15 Most Monstrous Villains In Television

Out of all the myriad Big Bads that are faced in seven seasons of Buffy The Vampire Slayer and five seasons of Angel, the darker spin-off show starring her grim-faced ex-boyfriend - and we’re talking demons, elder gods, primeval representations of evil, lawyers and local politicians - there are none with the force and reprehensible nature of Angelus.

It’s probably not worthwhile trying to detail here how vampires work in Buffy and Angel: it’s different from every other iteration of the monster in popular culture and it’s inconsistently and confusingly applied. Suffice to say that the vampire is considered to be a walking corpse possessed by a demon with the personality and memories of the dead person, but warped into evil: they’re perverted, mangled versions of the people they were.

When Irish dilettante Liam is turned in 1753, he rises again as Angelus - literally, ‘the one with the angelic face’. For two hundred years, Angelus tours the world murdering hundreds, thousands of people, gathering a reputation as the most bloodthirsty, vicious monster in existence.

All vampires in Buffy and Angel are monsters, but Angelus is unique. It’s not what he is but who he is that makes him so depraved. He’s a serial killer and a spree killer; a sadist and a torturer that takes gleeful pleasure in hurting people, physically or emotionally.

He’s smart, but it’s his emotional intelligence that makes him dangerous. Angelus understands people, can get under your skin with a few well-chosen words. It’s also heavily implied that he’s a violent rapist: he rhapsodises about his misadventures with nuns, and represents a threatening sexual presence throughout the second half of Buffy season two and Angel season four.

When he murders the wrong girl, her family place a curse upon him, restoring Liam’s human soul to control of his body. The demonic Angelus is left to fester inside, powerless and loathing the supposedly weak, angst-ridden person he becomes as Angel, who feels all of the remorse and guilt over Angelus’ unspeakable centuries of cruelty. From that moment on, Angelus is doomed