Random Movie Villains Who Suffered A Fate Worse Than Death (14 items)

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  (#2) Red Skull

  • Captain America, Captain America: The First Avenger, Marvel Universe

  After spending much of his professional career lusting after the Space Stone, Red Skull is presumed dead after being sucked through a wormhole, but his fate was much worse. Rather than perish in the vastness of space, Red Skull is brought to Vormir, where he's given the job of guarding the Soul Stone.

  When the audience catches up with Skull in Avengers: Infinity War, he's been on Vormir for 70 years and is tortured with the knowledge that he can never attain the Soul Stone because he can't love anyone other than himself. He doesn't age; he doesn't perish - he just exists alone on the planet.

  After Thanos sacrifices Gamora to gain the stone, Red Skull is finally freed from his curse. It's not clear if he dissipates into the universe or is brought back to his guardianship of the stone once Tony Stark sacrifices himself to undo Thanos's snap.
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  (#3) Helen Sharp

  • Death Becomes Her

  In Death Becomes Her, there exists a magic potion with the ability to keep its user young forever. The potion turns people into their best-looking selves, but it also creates monsters who can fall apart and perish time and time again without ever really passing on. It essentially turns its users into living, breathing members of the undead.

  Helen Sharp waffles between protagonist and antagonist in this dark comedy, but once she and her frenemy Madeline are turned onto the potion, they'll stop at nothing to remain beautiful forever - including using spray paint and epoxy to fix themselves up whenever they fall apart.

  As the film ends, both women attend the funeral of an ex who lived a happy life, and after leaving the church, they trip down its stairs and fall apart. The women are left arguing about where they parked their car as their disembodied heads roll across the sidewalk.
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  (#13) Beetlejuice

  • Beetlejuice

  By the final moments of Beetlejuice, the ghost with the most has:

  • Turned into a giant snake and tried to eat a bunch of wealthy New Yorkers
  • Crashed a toy car into an afterlife-powered brothel
  • Attempted to woo and marry a teenager
  • Gone out of his way to banish the Maitlands to limbo
  • Attempted to cut in line while in a waiting room for the recently deceased

  All of that is to say that he's not a great guy - but does he deserve the eternal indignity of sitting in a waiting room with a shrunken head forever? He shouldn't have tried to skip out on his place in line - no one likes a line-cutter - but there's something gruesome about the way he's forced to sit there with a tiny little head while waiting for his number to be called. Beetlejuice definitely needs to learn how to treat people, but there's no way he's going to learn his lesson by just stewing forever with a little peapod-sized noggin.
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  (#1) Carmine Falcone

  • Batman Begins, DC Universe

  At the onset of Batman Begins, Carmine Falcone is living large as a member of Gotham City's underworld, but like all villains of his stature, he wants more power. After going into business with Jonathan Crane and Ra's al Ghul, he helps them move fear toxin into Gotham for Ghul's plot to destroy the city.

  After Falcone is put in jail following a tussle with the Bat, he tries to blackmail Crane and ends up getting dosed with an insane amount of fear toxin. He's left in Arkham Asylum muttering "Scarecrow" over and over. There's no way to know if the toxin will ever wear off, which means that Falcone's going to spend the foreseeable future living in terror.
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  (#5) Riddler

  • Batman, Batman: Under the Red Hood, Batman, Batman Forever, DC Universe

  Batman has never been known to be especially kind to his rogues' gallery, but in Batman Forever, he dishes out his most hellacious punishment to the Riddler of all people. Throughout the film, the Riddler goes out of his way to ruin the Dark Knight's life, but that's just what the villains of Gotham do (that and wear thematic outfits).

  After a fight against Riddler and Two-Face on Claw Island, Two-Face is apprehended by the authorities, but Riddler is hooked up to a giant brainwave receiver that shoves all of the knowledge of Gotham City into his frontal lobe. As he is wont to do, Batman destroys the brainwave machine, but the malfunctioning creation zaps the Riddler and turns his mind to mush.

  Following his defeat on Claw Island, Riddler is doomed to spend the rest of his life in Arkham Asylum living out the fantasy that he's Batman. Kept alive by the staff at Arkham, there's no telling how long Riddler will spend carrying on as Batman, going on adventures from the privacy of his padded cell.
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  (#11) Biff Tannen

  • Back to the Future, Back to the Future Part III, Back to the Future Part II, Back to the Future

  Biff Tannen isn't a good guy by any stretch of the imagination or in any timeline, but his fate in the Back to the Future trilogy begs the existential question of whether or not it's right to "fix" the past if it's going to irreparably alter the way someone acts and thinks. This isn't to say that Biff was better as a bully in the 1950s or the 1980s, or as the despotic leader of Hill Valley in the alternate '80s, but the constant rewriting of his timeline is horrifying.

  After Marty travels to 1955, 2015, the alternate 1985, and the 19th century, he has so well trounced the Tannen line that while Biff still retains the part of himself that's abysmal to be around, he's also much more submissive to the McFly family. It's not just that his past has been so thoroughly changed that he gladly serves the McFly family as an auto detailer - it's that he doesn't even know what's happened to him.

  Biff's storyline in this landmark trilogy is nothing if not Kafkaesque. He's a man who's so deeply unlikeable that Marty McFly travels back in time and does everything he can (e.g., convincing his dad to fight Biff, crashing a truck of manure into Biff's car) to change him into a meek and dutiful member of society.

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