20 Greatest 90s Movie Villains

6. Misery - Annie Wilkes

Annie Wilkes (Kathy Bates) keeps getting better and better as the years go by. That's not to say that she wasn't always great, though.

When author Paul Sheldon (James Caan) gets into a car accident, a local woman named Annie looks after him, and she seems like a kind, hospitable host at first. Unfortunately for Paul, she's actually completely mad, and when she discovers that he's killed off her favourite character, she forces him to write a new novel on pain of death. 

In the end, that normal-looking woman turned out to be one of the scariest horror villains of all time and, lest we forget, she was responsible for one of the '90s' most disturbing scenes. That is, of course, when she hobbles Paul with a sledgehammer. That scene was so grim that many actors passed on the script based on this moment alone. 

Annie was superbly written by Misery's screenwriter, the great William Goldman, but the lion's share of the praise has to go to Kathy Bates, who gave a performance so outstanding that even the usually horror-phobic Oscars couldn't ignore it. She won a well-earned Oscar and, in her speech, apologized to James Caan's ankles. 

This character always rocked, but she hits even harder in today's era of toxic fandoms. You could so easily imagine a modern update with an evil Star Wars fan forcing Rian Johnson to remake The Last Jedi, couldn't you?