10 Smartest Horror Movie Villains

7. Seth Brundle - The Fly

Like Billy Weir from Event Horizon, Seth Brundle is another brilliant mind seeking scientific advancement who rather unwittingly ends up being a morality tale about over-reaching. And like Weir, the warning is revisited on his own body.

In The Fly, Brundle's goal is to develop a teleportation system, having mastered molecular physics at the age of just 20 - he's basically on the same sort of level as Einstein at this point. But passion corrupts and Brundle is undone by jealousy, which leads to a premature test of his Telepods and the notorious accidental transformation into the Brundlefly.

And while the creature might look like a sub-human monster, it retains Brundle's mind - warped grotesquely, admittedly - so it's basically a hybrid of the brilliant and the grotesque.