In fiction, baldness often equates with lack of moral fortitude. Many, many villains are recognised as such by the audience by their shiny, shaven noggins. It might be the Corrupt Corporate Executive in a political thriller, the sinister evil sorcerer, unholy priest, cult leader, or Evil Overlord in sword-and-sorcery, or a thuggish Giant Mook readying to crack the hero in two. However, it is most commonly applied to the Evil Chancellor and the Mad Scientist.
Where the hero has his flowing golden locks or a boyish, tousled mop of red or brown hair to indicate his youthful purity, something about the complete absence of hair makes a bald villain look particularly nefarious, especially while he's slouched on his throne, steepling his fingers and delivering a Breaking Lecture while the ominous backlight shines off his gleaming chrome-dome.
This might be a throwback to ancient belief in hair as a symbol of health and virility, as exemplified by the Biblical story of Samson; it may also be more primal still, as a shaven head more closely resembles a skull and, combined with the natural tendency for us to lose our hair as we grow old, is therefore symbolic of aging and death. As a matter of fact, in ancient Rome, baldness was considered a gross deformity. Somehow, that didn't stop the very bald Patrick Stewart from being called "The Sexiest Man on TV" in 1992.
Whatever the original reason, Hair Hates Evil, and about the only times you'll see a kind and moral character without his (or her) hair will be when it's an egg-headed Smart Guy (who's probably also in a wheelchair), a Buddhist monk, a Bald Black Leader Guy, or the Littlest Leukemia Patient.
The only other good guys who go shaven are BadassAnti Heroes, so if a hero shaves his head as part of an Important Haircut, it is a sure sign he's about to get Darker and Edgier.
The tendency is, indeed, for the moral decay of a character to be inversely proportionate to the length of their hair, with innocent, virginal princesses practically drowning in their romantically flowing locks while the hard-bitten Badass sports a spiky military crewcut. The most frequent aversion of this trope is the White-Haired Pretty Boy, whose usually long and luscious tresses exist as a symbol of his evil, not in spite of it.
For the ultimate combination, supply a bald villain with a villainous goatee. This trope is also a function of Good Hair, Evil Hair.
Taking this trope way beyond its logical extreme, occasional verymadscientists will also shave off their skin and the top of their skull, leaving their brains completely exposed.
For aversions, see Bald of Awesome.
Examples:
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Anime and Manga
Nearly all of the major villains in Dragon Ball have no hair: Pilaf, both Piccolos, Frieza, Cell, Majin Buu. They're not exactly bald, though, they just have no hair - with the possible exception of Pilaf, none of them are mammals.
Plenty of bald heroes too: Tenshinhan, Krillin, and Master Roshi.
True, but Tenshinhan was originally a villain (albeit one who almost immediately performed a Heel Face Turn a few eps after his introduction), so the point stands.
Not to mention, Krillin originally convinced Master Roshi to train him by bribing him with pornography. And Krillin isn't naturally bald, as he grows his hair back (as a sign that he was no longer living as a monk who renounced all worldly pleasures) after marrying Number Eighteen.
Considering this is a trope, I think Toriyama might be playing with this a bit. Tenshinhan is a bald villain, but becomes a good guy when he finds out people respect it more. Nappa was a classic "bald" villain (and a classic villain in many respects), but gets trumped by the true hero in mere seconds and replaced by a preferable, haired antagonist.
And his scalp catches fire when he does awesome things such as beating the crap out of mechas with his bare hands.
Even The Anti-Spiral fits this trope
Ivan the Terrible (or Ivan of Russia, in the Japanese version) from Giant Robo: The Day The Earth Stood Still is bald, though he's not the most nefarious of the evil group he's a part of, even though he may be one of the biggest nutcases in the entire anime. Though, to be fair, one of the guys dead-set on doing good is bald as well.
Both played straight and inverted in Kinnikuman. Buffaloman, originally introduced as the most powerful Devil Superman in the series, reveals himself to be bald in the following arc. However, the reveal only happens when he officially pulls a Heel Face Turn.
Vargus of Mahou Sensei Negima!, who was initially introduced as a thuggish bully of a Giant Mook that attacked Negi in the Magic World for no reason, though it's later shown that he's actually a lot nicer than he first appeared.
