Crafting a main villain in a children’s movie makes for a delicate balancing act. In most cases, filmmakers strive to create an antagonist capable of undermining their heroic counterparts, presenting their villainous antics in a straightforward, sometimes cartoonishly comical manner.
Every so often, though, the production team behind a children’s movie might accidentally conjure up a villain that instantly strikes fear in its younger audience members. Whether through their foreboding appearance or twisted personalities, these movie baddies leave viewers cringing in terror, horrifying audiences from generation to generation.
It’s incredible to think that someone as down-to-earth as Christopher Lloyd–I.E., the man behind Back to the Future’s Doc Brown–could play a character as thoroughly malevolent as Judge Doom. The sinister judge, jury, and executioner of Los Angeles’ Toontown district, Judge Doom’s imposing appearance alone is enough to make viewers to literally recoil away from the screen. If his outward appearance wasn’t bad enough, Doom somehow manages to appear even more terrifying once he sheds his human disguise, revealing his true form as a wild-eyed, wacky-haired, screechy-voiced Toon hellbent on exterminating his own kind.
There’s a reason most people associate witches with pointed hats, black dresses, and unkempt broomsticks. Setting the standard for every fictional spellcaster that followed, the Wicked Witch of the West also managed to horrify mainstream audiences in the late 1930s, so much so that Margaret Hamilton had to appear on Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood to distinguish herself from her cackling counterpart. Arriving with a burst of red smoke and with an army of flying monkeys at her back, this green-faced sorcerer could cause your heart to skip a beat through her unhinged laughter alone.
The first villain ever presented in a feature-length Disney film, the Evil Queen continues to make audiences’ skin crawl nearly a century after Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs’ original release. A vain yet alluring monarch who envies Snow White’s youthful beauty, the Evil Queen schemes out ways to permanently eliminate her estranged stepdaughter, allowing the Queen to assert her place as “the fairest in the land.” While a tad intimidating in her original form, it’s the Evil Queen’s disguise as a wizened old crone that provides Snow White with some of its most chilling sequences (such as her magical transformation or her constant attempts to poison Snow White).
Next to Snow White’s Evil Queen, the Horned King takes the cake for the single most intimidating Disney villain in the company’s history. A skeletal emperor who plans to conquer the medieval land of Prydain, the Horned King’s monstrous appearance reflects his warped personality. With a howling wind announcing his presence, the Horned King gives The Lord of the Rings’ Sauron or Star Wars’ Emperor Palpatine a run for their money in terms of disquieting evil overlords.
We have no idea whether it was intentional or not, but somehow, Return to Oz provides no shortage of unsettling visuals throughout its two hour runtime. Case in point with the Wheelers, an antagonistic group of humanoid creatures with wheels in place of their hands and feet. Rolling into the film in pursuit of Dorothy and her talking chicken Billina, everything about the Wheelers comes across as pure nightmare fuel, from their unnatural movements and high-pitched laughter to their ghoulish costumes and grim threats of violent dismemberment.
Adapted from Neil Gaiman’s award-winning young adult novel of the same name, Coraline never bills itself as a film aimed at younger audiences. Instead, it gears itself more heavily towards slightly older viewers who are more comfortable with darker subject matter, as seen through the film’s nightmarish antagonist, the Other Mother. A spider-like creature with crackled skin, lifeless button eyes, and long, knife-like fingers, the Other Mother never ceases to get under viewers’ skin from the very first moment she appears on-screen.
