5 Scariest A24 Movie Villains, Ranked

A24

Many film critics took notice of A24 when it first started distributing movies in 2013. The new studio seemed to be interested in interesting projects by auteur directors, disseminating movies by Roman Coppola ("A Glimpse Inside the Mind of Charles Swan III"), Sofia Coppola, ("The Bling Ring"), Harmony Korine ("Spring Breakers"), Sally Potter ("Ginger & Rosa"), Denis Villeneuve ("Enemy"), and Jonathan Glazer ("Under the Skin"). It became clear that A24 was a new Hollywood force to be reckoned with, and it didn't take the public too much longer to take notice. 

Thanks to their choice of material, A24 movies — although of vastly varying genres, tones, and filmmaking styles — became something of a subgenre unto themselves. Some online pundits began referring to a new wave of horror films as "A24 Horror" (In addition to "Under the Skin," there was "The Witch," "It Comes at Night," "The Killing of a Sacred Deer," "Hereditary," Midsommar," "The Lighthouse," Talk to Me," and many others). The studio's name became shorthand for a certain kind of arthouse picture. 

I will happily assert that the higher-ups at A24 certainly have interesting taste, and have been very good about distributing ambitious, artistically salient, and strikingly new types of movies for mass consumption. The studio has gained a great deal of goodwill in the last 13 years. Let's just hope that A.I. deal doesn't wreck everything. 

And, since the studio has a reputation for horror (among other things), A24's movies contain some of the scariest villains seen in a generation. The following list will rank the most frightening.

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Peter Strickland's 2018 horror film "In Fabric" is one of those concepts that sounds utterly absurd on paper. A beleaguered bank teller named Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), stressed out by the people in her life, decides to buy herself a nice dress for a date. The dress is deep red and drapes perfectly. But it also has a sinister air. It gives Sheila a rash and injures her hand when she washes it on the wrong cycle. It's quite clear from the start that the dress is haunted in some way, and the rest of the movie follows it from one owner to the next, grievously injuring each one of them. By the end of the movie, the dress is floating around without a human inside of it, on some kind of mission of violence. 

Strickland also throws in a strange, dreamlike, psychosexual element to "In Fabric" that makes the movie a true nightmare. This is a film with disconnected dream sequences and bizarre sexual fantasies that seemingly analyze our relationship to clothes, and how that connects directly to our own sexual anxieties. A mannequin menstruates. A woman gives birth to a baby that wears the dress. Strickland eventually explains why the dress is seemingly alive, but it's not meant to sew everything together, so to speak. It's merely included to put a button on everything. 

Strickland, not to belabor the tailoring puns, threads the needle expertly with "In Fabric," turning a silly-ass horror concept — a killer dress — into a weirdly terrifying and thoughtful meditation on sex and self-image panic. If you think you could take on a killer dress with a pair of scissors or a blowtorch, then you don't know this dress. 

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Ari Aster's 179-minute oedipal freakout "Beau is Afraid" is a panic attack of epic proportions. The title character (Joaquin Phoenix) begins the movie carrying a planet-sized chunk of mother-induced guilt on his shoulders, and it only gets heavier as the film progresses. Every single instant of "Beau is Afraid" was lab-created to induce anxiety, not letting up for a second of its nearly-three-hours. It's one of the best films of 2023 and one of the worst times you will ever have watching a movie. 

Beau Wassermann lives in what seems to be a post-apocalyptic hellscape where vagrants and crazies roam the streets. Beau is a timid, fearful man who has long since lost the capacity for peace. He intends to visit his mother Mona (Patti LuPone) on the anniversary of his father's death, which is a fraught moment, as Mona has long told the story of how Beau's father died in the middle of conceiving him. When Beau misses his flight, he calls his mom to apologize, and finds that Mona has died as well. He now must hurry across several states to attend her funeral in time. Naturally, fate will step in at every turn to ensure that he is injured and waylaid multiple times on the way. He panics and panics and panics.

But because "Beau is Afraid" is kind of an abstract, surrealist work, it appears Mona isn't actually dead and was, instead, faking her death specifically as a way of testing her son's loyalty. She might even be having an affair with Beau's shrink, hoping to find instances of when he badmouthed her. She is cruel and abusive, and Beau is cowed by every one of her cutting, emotionally damaging words. 

