You all remember that person's name. The little shit in your class that seemed to give everyone a hard time just for the sake of dishing out hard times. They didn't conform to reason, loyalty, or understanding, instead they worshiped at the altar of grief and the furnishing of. That serpentine fucker had nothing reasonable to gain from telling the teacher on you, he just really wanted to see you in trouble, he wanted to savour every moment of your suffering like an apple drop lollipop. Some people are mean, but then there are those that are truly villainous.
In fantasy, I've found that there are two layers of evil with which the storyteller can bestow upon his or her "bad guy", in order to create an engaging story. The most common of the two, I'd like to call the "Routine Arsehole", that is, the bad guy that:
a) Wants to take over the world.
b) Wants to destroy the world.
c) Wants a large sum of money or he'll do something really shitty.
You see the Routine Arsehole in virtually every action film that's ever met a projector screen, and he won't be going away any time soon. He's too reliable for the lazy Hollywood drug addicts. Everyone likes the world, right? No one wants to see it blown up or conquered by bloodthirsty apes. The Routine Arsehole is the go-to guy for wholesale malevolence.
Then there's the other kind. The kind whose name you remember. We'll call this one the Conclusive Villain, the Perfect Bastard, the Treacherous Degenerate, the Lousy Philistine, Cronus, Bhairava, Mephistopheles, Baal, Leviathan, The Morning Star, Lucifer, Satan, or The Devil.
But he used to sign his cheques under 'Vincent Price'.
With his perpetual grimace, whip-crack tongue, and general affinity for ruining everyone's day by any means necessary, I can't think of a villain more comfortable in the universe than Vincent Price. The man may have been the very definition of a saint and a scholar in his personal life, but once he stepped in front of those lights and cameras, he could muster up enough poisonous evil to paralyze an army of elephants. He was good at what he did, and the things he did were bad.
So without further ado, here's the first part in a series exploring the deepest, darkest places that Vincent Price has dragged us, kicking and screaming, over his illustrious 58 year career as a fucking bastard.
Witchfinder General
Vincent's role: Matthew Hopkins, the vicious witchfinder.
The misdeed (among many others): Blackmailing the young niece of a local priest into sleeping with him repeatedly by threatening to torture her uncle to death as a witch, then killing him anyway.
It really is one of those 'boo! hiss!' occasions in cinema, especially as you can pinpoint the exact moment, a glint in the eye, when the devil on Price's shoulder convinces him to do something absolutely despicable to this poor girl. Sara, played by the lovely Hilary Heath, is the very epitome of the god-fearing English rose, a timid and gentle creature whose innocence and selflessness is sweet perfume to the dastardly Matthew Hopkins.
Within minutes of arriving to the location of an alleged witch, treacherous locals guide Hopkins and his lackey to the house of Sara's uncle, the village priest. Not wasting a heartbeat, Hopkins immediately orders for the priest to be tortured in order to drive a confession from him and when the witchfinder spots the priest's beautiful niece, he decides he wants a sum more than the coins offered to him by the terrified locals.
Sara, fearing for her uncle's life, does all she can to keep Hopkins from torturing and sentencing him to death. And in the end, even after giving her body to him over and over again, the damnable Hopkins still decides to torture and hang the old priest and leave Sara to deal with the vicious and paranoid villagers.
What a cunt.
The Abominable Dr. Phibes
Vincent's role: The abominable Dr. Phibes.
The misdeed (among many others): Draining every last drop of blood from a man's body in a painstakingly elaborate act of revenge.
Many would view Dr. Phibes with a certain degree of sympathy, considering that his evil is the result of love and a life tragically ripped from him. There is a very pronounced romantic and poetic aura to Dr. Phibes, and so it's open to us to interpret him as either a callous villain or a tragic antihero. However, no matter which way you look at it, you have to have reached the absolute zenith of depravity when you deal with your problems by draining every drop of blood from a man's system, pint by pint, while staring right in his eyes.
Dr. Anton Phibes seeks to exact revenge on the doctors that he believes were responsible for the death of his beloved wife Victoria, but as a scholar and art fanatic, a gun or a baseball bat aren't good enough to satisfy his twisted imagination. Arguably the precursor to the inventive Saw series, The Abominable Dr. Phibes features an array of ingenious and original acts of revenge and murder based on the nine plagues of the Bible.
I'm not entirely sure how Phibes chose which doctor would receive which 'plague', but this poor sod, in my opinion, drew the shortest damn straw. How much do you really have to hate someone before siphoning every drop of their blood into decorative jars becomes a good idea?
Bad, bad man.
The Masque of the Red Death
Vincent's role: The contemptible prince Prospero.
The misdeed (among many others): Everything that happens in the first seven minutes of film time.
Allow me to reiterate that we've assembled here at this blog to 'boo' and 'hiss' at the villainy of mean old Vincent Price, not applaud his vile actions. However, sometimes you witness an evil so inflated with pompous venom and executed in such a short space of time, that you simply have to look on in jaw drooping amazement.
To kick off this streak of back-to-back knavery, our villain begins by nearly mowing down a small child in his horse-drawn carriage, almost certainly killing it had a valiant villager not saved it just in the nick of time. Then, throwing a frown from the curtain of his carriage, he steps outside to greet the unwashed villagers and invite them to a celebration being held at his castle, of course this is delivered in as patronizing a fashion as possible.
When confronted by two furious villagers over his treatment of them, prince Prospero orders his soldiers to garrote them with a flick of his wrist and a quiver of his moustache. But before they can be strangled in front of their terrified peers, a young lady throws herself before Prospero and begs for him to spare their lives. Prospero, the masterful bastard that he is, instead decides to make the young girl choose which one of them dies, one of them being her father, and the other being the man she loves.
However, upon realizing that the red death has reached the small village via a dying old woman, Prospero makes a hasty exit from the diseased village, but not before sending both defiant villagers to his castle prison, kidnapping the young woman for his own twisted sexual agenda, and burning the entire village all the way to hell along with all of its poorly inhabitants.
This all takes place in under five minutes of screen time.
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