Stephen King names the best bad guy in cinema history: “The greatest evocation of screen villainy”
Having written dozens of novels and established himself as modern horror’s most recognisable author, Stephen King has created a cavalcade of villains that have entered the pop culture consciousness.
Whether it’s the terrifying Pennywise from It, Misery‘s sadistic Annie Wilkes, the ravenous canine Cujo, the fanged menace Kurt Barlow, the constantly loosening sanity of Jack Torrance, or the detestable Percy Wetmore, King has been responsible for some truly reprehensible figures.
Those are just the ones ripped from the pages of his stories, too, with Storm of the Century‘s Andre Linoge definitely worth considering as one of the scribe’s greatest-ever antagonists, something King would likely agree with, seeing as the 1999 miniseries is his personal favourite of his own work.
Film and television have been dipping into his bibliography for decades to turn his back catalogue into a one-stop shop for Hollywood, but none of the characters to make the jump from page to screen were labelled as cinema’s most fearsome villain by King.
Instead, he opted for a 1967 psychological thriller directed by Dr No and From Russia with Love‘s Terence Young, which became a runaway success at the box office and deservedly earned Audrey Hepburn an Academy Award nomination for ‘Best Actress’ thanks to a tour-de-force performance in Wait Until Dark.
The screen icon’s Susy is a blind woman living alone in her apartment who ends up in a desperate fight for survival when a gang of thugs turn up to retrieve a heroin-stuffed doll her husband accidentally brought home on a flight from Montreal to New York.
A combination of melodrama and home invasion thriller elevated by several standout performances, King vividly recalled seeing Wait Until Dark during its theatrical run, with the white-knuckle third act finding him out on a limb and calling one of the criminals the best villain he’d ever seen in a movie.
“The last 15 or 20 minutes of that film are utterly terrifying,” he wrote in Danse Macabre. “Partially due to the virtuoso performances turned in by Audrey Hepburn and Alan Arkin (and in my view, Arkin’s performance as Harry Roat Jr from Scarsdale may be the greatest evocation of screen villainy ever, rivalling and perhaps even surpassing Peter Lorre’s in M).”
Up until that point, King had remained steadfast that Lorre’s sinister turn in Fritz Lang’s influential and seminal mystery masterpiece had been the pinnacle of breaking bad on the big screen. However, as soon as he saw Wait Until Dark, a new contender not only emerged in the form of Arkin’s Roat but knocked the longtime incumbent from their perch.
There’s at least one generation of cinemagoers out there who only know the late Arkin for the kindly, wizened, and occasionally eccentric character parts he played in the two decades before his death, but Wait Until Dark is more than enough proof that he could be utterly spine-chilling in his day.
