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"I'LL KILL YOU ALL! Ha-ha! I'll drive you crazy, and I'll kill you all! I'm every nightmare you've ever had! I am your worst dream come true! I'm everything you were afraid of! RARGH!" —Pennywise (IT) to the Losers Club (the Lucky Seven). |
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They all float down here...
Stephen King has written some pretty nasty villains in his day, but these Complete Monsters particularly stand out. With rare exceptions, the actual monsters of his works tend to pale in comparison to the more human villains.
Stephen King's Multiverse[]
Multiple Novels[]
- Los' the Red, best known as the Crimson King, is the demonic offspring of Arthur Eld and the Overarching Villain of King's multiverse. A sadistic entity who proclaims the glory of chaos, or "The Red", the Crimson King presides over a court of nightmare and slaughter while sowing evil and chaos across the realms. The being behind all the evil and destruction of Randall Flagg; the rampaging armies of John Farson; and agents such as Atropos and Munshun, the Crimson King has the nation of Gilead annihilated and its people slaughtered, while having psychic children known as Breakers taken to have them sucked dry so their powers may be used to help open the path to The Dark Tower. The Crimson King's ultimate goal is to ascend to the top of the Tower and consume all the multiverse, ending everything that exists so the King may rule the primordial chaos that results. At last poisoning his own court to become undead and losing his mind and power, the Crimson King faces Roland while seeking to ascend the Tower and end all reality.
- Randall Flagg has a history of inspiring some of the world's worst people, raping and murdering for generations before the events of the book even started. He is seen as an embodiment of evil itself. Living through different lives in different worlds, the one constant about Flagg is that he is always working to sow the seeds of chaos and despair wherever he goes. Flagg was part of the Vietnam War, Klu Klux Klan lynching, police murders, and race riots, and each time such violent experiences would ultimately serve to empower the evil within him.
- In The Stand, Flagg appears as a Dark Messiah in a post-apocalyptic, plague-ravaged United States. Here he builds a new civilization in Las Vegas, calling to him those with penchants for destruction, power, and fascism. Flagg has people publicly crucified for opposing or failing him, murders his pregnant girlfriend for enraging him, and plans on destroying the peaceful "Free Zone" settlement just so his civilization can be the dominant one.
- In The Eyes of the Dragon, Flagg is an Evil Sorcerer in the medieval country of Delain. Here, Flagg has Queen Sasha murdered, poisons King Roland, frames Prince Peter for the crime, and then plunges Delain into a new Dark Age by manipulating the remaining heir, Thomas.
- In The Dark Tower series, it is revealed that Flagg has lived for so long and accumulated so much power that he has become the emissary for the Crimson King. Flagg earns Roland Deschain's undying hatred for beating and sleeping with Roland’s mother, and for aiding the revolutionary, John Farson, in causing the destruction of the city of Gilead. Flagg also forces Roland to let his preteen companion, Jake Chambers, die, and drives a girl insane by telling her the trigger phrase which causes a formerly dead man to recount the afterlife to her. Corruptive, treacherous, and sadistic, Flagg's ultimate goal was to betray his master and climb to the top of the Dark Tower in order to become God.
Individual Novels[]
- IT: The titular monster is neither animalistic nor alien in its thought processes; the creature has a full understanding of human morality, it just doesn't care to follow it in any way. In the town of Derry, IT awakens from its hibernation every three decades and proceeds to murder and devour the children of the town, often using the avatar of a Monster Clown named Pennywise to lure children into its clutches. IT prides itself on using its shapeshifting and hallucinogenic powers to torment its victims, preying on their phobias and acquired fears and likening the cultivation of their terror to "salting the meat." From 1740 to 1743, IT was responsible for the disappearance of three hundred Derry Township settlers. In 1957, IT killed Bill's six-year-old brother, George, and devoured Patrick Hoffstetter alive while in the form of his greatest fear, leeches. IT also drove Henry Bowers to madness, then killed Bowers' friends after they succeeded in luring the Losers' Club into the sewers. After waking up in 1984, IT kills a man named Adrian Mellon before resuming its killing spree of children. IT proceeds to manipulate Henry Bowers into trying to kill the Losers; drives Bill's wife, Audra, catatonic by exposing her to its deadlights; and manages to kill Eddie before its final defeat.