There's also the leader of the Bounty Hunters later on, but he is more of a Punch Clock Villain; he meets Negi in a bathhouse later 'off the clock' and comments that he has no intention of pulling anything.
Gao Gai Gar: in FINAL, Palparepa, the lead protagonist's evil counterpart, is completely bald.
In Legend of Galactic Heroes, three morally questionable characters are bald. (Though most morally questionable characters are not.)
The evil school inspector in Gokusen. Some villains can make their Scary Shiny Glasses gleam menacingly; this man creates the same effect with the top of his head.
In order to illustrate their pre-series Face Heel Turn, TOKYO TRIBE 2's Mera and Skunk both shave their heads. Kai even comments on Mera's shaven head before he becomes aware that he's one of two people that Mera vowed to kill.
Inverted with the Kongo twins in Eyeshield 21. Unsui's baldness is meant to reflect his monk-like attitude and is a generally swell guy. His brother, on the other hand, has a huge mane of dreads and is a total jackass. In fact, Agon shaving his head is seen as a mark of improvement in his character.
Kriem when she appears in Episode 18 of Tiger & Bunny. It makes sense, really, when you consider that her hair enables her to control inanimate objects to wreak havoc. The hospital staff probably shaved her head so that she wouldn't be able to when she woke up.
In the Ace Attorney manga, Robin Wolfe has a bald head that is quite shiny and catches Maya's attention as soon as they meet. The "evil" part comes when it turns out he called an arachnophobic employee to his home, restrained him in a chair in a guest house full of spiders, and left him there for hours, leading him to be Driven to Suicide.
Shazam villain Dr. Sivana (who predates Luthor by a couple of months) is another bald mad scientist, who is also diminutive, gangly, ugly, and wears coke-bottle glasses. He has a thing for talking worms.
The Kingpin, in Marvel Comics. Bullseye from the Daredevil comics is also bald and has a bullseye scared into his forehead.
Professor Xavier of X-Men is almost a textbook example of the 'kindly eggheaded Professor' aversion, as he's sometimes portrayed as being morally ambiguous and slightly sinister, and let's not go near his various Super Powered Evil Sides. It's worth noting that Patrick Stewart is a classic example of Bald of Awesome.
In X-Men: Evolution, Mesmero is bald, with arcane markings on his face and head. Much creepier than the original.
Apocalypse also lacked hair.
Marvel Universe semi-aversion: Moondragon, even when she was not being actively influenced by the malevolent Cosmic Horror she named herself after, fit The Gift trope to a tee. Her girlfriend Phyla mellowed her out, some.
In the original Flash Gordon comic strips, Prince Barin sported a clean-shaven pate in his first appearances — but when he did his Heel Face Turn, his hair grew out with astonishing rapidity. Ming, however, is bald as...someone who is bald.
The righteous Christian in any Chick tract will have a full head of hair (except the Bull, who started out evil). Villains, atheists, and goddamn liberals will be balding, usually with embarrassing combovers or comb-back-overs.
Henry Bendix, the Weatherman from The Authority and Stormwatch.
Tintin encounters badguy Rastapopoulos on several occasions. (Also, recurrent conspirator Jurgen is short on hair, though he has some on the top of his head.)
Gold Digger's Zelda - a genetically engineered mook to an evil (but he's getting better) child genius - has no body hair at all, not even eyebrows (or possibly eyelashes). She hates it (she used to have very long and luscious hair). It's explained as the result of having "Dolphin DNA" being used in her gengineering.
The Duke of Lorraine in Rex Mundi.
Dr. Hugo Strange, the first recurring Batman villain.
The Penguin is often shown to be bald when his top hat is off.
Many Sin City villains have this going for them: Manute, Wallenquist, Liebowitcz, Cardinal Roark, and the Yellow Bastard. There was also an evil rich guy with an odd sense of family values in the short story Daddy's Girl.
In the Phantom, many baddies sport bald pates. In General Tara's case, it is possible that the baldness is a choice to indicate virility, since he augments his intimidating dome with a large bushy handlebar moustache (gleamingly waxed, of course) and matching goatee. To indicate his self-indulgent lifestyle, the fat buffoons in the Phantom strips (Tara included) always carry an extra bulge of flab at the base of their shiny skulls.
