5 DC Villains Whose Pure Evil Makes Them Truly Unnerving

DC Comics has spent decades perfecting the supervillain. Starting with the mad scientists, Nazis, corrupt politicians, and mobsters of the Golden Age as the starting point, soon villains like Ultra-Humanite, Lex Luthor, Per Degaton, the Joker, the Wizard, Vandal Savage, Catwoman, Two-Face, and so many more came around, changing the face of comic villainy. The Silver and Bronze Age would see even more villains debut, an undercurrent of menace returning to the villains as the years went on. In the modern ages, DC villains have become some of the greatest out there, complex bad guys that have reached iconic levels in pop culture, influencing the future of the superhero comic.

There are numerous villains in the DC Multiverse. Some of them are funny, some of them are dangerous, some of them are sympathetic, some of them are so bad they’re good, and some of them are just plain bad. You can get every kind of bad guy, including some of the most evil antagonists imaginable. The worst DC villains have become something completely unnerving for readers, their actions and motivations making them into the perfect monsters. These five DC villains give readers the willies, their evil taking them to new levels of depravity.

5) Zsasz

Batman faces the most violent villains out there, so Zsasz’s brutality isn’t the shocking part about him or the par that bothers readers. You basically expect it from him by now. Victor Zsasz is very different from a lot of other Gotham criminals. He’s certainly insane, but unlike the others, his mania doesn’t make him want to dress in outlandish costumes and try to take over the city. He’s just a monster who wants to kill as many people as possible, making a hash mark on his skin every time he takes another life. We’re used to Gotham being a terrible place full of the worst villains ever, but there’s just something about Zsasz that places him above the rest. He doesn’t want the money or the power. He doesn’t even want people to be scared of him, not really. He just wants to kill as many people as possible, upping his score like he’s playing some sick arcade game with the rest of the world. He’s sick in a way that other villains aren’t, a monster of the highest order.

4) Granny Goodness

Granny Goodness is a character who seems one way but is another. She’s the leader of the Female Furies, Darkseid’s most powerful force, having fought for countless years in the wars against New Genesis. She committed atrocities with a smile on her face, willing to do anything for her dark lord. She was put in charge of training his armies in the Armaghetto, her Orphanage tormenting stolen children until they became little more than scar tissue and muscle, ready to die for Darkseid in the wars against the light. She broke people physically and mentally all while telling them how much she loved them and how this was the best thing for them, turning torture into something that made the tortured feel like the bad one. She’s smiling evil, a monster who hides behind her age and matronly looks. Apokolips has many such beasts, but there’s something about the glee with which Granny Goodness transforms children into soulless monsters to die for Darkseid that makes her worse than the rest of the them.

3) Scarecrow

Batman faces evil supergeniuses all the time, with many scientists using their creations to become the worst bad guys in the city. One of the most scary (he would love to be described this way) is the Scarecrow. Jonathan Crane is a psychologist who decided to study the mechanics of fear, obsessed with the emotion and the way it affected people. Eventually, he started experimenting with drugs that made people afraid, studying them as they were in the grip of their dread, and soon was fixated on fear. He started committing fear-based crimes, trying to dose the entire city with his fear toxin. Scarecrow is another villain who doesn’t care about anything but his obsessions. His whole MO is to make people feel terror at a level that they never have before. He wants to torment people, to reduce them to nothing more than their fear. He doesn’t want power, he doesn’t want your life, he just wants you to suffer.

2) Sinestro

Sinestro was a man for whom order was the only thing that mattered. He wanted power to enforce his own ideas of order on the universe, killing the recipient of the Green Lantern ring of Sector 1417 and becoming the greatest Green Lantern of them all. He’d turn his sector into a fascist dictatorship, all while maintaining his reputation as one of the greatest heroes in the universe and training Hal Jordan. That’s the thing that unnerves readers about him the most; Sinestro is a charming person who wants a better world and we want to like him, to see the good in him. He helps his friends and he wants the universe to be a better place. However, he’s a fascist monster, wanting to use fear to make sure no one steps out of line. He’s the kind of person who can be your best friend, someone you trust completely, a person who would make you a better person. However, under all of that, he’s the worst kind of person. He could be a hero, but instead he chooses to be this.

1) The Joker

The Joker is Batman’s greatest enemy and the most unnerving villain ever. The problem with the Joker isn’t that he’s a brutal monster with no soul, it’s that there’s no real rhyme or reason to the whole thing. He’s just evil, wanting to spread as much havoc and chaos as possible. There are few villains out there willing to do the kind of terrible things that he is. One moment, he’s funny and charming, a monster that you could share a confidence with and respect. The next moment, he’s all mercurial fury and endless malice, a monster who will do the worst things he can imagine to you… and he can imagine some horrors. In some ways, the Joker is predictable – you know exactly what you’re going to get from him. However, that’s the problem; you know that it’s going to be terrible, but you have no idea how bad it’s going to get. The Joker is always ready to shock you, which is what makes him so frightening.

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