12 Most Terrifying Action Movie Villains

The Joker was always going to take the top spot on this list, but for anyone hoping to see Arthur Fleck up here, Heath Ledger's incarnation in Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight has the edge, purely because of just how evil his version is.

While we follow Fleck's descent into madness through Todd Phillip's Joker, and get to see a more vulnerable side of the character, Ledger's incarnation in The Dark Knight become the ultimate prince of chaos, because we know so little about him. That is terrifying, because it makes him capable of anything. Through the film, we hear no less than three different stories about how the Joker got his scars and it keeps an air of mystery and fear around him.

Of course, a lot of the appeal is down to Ledger's acting in the film, which remains just as haunting, yet tantalizingly beautiful to see. It's the physical ticks and twitches that become more noticeable on every rewatch of the film that make his version so special, the shaking of his body when he moves that makes you shiver, and it's both mesmerising and disturbing. You can really tell that Ledger completely immersed himself in the performance, and there's a constant feeling that Christian Bale's Batman has really met his match.

It remains such a tragedy to this day that Ledger died before the film was released, and it would have been incredible to have seen more of him, as was initially planned for The Dark Knight Rises.