Congratulations, Mona. You're the worst mother imaginable. 

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Like "Beau is Afraid," Mary Bronstein's "If I Had Legs I'd Kick You" is a surreal odyssey into anxiety. This time, however, the story is told from the perspective of a professional psychiatrist named Linda (Rose Byrne) whose own life is falling apart. Her husband (Christian Slater) is absent and only badgers her over the phone. Linda's daughter (Delaney Quinn), who is almost never actually shown on camera, is suffering from some kind of eating disorder and requires a feeding tube. Linda is about to be kicked out of a medical group for her daughter because there hasn't been enough progress. Everyone implies that it's Linda's fault. Everything gets worse when a burst pipe in her apartment forces Linda and her daughter to move into a nearby motel. 

And, on top of all of this, she has to continue to serve as a therapist, listening to people who seem to be terribly at risk. What does she do, for instance, when a patient abandons a baby in her office? And why is everyone blaming her for that? 

One might think that Linda can rely on her own therapist, a cold-faced man played by, of all people, Conan O'Brien. Linda's therapist listens to all of her complaints, but rather than serve as a steadying presence, he only whines about how her problems are giving him a headache. When she finally confesses to overwhelming feelings of guilt over her abilities as a mother (connected to a personal trauma), Linda's therapist says that he can't see her anymore. This guy is supposed to be a bedrock, and he comes across like an abusive husband or cold-hearted mean girl. He is the catalyst for madness. I find him utterly terrifying. 

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In 2022, Ti West made a throwback slasher movie called "X," in which a killer old woman stalks actors and filmmakers on a makeshift XXX movie set in the late 1970s. "X" contained some intriguing ideas about the adult film industry, the freedom that pornography can provide an audience, and the sexual frustration of a previous generation ... but it was mostly a by-the-numbers slasher film that could have easily been made in 1987. Mia Goth played one of the film's adult actresses, as well as the killer old woman, Pearl, outfitted in an elaborate old-age suit. 

The surprise came at the end of "X," when West revealed a preview of "Pearl," an unexpected prequel film that was already set to be released six months later. When "Pearl" came out, it hit hard. Mia Goth returned as a young Pearl, and the story is about Pearl coming of age on her family's farm in 1918. Goth gives one of the year's best performances, depicting Pearl as sexually active in her mind, but shamed by the prudish mores of the time. She aims for romance and escape, and might even have a chance to flee to Hollywood as a dancer — talent scouts are passing through her small Texan town. 

Pearl is unhinged to begin with, but we see how her circumstances lead her to commit murder. We understand her every scream, her every maniacal grin, her every twitch of dissatisfaction. When she starts swinging axes into people's bodies, we completely understand why. It's rare that a film can so vividly put you into the mind of a killer. 

"Pearl," in retrospect, makes "X" better. It was followed by the satanic/serial killer thriller "MaXXXine" in 2024, but that one also wasn't as good. "Pearl," however, is a classic.

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Rudolf Höss lies at the center of Jonathan Glazer's "The Zone of Interest," and he is the most terrifying villain of them all because, well, he was real. Rudolf Höss served as the Nazi commandant of the Auschwitz concentration camp in 1943. He lives in a rather nice house with his nice family and tends to his nice garden. His garden shares a wall with the camp where people are being mass executed daily. Occasionally, he and his family might hear some distant screams coming from the camp, or see smokestacks billowing as people are burned, but they merely go about their day.

For Rudolf Höss (Christian Friedel), the mass death is just a job His wife, Hedwig (Sandra Hüller), points out that it's a prestigious gig, and that he should remain stationed as a mass executioner for as long as possible, as she has become comfortable with this house. Höss attends meetings with his higher-up about how he might "step up production," as it were. Idly, throughout the day, he confesses that he is bored, and that he sometimes shifts into workaholic mode, envisioning what might need to be done to kill everyone in a ballroom, for instance. 

There may be no better film about the banality of evil than "The Zone of Interest." Höss never has a single blip of conscience about what he is doing. His suffering victims are his job, and he goes about his job dispassionately. This is what evil looks like. Not cackling and scheming, but moving forward through a deathly system you don't interrogate. "The Zone of Interest" ends with a reminder of the actual human cost of Höss' dispassionate, hateful acceptance of the world.