10 Detestable Movie Villains We Never See
We never caught sight of these easy-to-loathe movie antagonists.
What do most of the all-time great movie villains have in common? That's right - screen presence!
Villains can come in all forms, shapes, and sizes, but it's basically expected that they appear visually on-screen at some point, even if only in the third act.
And yet, creative filmmakers can certainly do things a little differently, and in the case of these 10 movies, they managed to make us absolutely despise antagonistic characters we never actually catch a clear glimpse of - if any glimpse at all.
Inspired by this recent Reddit thread on the very subject, here are 10 detestable movie villains we never see.
These villains range from flesh-and-blood humans who are curiously concealed out of sight, to supernatural entities who don't even have a physical form. The common thread?
Each of them manages to linger on in our minds no matter that we never see what they objectively look like. We're left to figure it out and decide their appearance for ourselves.
It's not an approach that always works, but in the case of these 10 films, it arguably only enhanced our disdain for the villains in question...
10. The Trucker - Duel
Steven Spielberg's fantastic feature debut Duel is a masterclass in "less is more" filmmaking.
The film revolves around a travelling salesman, David Mann (Dennis Weaver), who is doggedly pursued by the driver of a semi-truck, and in the film's shrewdest directorial flourish, the driver is never fully seen.
We catch only fleeting glimpses of his arms and boots, but never do we see his face or get much visual impression of what he really looks like.
This was a component of Richard Matheson's script and Spielberg further emphasised it in the film, along with the driver's total lack of motive, to basically make the truck itself the villain.
Anyone who drives will have dealt with aggressive motorists on the road, and Duel's villain is an unnervingly heightened rendition of that, with both Mann and the audience unable to glean any but the faintest fleck of humanity from the villain through his visual absence.