A fewStephen Kingvillains have become cultural icons thanks to their ubiquity in his books or their widespread cultural impact. Pennywise, Annie Wilkes,Randall Flagg, Christine, and others are all immediately recognizable thanks to their impact. Other Stephen King villains, however, are less well-known. Whether it’s that their ability to spread evil or their impact on the plot goes largely unrecognized,some Stephen King villains are too underrated despite how great they are.
Stephen King villains run the gamut from humanto supernatural, earthbound, or interdimensional entities. They can be inanimate objects, demons, immortal, or disturbed humans. Some of his villains are tragic while others are completely unredeemable. Either way, thebest Stephen King villainis one that lingers after the book is finished, and, despite being underrated, the villains on this list do exactly that.
10Rose the Hat
Doctor Sleep
While most of Stephen King’s most malevolent villains are males (or at least male-coded), Doctor Sleep’s Rose the Hat is one of the few female villains who is incredibly powerful and genuinely terrifying. As the leader of the True Knot, a group of vampiric creatures who feed on the lifeforce of children with the Shine,Rose weaves a quiet swath of terror across the country for special children.
As fear makes the lifeforce, a.k.a. “steam” of children taste better,Rose has no problem terrifying her prey in inventive, cruel ways. Add that to the fact that she’s not only quasi-immortal, but also has psychic abilities, astral projection, telepathy, and the ability to read memories, and she’s one of the more formidable antagonists in Stephen King’s universe. She’s like a poisonous butterfly with beautiful colors - entrancing and enticing, but ultimately deadly.
9Room 1408
1408
It’s a testament to Stephen King’s ability to make anything scary thatso many inanimate objects and animals have been made villainsin his books. A few times, it’s been a building or location, but in the case of the hotel room 1408 from the short story “1408,” it goes above and beyond.
While the Overlook Hotel gets all the focus for Stephen King’s most haunted location, Room 1408 might beat it for the sheer nightmarish happenings contained within its walls.
While the Overlook Hotel gets all the focus for Stephen King’s most haunted location,Room 1408 might beat it for the sheer nightmarish happenings contained within its walls.Unlike the Overlook, the hotel room adds a surreal, nightmarish layer to its hallucinations. It’s so twisted that it’s not entirely clear whether the malevolent entity controlling the room is a mere spirit or something much, much darker.
8Warden Norton
Rita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption
While most of his memorable villains are supernatural entities or people possessed or influenced by supernatural entities,some of his best villains have been good, old-fashioned awful human beings.One of those is Warden Samuel Norton from the novellaRita Hayworth and the Shawshank Redemption. Norton has no strange powers or inhuman abilities; he’s merely warped by the garden-variety corruption of those in positions of power.
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What makes Warden Norton such a good villain, and undoubtedlythe best villain in a Stephen King movie, is that men like him exist at all levels of power and in all eras. He’smerely an example of how easily absolute power corrupts absolutely, and how far a man might go to protect the secrets of his crimes. He’s not an aberration, but someone any of us might run into in the real world, which is the scariest thought of all.
7John Farson
Wizard and Glass
In numerous Stephen King stories, a human being is manipulated by an evil entity to do horrible things, butfew have caused as much widespread destruction as John Farson. The ubiquitous Man in Black/Marten Broadcloak, a.k.a. Randall Flagg, is the most prominent and overarching villain inThe Dark Towerseries and the Crimson King is the all-powerful interdimensional entity of chaos and destruction pulling the strings. But it’s John Farson who pushes the plot forward in a tangible, hands-on way, especially in the backstory that happens before the main events of the series.
An interesting fact is that John Farson never actually appears in theDark Towerbooks. He’s only mentioned by other characters, making him something of a boogeyman and mythical figure.
It’s John Farson, after all, who leads the rebellion that ends in the slaughter of the gunslingers and the fall of the shining capital city of Gilead on the orders ofRandall Flagg and the Crimson King. Farson’s men kill several of Roland’s friends in the Battle of Jericho Hill, the last stand of the gunslingers, and, before that, Farson indirectly leads to Roland’s first love, Susan Delgado, being burned to death at the stake. It’s a testament to Farson’s widespread impact that he is, whether directly or indirectly,responsible for destroying everything and everyone Roland ever loved.
6Leland Gaunt
Needful Things
Stephen King undoubtedly goes to some very dark places in his books, but some character deaths are more heartbreaking than others. Likewise, some of his novels are bleaker than others, with the deaths being senseless, upsetting, or the ending being ambiguous enough to wonder about the point of their sacrifice.In the top handful of King’s bleakest novels isNeedful Things,and that’s down to the book’s villain and puppetmaster, Leland Gaunt.
In the top handful of King’s bleakest novels isNeedful Things, and that’s down to the book’s villain and puppetmaster, Leland Gaunt.
Like many Stephen King villains, Gaunt’s evil isn’t contained to just one book; he also acts as an unseen antagonist inThe Dark Towerseries and the novellaThe Body. Similar to Kurt Barlow in ‘Salem’s Lot, Gaunt’s evil is insidious and slow-growing as it’s revealed he’s a demon who plants the seeds of destruction in a town to harvest the souls of his desperate customers. His ability to somehow know the darkest secrets in the hearts of people is the source of his power, andhe seems to be everywhere and nowhere at once.He’s not defeated in the end, underscoring that he’s merely a demonic leech that moves to a new feeding ground when he’s sucked the last one dry.
