. The story follows Chris, a photographer, who joins his white girlfriend Rose at her wealthy family's house in the country for a weekend. Though things take a turn for the weird early on, the Armitages seem harmless enough. But something sinister is going on under the surface, and before it's all over, Chris discovers that Rose is in on it, as her formerly warm and supportive demeanor suddenly switches to icy cold.

As Rose, Allison Williams helps to deliver some of the film's most disturbing sequences, including a scene where she talks on the phone with Chris's friend, her voice filled with emotion, her face utterly and terrifyingly blank.

Glenn Close received an Academy Award nomination for her role in Fatal Attraction. It was one of six nominations the film received, including Best Picture. Fatal Attraction was also one of the highest-grossing films of the year. And a big part of what made the film so compelling was the relationship between Michael Douglas as Dan Gallagher, a happily married lawyer, and Glenn Close as Alex Forrest, the coworker he has an affair with and who becomes obsessed with him, to the point of stalking his family and plotting to get rid of his wife so she can have him all to herself.

Yet considering Forrest became a bunny-boiling villain for the ages, Close never saw her that way, and has spent years championing mental health reforms and disparaging the way the film treated her character. "I've never thought of her as a villain," Close told The New York Times, "just in distress."

Could any villain ever seem less villainous than the kindly Minnie Castevet from Rosemary's Baby? Played by veteran actress Ruth Gordon, the elderly neighbor of Rosemary Woodhouse appears meddlesome, perhaps, but far from sinister... at least at first. It isn't long, however, before the overbearing "kindness" of Minnie and her husband proves to be something else entirely. They are actually witches, preparing Rosemary - with the help of her husband - to be the mother of the literal son of Satan.

As villains go, they don't start out much more innocuous - or end up much more abominable.