Humans are conscious beings with a moral compass that can go from Saint to Scary frighteningly quickly. With the flick of some internal switch, someone can turn with such ferocity and violence that you'd scarcely think was possible, regardless of their relationship to you. Sure, we're probably making the world a better place (some of the time), but at the same time, there are those who are also destroying it with cruel intentions and an inhuman ability to inflict pain on others for fun, or for gain. Regardless of the scary ones with fangs and claws in nature, mankind are the real monsters. Terrorising, manipulating, torturing each other for their own sadistic pleasure as well as doing it for what they believe is some warped 'better good'. Ridding the world of anyone who looks or think differently to you is not making the world a better place, it's setting us all back. There have been grand scale events like World Wars, slavery and even now you hear of someone getting murdered almost on a daily basis whenever you watch the news. These are all conscious, rational and voluntary human thoughts and actions that have resulted in our disastrous history. And, inevitably, that dark history has recorded a terrifying rogue's gallery of evil...
9. Elizabeth Bathory
It is rumoured that this Transylvanian Countess used to drink the blood of the girls that she killed in order to stay youthful and beautiful. While these rumours only appeared after her death, she supposedly tortured and killed over 650 women during her lifetime in secret chambers in her house; so drinking and bathing in blood doesn't seem quite as radical when you think about how she loved to surround herself in death... She was born in 1560 to an extremely wealthy family whose social status could only protect her up until a certain point. She married in 1575 and as her husband was absent, she spent her days torturing servants - something which he might have introduced her to as a way to pass the time. But Bathory got a bit carried away and pretty much killed them all, which must have inspired some pretty frank discussions at the local servants Union office. As potential murder victims stopped applying to work for her, she expanded her horizons and began to kidnap local peasant girls to torture. She would beat and starve them to death, burn them, peel off their skin and remove body parts and bathe in their blood. She would make them cook and eat their own flesh, cover them in honey and make bees and ants bite them until they died and she would insert red hot pokers into various body parts. It wasn't until she eventually got cocky and started to kidnap daughters of the local nobles that she made her mistake. It was at this stage that the disappearances couldn't continue to be ignored. Peasant girls yes, daughters of nobility, no. So investigations were conducted and Bathory's castle was raided. Supposedly when they entered the premises, she was in the middle of torturing a servant who was almost dead from the beating she was giving her. In 1610, Elizabeth and four of her servants were declared guilty of these crimes but Bathory was the only one not sentenced to death (because of her family's reputation). Instead, she was locked in her castle in a confined space with no windows and only slits for air and food. She eventually died in 1614. Good.