- Salem's Lot:
- Richard Throckett Straker is an antique salesman as well as Kurt Barlow's human servant who brings him into the small town of Jerusalem's Lot. During the first half of the novel, he murders a young boy, Ralphie Glick, as a sacrifice to Satan, and abducts his brother, Danny, and gives him to Barlow to be turned. This results in Danny infecting many people over the course of the novel. Within this time frame, Straker kills Win Purinton's dog, Doc, and hangs him on a fence, then buys every rose in town, all to protect himself from his master while everyone else in town is left vulnerable. Later, when Mark Petrie goes to investigate Straker's place of residence, the Marsten House, he finds a scrapbook bound in human flesh that has a picture of a naked man — likely Straker himself — holding the corpse of a child, implying that Ralphie was far from the first child he killed. Shortly afterward, Straker catches Mark and ties him up, and leaves him to be turned by Barlow.
- Kurt Barlow is an ancient, insidious vampire, and the Big Bad of the novel. His ultimate goal is to turn the town of Jerusalem's Lot into a nest for vampires by playing on the townspeople's desires and insecurities and offering them a chance to achieve what they want, which always ends in him turning them. After losing control of his thirst and killing a wounded Straker and blaming Mark for the incident, he decides to Kick the Dog multiple times. He turns Susan, forcing Ben to seek her out and kill her, murders Mark's parents in front of him, and after a standoff of faith with Father Callahan — which the priest lost — he forces him to drink some of his blood, barring him from the holy ground for the rest of his life. One of his final acts in a last-ditch effort to stop Ben from staking him is to hypnotize Mark to kill the former, all the while threatening to castrate the latter before turning him. And even after his final demise, he still succeeded in his goal, essentially dooming anyone who walks into the town of 'Salem's Lot.
- The Shawshank Redemption: Bogs Diamond is the leader of the Sisters, a gang of sadistic rapists who go after wimpier inmates who can't fight back. Boggs takes a special liking to Andy, and he gets his men to rape and brutalize him over the course of several years. And thanks to some quick thinking on Andy's part, he only narrowly averts having to perform oral sex on Boggs and the Sisters after being caught one night, but Boggs simply settles to beat him so badly that Andy has to spend a month in the infirmary. When Red tells Andy that he caught their attention, he nonchalantly asks if it would matter that he's not gay. Red replies that they aren't either because they'd have to be human first.
- The Dark Tower series:
- Jack Mort, a sadistic psychopath who's responsible for ruining Odetta Holmes' life twice (first by dropping a brick on her head, causing her multiple personality disorder, later shoving her on the rail track, causing her to lose her legs, not knowing or caring it was the same woman) and killing Jake by shoving him under the bus. Roland gives back a fitting death by controlling his possessed body to jump before an oncoming train and leaving Jack's body, leaving Jack to die alone.
- Hitler Brothers, fascist scumbags who torture Father Callahan's friend, Lupe Delgado, and later assault Callahan for being a 'negro-lover'.
- Rose Madder: Rose's husband Norman. Setting aside for a moment the fact that he's been beating and sexually abusing Rosie for fourteen years, including causing her to miscarry, after he finds out that she left him, he is determined to hunt her down and torture her to death. His methods for locating his ex-wife are tracking down, torturing, and murdering the people who helped her. His favorite method of killing is biting his victims to death. He is also a racist, sexist, homophobic creep who thinks all feminists are lesbians and despises one of his victims as soon as he finds out he's Jewish. His feelings about women are summed up in the fact that when he is in disguise and has to come up with the name of a woman who's protected him, he uses the first and last names of his two favorite porn actresses.
- Under the Dome: Selectman Jim Rennie. At best, he's a cold-blooded amoral, greedy, psychopathic bastard. Soon after the start of the novel, we learn that the man is the ringmaster of a MASSIVE drug ring, apparently one of the biggest suppliers of meth in the whole country. Then it gets worse. Not only do we learn that he killed his own wife by smothering her with a pillow (a woman already dying of cancer, no less), but over the course of the novel, to ensure that he remains the absolute master of the town, he covers up the various murders and rapes committed by his son, Junior, and the gang of thugs he's commissioned as a police force. He kills three or four people (including a pastor, smashing his head in with a gold-covered baseball) who threatened to reveal to his subjects what kind of a monster he is, purposefully causes a riot over supplies just so he can claim the need for greater control, and frames the main protagonist, Dale Barbara, for everything that he and his gang has gotten away with. Then, because he had his gang steal huge amounts of propane (the only fuel source in town) just so he could make more meth, he sets the stage for the massive explosion that consumes almost everything in the town, turning the atmosphere into little more than an assortment of poisonous gases, and then gets away with it, hiding away in a fallout shelter. Even worse, he refuses to accept fault for ANYTHING that either he did or happened because of his decisions, even so far as to excuse his multiple murders as "sending them into the arms of Jesus," his faith allowing him to dismiss any of the multiple atrocities he does. Jim Rennie is easily one of Stephen King's worst villains. Happily, he gets one of the more horrifying deaths. Either he suffocates when he tries to get out of the fallout shelter when the power fails, choking on the bad air while suffering a massive heart attack, or he does the same while pursued by all the people who died because of him. Either way, he deserved it.