5Mrs. Carmody
The Mist
Stephen King has a knack for crafting believable religious fanatics;he takes dogmatic belief and hones it into a razor-sharp weapon, stretching it past the point of reason and sanity. His religious zealots are often the end result when a person gives up their entire being to a higher power and lacks the ability to separate reason from insanity. Carrie’s Margaret White is the most notable, but Mrs. Carmody from the novellaThe Mistis a close second, and, in some ways, beats Margaret.
While Margaret White’s fanaticism is contained to her daughter, which is bad enough,Mrs. Carmody’s religious fervor impacts her communityas she starts to convert the mass hysteria of the survivors into followers of her murderous cause. Mrs. Carmody symbolizes how someone with a little bit of charisma, misplaced conviction, and warped morals can take advantage of the most vulnerable to spread a poisoned gospel.
4Patrick Hockstetter
IT
Of Stephen King’s non-powered human villains,Patrick Hockstetter might be the most purely evil.It’s a recurring refrain when experts or witnesses discuss serial killers, that there is “nothing behind [their] eyes.” Patrick Hockstetter is one such case, as chilling and accurate a depiction of a psychopath working his way up to being a serial killer as anything set on a page. There’s just something inherentlywrongwith Patrick, and that wrongness jumps off the page.
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Patrick’s murder started early, when, at age 5, he smothered his baby brother in his sleep. ThroughoutIT, he tortures and kills animals and dreams of doing the same to people. If he hadn’t been killed by Pennywise at such a young age,he would absolutely have become a serial killerand murdered many people in gruesome and horrific ways. Whether one believes in the concept of a soul or not, one thing is certain: Patrick Hockstetter is without one, a hollow void where empathy and morality should be.
3Raymond Andrew Joubert/Moonlight Man
Gerald’s Game
While many of Stephen King’s villains are terrifying,Raymond Andrew Joubert, a.k.a. the Moonlight Man fromGerald’s Gameis just creepy,and that might be worse. As a necrophiliac and serial killer, Joubert is who Patrick Hockstetter would have turned into had Pennywise not murdered him. While Gerald Burlingame is the overarching antagonist of the novel, Joubert is arguably worse because he’s far more evil – and unlike Gerald, he’s not killed off early in the novel.
Dutch actor Carel Struycken played Raymond Andrew Joubert/the Moonlight Man in Mike Flanagan’s adaptation ofGerald’s Game. Thanks to his exaggerated features and 7’ height given to him by the condition of acromegaly, Struycken often plays monsters, aliens, and other supernatural creatures.
The scariest thing about Joubert isn’t so much the character himself, though he is no doubt twisted and sick, responsible for multiple murders. The scariest part is that Jessie, in her fear and waking nightmares,mistakenly thinks Joubert is merely a figment of her imaginationonly to later find he is very real. The vulnerable Jessie being so close to a serial killer while having no defenses against him is a terrifying scenario, the complete loss of control scarier than most monsters in King’s stories.
2Harold Lauder
The Stand
While the main villain ofThe Stand(and Stephen King’s entire universe) is, of course, Randall Flagg, he has plenty of antagonistic underlings to carry out his dirty work for them. Of those,Harold Lauder is the most fascinating,an incel figure before the concept of incels even existed. His exaggerated sense of his own intelligence, coupled with his conviction that he “deserves” Frannie’s love, curdles into a bitter rage when he doesn’t get what he feels the world owes him.
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Harold’s betrayal of the group and blowing up multiple characters with a bomb is one of the most shocking moments in any Stephen King book. The great tragedy ofHarold Lauder is the redemption he was deniedat the very end of his life. As he lays dying, double-crossed by Nadine, Harold finally accepts that all his decisions led to this point,offering a glimpse of the better man he might have been if he’d not been manipulated by Randall Flagg.
1Lloyd the Bartender
The Shining
TheOverlook Hotel is almost a character in its own right inThe Shining, the hulking, sleeping pile that wakes when Jack Torrance steps into its innards. The home of multiple evil acts over the years,the Overlook has been steeped in that energy and now houses numerous ghosts,malevolent entities, demons, and, long after the events ofThe Shining, Rose the Hat. Of those ghosts, it’s Mr. Grady, a.k.a. the Caretaker, who is seemingly the most responsible for manipulating Jack Torrance and turning him into a murderous lunatic.
Still,Lloyd, the hotel’s bartender ghost, might be the most evil and manipulative spirit in the hotelas he comes in the guise of a friend and an ear to listen. Without a doubt, Jack would not have been as easy to manipulate had he not fallen off the wagon and started drinking again, and Lloyd is the hand that keeps handing him the glass. All the while, he does it with a smile, listening to Jack’s increasingly dark ravings and encouraging him that he’s exactly right. It’s an insidious manipulation and harder to detect, making him one of the most effective and underrated villains in aStephen Kingbook.
Stephen King
Discover the latest news and filmography for Stephen King, known for The Dark Tower series, The Stand, IT, The Shining, Carrie, Cujo, Misery, the Bill Hodges trilogy, and more.
