10 Most Vile Villains From Recent Horror Movies

3. Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal - 28 Years Later: The Bone Temple

A Clockwork Orange meets Jimmy Savile. We could leave it there, as that perfectly encapsulates how chillingly close to the bone 20 Years Later: The Bone Temple's atrocities reflect the real-life aspects of Savile's characteristics and heinous crimes.

There's a brief cameo of the self-styled Sir Lord Jimmy Crystal (Jack O'Connell) and his acolytes - who he collectively calls 'Fingers' - at the end of 28 Years Later, rescuing Spike (Alfie Williams) from an oncoming horde of Infected. However, when we get to Nia Dacosta's The Bone Temple, becoming a raging zombie is a pretty palatable option compared with Spike's harrowing initiation, whereby he's forced to fight one of the Fingers to the death under the gleeful gaze of Sir Jimmy.

Fresh from starring in Sinners as another memorably barbaric villain - the Irish vampire Remmick - Jack O'Connell injects Sir Jimmy with calculating charisma and Satanic swagger. At one point, Crystal leads his cultish crew - attired in tracksuits and tatty peroxide-blonde wigs - with wanton insouciance to a farmhouse of survivors, then eventually offers them charity by skinning the upper halves of their bodies whilst they were still alive.

Nonetheless, for balance, we must remember that Sir Jimmy is a product of his Rage-ravaged environment. As a child, he heartbreakingly questioned why his vicar father had forsaken him right in the middle of an Infected attack, thus seeding his own belief that God had indeed abandoned the world to Old Nick. That belief corrupted his mind to the extent that he genuinely thought he was the Son of Satan, whom he constantly hears chattering away inside his head. 

Nonetheless, for balance, we were hammering every nail into that inverted cross along with Kellie.