- Black House: The Fisherman, real name Charles Burnside, is a cannibalistic Serial Killer who preys upon children. Modeling his modus operandi after historical Serial Killer Albert Fishnote (and hoping to exceed him in terribleness), he rapes, kills, and eats at least three children in the town of French Landing, Wisconsin. He is eventually revealed to be a human agent of the Crimson King, willingly serving a plan to break reality and destroy all of existence.
- The Dead Zone: Greg Stillson, despite putting on a front as a man of the people, is in truth an insane sociopath with a dangerous messiah complex. Believing that he's destined to become President of the United States, Stillson decides that nothing will get in his way, leading to him threatening a negative reporter with both blackmail and a death threat. When Johnny views his future, he sees Stillson intentionally launching the country's nukes to kill millions of people despite the news of a diplomatic solution, even threatening to cut off his Attorney General's hand to make it happen, all with a hallelujah on his lips. When Johnny attempts to assassinate him to prevent this, Stillson uses a baby as a Human Shield, showing his true selfish colors to the world.
- The Green Mile:
- Percy Wetmore. It's bad enough when he steps on, yes, steps on Eduard Delacroix's pet mouse and kills it. But later on, when it's Del's turn in the electric chair, Percy insists on being in charge of the execution and then sabotages the execution by deliberately neglecting to soak the sponge on the electrode cap in brine (which is necessary to ensure a quick death) so that Del will die as slowly and painfully as humanly possible, subjecting the audience of his loved ones and his victims' loved ones to watch. It's no wonder John Coffey infects him with madness in the end. And keep in mind, Coffey only does that procedure to people that are PURE evil.
- The biggest Complete Monster of The Green Mile is Wild Bill, because he actually raped and murdered the two girls that John Coffey is being put to death over. In order to stop the girls from calling for help, he told them that if one of them screams, it's her sister that he'd kill. Percy is almost saved from this trope when he shoots Wild Bill to death, only staying in it when you realize that he's not really in control of his actions at this point.
- Needful Things: Leland Gaunt is a very different kind of monster villain, a genial and well-spoken owner of a little novelty shop that just happens to have your heart's greatest desire in stock. He's willing to sell it to you for a paltry sum and a little favor. This is a harmless prank to play on your neighbor. What you don't know is that your "needful thing" is in fact a malevolent charm that will make you paranoid and obsessed over it and drive you into murderous insanity, and all the harmless little pranks are designed to thrive on old grudges and insecurities, exploit all the dirty secrets your neighbors (and you) have and stir up all the incipient feuds, turning people against each other until your whole town tears itself apart with weapons that Mr. Gaunt helpfully supplies. Even if you're spared by the slaughter and general madness, it is only so you could realize that you're partially responsible for it and kill yourself. Mr. Gaunt will just stand there at the window of his little shop, savoring chaos and death, like he'd done countless times before all across the world. Although he is heavily implied to be The Devil incarnate, so it makes sense.
- Insomnia: Atropos is an entity that cuts the life threads of mortals whose time has come. In contrast with other members of his species, Atropos absolutely despises humans for being short-lived creatures, and thus takes great pleasure in ending their lives. Out of hatred, he goes after people whose fate has been left undecided and causes them to die horrible deaths. He has done this enough times to fill a cave with trophies of his victims. When his boss, the Crimson King, wants him to kill a young boy before he grows up to oppose his plans, Atropos uses this opportunity to harm as many people as possible. He corrupts the kind Ed Deepneau into becoming a wife-beating extremist who bands together with like-minded maniacs to assault a woman care center, where they murder dozens of people, all as a distraction for his real plan: to have Deepneau crash with a plane full of explosives onto a pro-abortion rights rally that the kid and his mother will be attending, killing them along with two thousand other humans. Along the way, Atropos also has several of the poor kid's friends killed just to piss him off, and rub it in his face. When his plans are at last thwarted, Atropos tries to kill Deepneau’s six-year-old daughter purely out of spite.
- Kingdom Hospital: Ebenezer Gottreich and his brother Klaus, the former being the head of a civil war mill which uses slave labor of men women, and children, the latter being a sadistic and insane doctor at the previous hospital, performing torturous experiments on his patients. After the civil war, Ebenezer's mill was a staggering business, with slave labor being revolted, and planned to save his money and burn down his mill, and kill his employees. In the fire, hundreds of his employees are killed, mostly the children. Later he has the survivors "treated" at his brothers' hospital. When Ebenezer discovers one of the children, Mary survived the fire, and witnessed his scheme, he has Klaus take her in. Klaus would later kill Mary in a lobotomy experiment, despite her insisting she never saw anything and promising not to tell anyone.
