20 Greatest 90s Movie Villains

To hell with Basic Instinct, the real star femme fatale of the 1990s is Asami Yamazaki, the main antagonist of Audition, a harrowingly nasty J-horror from director Takashi Miike. This woman traumatized audience members all over the world.

While many femme fatales give off a sense of danger immediately, Asami is different. She's quiet, even docile on the surface, and for the viewers who go in blind, she'll seem like an ideal new partner for protagonist Shigeharu Aoyama (Ryo Ishibashi), who's looking for a new wife after losing his previous one. In fact, the entire movie lulls audiences into a false sense of security, with the first half playing like a gentle romantic comedy. 

And then, around halfway through Audition, we see Asami sitting in her flat... with a sack that has someone inside. From that point forth, it slowly becomes painfully clear that Asami is in fact a lethal, deranged psychopath who tortures and murders the men in her life. Unfortunately, by the time Aoyama realizes this, he's in drug-induced paralysis and is being sadistically tortured by his supposed lover, who subjects him to possibly the most painful torture scene in all of horror cinema.

Once she flicks the switch, Asami is a terrifying monster who will make everyone's skin crawl, and the way she hides such depths of depravity beneath such a calm exterior makes her the most dangerous kind of serial killer: the one you don't see coming until it's too late.