10 Most Terrifying Horror Movie Villains You've Never Heard Of

6. Dr. Richard B. Vannacutt - The House On Haunted Hill (1999)

€œThat? What just happened to you there... that's nothing. You've just been playing around with a ghost. Wait til somebody lets out the Darkness in this place.€ Another brilliant doctor here, this one a physician and humanitarian corrupted by the formless evil of a demonic statue. The owner and head doctor at the Vannacutt Psychiatric Institute for the Criminally Insane (or VPICI, as its friends called it) used to spend his free time travelling the world, collecting mesmerising, beautiful works of art, firmly of the conviction that great art could have a therapeutic effect on even his most violent and unhinged of patients. That search turned up the Baphomet Idol, an ancient artifact in the shape of an ancient pagan deity or demon€ The Idol twisted and warped the good doctor€™s gentler instincts, leaving him with the ambition and the curiosity to experiment, but none of the ethical morality. That, and it turned him into a gimlet-eyed, batsh*t insane sadist. Vannacutt performed dozens upon dozens upon dozens of horrific medical experiments on his patients over the next few years. The atrocities he and his equally degraded staff engaged in included live vivisection without anaesthetic, endless electro and hydrotherapy, burying patients alive, mental torture of schizophrenics, burning tuberculosis patients alive and more. In 1931 the patients revolted against the staff, tearing them and Vannacutt to pieces, but before he died, Vannacutt activated the asylum€™s lockdown protocol, sealing everyone living inside to die. The Baphomet Idol trapped the souls of everyone who€™d died in the building€ and a lot of people had died violent, horrible deaths there thanks to Vannacutt. Wielding the leash even in death, Vannacutt led these unquiet, psychotic spirits to murder anyone who visited the long abandoned facility€ each death adding to the Darkness that lingered in every brick and tile. Take all that, add some genuinely unsettling flashbacks, some even more disquieting ghostly set-pieces, and cast genre mainstay and creepy-looking motherf*cker Jeffrey €˜Re-Animator€™ Combs as Dr. Vannacutt, and The House On Haunted Hill remake is a surprisingly effective, gory chiller€ at least until the final act, when terrible special effects substitute for the thrills n€™ spills.