- The Shining: The consciousness of the entire Overlook Hotel can be viewed as being this. Anyone who stays in the hotel becomes corrupted and evil by its powers, and those corrupted who die there are condemned there for all eternity. This is shown clearly with Grady, who killed his wife and his two daughters, and Jack Torrence trying to kill his own wife and son. What's more, the consciousness intends to have said son, Danny Torrence, absorbed into itself so that it can gain and be able to use the boy's special ability, the Shining, and with it create a way to become a living entity, leave the confines of the Hotel and spread it's pure, unadulterated evil out in the open.
- Apt Pupil: Todd Bowden, an ordinary all-American boy who gives in to the darkness within him when he finds out the truth about his Nazi neighbor, Kurt Dussander. Todd blackmails Dussander with the information so that he tells Todd about the camps. After some time of this, Todd begins murdering homeless people in his town. Eventually, the only way he can feel pleasure is with the fantasies of murdering his girlfriend and parents for petty slights. The story ends with Todd taking his rifle to the highway and killing passing motorists, and his death.
Adaptations[]
- The Shawshank Redemption (1994 film): Warden Samuel Norton seems like a decent guy at first: he's a rather pleasant god-fearing man who happens to be quite stern, but nonetheless allows Andy Dufresne a few freedoms in order to improve Shawshank Prison. But it becomes clear that he's a lot scummier than he lets on as time goes by. He gets Andy roped up in a money-laundering scheme where he underbids on construction projects done with cheap prison labor and blackmails contractors into giving him money, and when new inmate Tommy has evidence that Andy is innocent of the murders he was accused of committing, Norton has him shot dead due to Andy's money laundering skills making him far too useful to let go. When Andy confronts him and calls him obtuse, Norton throws him into solitary confinement for a month as punishment, almost driving the poor guy insane before adding yet another month-long term simply for the hell of it. And Norton makes it clear that if he feels the need, he'll happily tear down everything Andy worked for and let the Sisters get back to raping him if he doesn't continue to slave over his laundering schemes. Thankfully, karma bites him in the ass when Andy escapes, and his illegal activities come back to haunt him, leading him to commit suicide when the police come knocking at his door.
- The Dark Tower (2017 film): Flagg, under the alias of Walter O'Dim, abducts multiple 'special' children to use their psychic energy to try to annihilate the Dark Tower which protects existence from the hungry monstrosities that dwell outside reality. This is a process that leaves the children 'burnt out' by the end, where Walter discards them. Having a dark enmity with the Gunslinger Roland Deschain, Walter destroys Roland's home, killing all his fellow Gunslingers, the last being Roland's own father who Walter murders in front of him. When 11-year-old Jake Chambers escapes Walter's men, Walter punishes them by forcing them to kill each other and sends soldiers to destroy an entire village Roland and Jake have taken refuge in. Murdering the local seer to get their location, Walter ambushes Jake's stepfather and mother, murdering both- the latter by burning her alive — and draws a smiley face and taunting message from her ashes for Jake to find. When Jake is captured, Walter attempts to use him to bring down the Dark Tower and start the apocalypse while facing Roland in a final battle.
- IT, Chapters 1 (2017) & 2 (2019): The titular "It", also known as Pennywise the Dancing Clown, is a ravenous, ancient Cosmic Horror that feeds on fear, and the version in these films, played primarly by Bill Skarsgard, is possibly the most evil version of the character ever conceived. Having fed and butchered thousands over centuries by using their worst fears against them, Pennywise developed a particular taste for children for being easier to scare, opening the first film by tearing the seven-year-old Georgie apart before continuing to horribly torment his brother, Bill, and the members of the Loser's Club, murdering many others in the town of Derry and even twisting Henry Bowers into killing his own father and attempting to kill the Loser's Club. A pronounced sadist, Pennywise makes a repeated point to hysterically mock Bill over his failure to protect Georgie and even forces him to watch as he devours another child that gronw-up Bill tries to protect in a mirror house; collects a mountain of thousands of trophies from its most favored victims; saves a gay man beaten nearly to death from drowning just so he can rip out his heart in front of his lover; and finally murders Eddie in the final battle, taking every chance it can to salt every wound it can find in its victims before killing them. A twisted, craven bully under its monstrous exterior that can't function without something to torment, Pennywise distinguishes itself from even the original novel version through just how far it goes to twist the nail.