10 Smartest Horror Movie Villains

9. Annie Wilkes - Misery

On the surface of things, Annie Wilkes seems to show fairly limited intelligence. Her passion for Paul Sheldon's romance novels - which even he believes he's too good to be writing - is designed to lull us and Paul into the false assumption that she is, to put it crassly, dim. It's also doubled-down upon by her mispronunciations of words.

But therein lies Sheldon's biggest mistake. Annie is a far more formidable intellect than she lets on: her past reveals she's a university graduate and worked in medicine and that's just "traditional" smarts. She was obviously clever enough to cover her tracks when she murdered the children in her care and her plotting to keep Paul locked up hints at the true depth of her cunning and what a real threat she is.

Wilkes also manages to deduce most of Sheldon's plotting to escape before he's ever really had much of a chance to enact them, and while she's clearly somewhat clouded by her obsessive personality, her cunning is off the charts for someone who appears so limited.