And, naturally, when Scott Evil goes Eeeevil, he gradually loses his hair.
Oddly, Blofeld was portrayed with hair in Diamonds Are Forever, though he wasn't any less evil for it. By the time of For Your Eyes Only, he was bald again.
Kratt, one of Le Chiffre's henchmen in Casino Royale. Mostly because Clemens Schick looks hilarious with a full head of hair and mysterious and sexy without it.
Bullshot. The villain, Otto von Bruno, is bald, so when he boasts that the hero will soon be out of his hair, it earns him a puzzled look from his henchman.
After the events in Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith, both Vader and Sidious are bald. As was Maul. Conversely, most of the Jedi have long hair.
The main character Pink in The Wall is on a downward spiral of insanity from the beginning of the film, but when he really loses it and envisions himself as a Nazi-like tyrant, he shaves everything: face, head hair, body hair, eyebrows, nipples...everything!
The Nazi consul (played by Otto Preminger) in Margin for Error.
Shocker's villain, Horace Pinker, has it and has burn-marks on it, too.
The main villain of The House by the Cemetery, Dr. Freudstein, is bald. But people do tend to lose all their hair when they have been dead for decades...
Surprisingly, Rapunzel from Shrek the Third was revealed to actually be this. Going by her reaction when it was exposed, apparently, this was not something she was proud of, to say the very least.
Something of a subversion: Matilda's father (who has plenty of hair and happens to be unscrupulous) believes that smart people have good, strong hair and that, therefore, bald people are dumb. (Matilda points out that William Shakespeare was bald.)
Harap Alb, a Romanian folk tale, has the "Sp?', literally, "bald man", as the primary Jerkass villain. The main character is told that the only thing worse than a bald man is a red haired one...Guess whose daughter he is forced to win over later?
Although he was not described specifically in the stories, Sherlock Holmes' Arch-Enemy Professor James Moriarty was presented as being bald in the earliest illustrations of the character.
In many later illustrations, he just had a very badly receding hairline, which also made him look more professorial.
Rare female example: in Ian McDonald's Desolation Road, Arnie Tenebrae becomes a psychotic, sadistic warlord. At one point, it's mentioned: "She was busy shaving her head."
Bayaz of The First Law combines this with Bald of Awesome, though the "evil" part is less evident until later in the series.
Colin Mochrie in Whose Line Is It Anyway? is a borderline case; while he's not evil per se (at least, we can hope not), he is balding with a very, very dark sense of humor.
Although Star Trek is usually an aversion, given Patrick Stewart's impressive skull, the Borg were more often than not depicted as bald, especially when fully assimilated.
And that's not even going near Shinzon and the Remans in Star Trek: Nemesis, whose look was supposedly based on Nosferatu.
Speaking of Patrick Stewart, he's the Big Bad in The BBCJohn Le Carre serials Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People.
When playing the villain in I, Claudius, however, he's got hair — either for the above-mentioned 'deformity' reason or because his bald head had not yet become famous.
Rare female example: as Battlestar Galactica's president Laura Roslin loses her hair to cancer treatments, she also becomes increasingly totalitarian.
Black Hole High: Victor Pearson, the series' antagonist, is bald in the present day, but in the 1987 time zone, he has a full head of hair. Almost everything we see of him in this period is sympathetic. He also manages to keep his hair in an alternate timeline where he's a slightly dotty science teacher. The final kicker: in the series finale, which reveals Pearson's ultimately noble motives, Victor is starting to grow his hair back.
The Technomages of Babylon 5 all shave their heads, for easier access to the brain and spinal column. Their evilness varies from person to person.
Subverted with John Locke in LOST, but played straight in the season 5 finale, when it is revealed that Locke had been dead since several episodes and that the one who had taken his shape was the Big Bad
Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a number of bald demons, the most famous of them being The Master, Season 1 Big Bad, and The Gentlemen, from "Hush", the silent episode.
Stargate Atlantis: regular Wraith are evil and have long white hair. In that one episode, the heroes confront a Wraith Evil Chancellor, who was extra special evil. He was bald.
In My Chemical Romance's concept record Danger Days The True Lives Of The Fabulous Killjoys, the prominent antagonist, Korse, is obvious bald in both music videos and promotional posters. His character is generally portrayed as an apathetic villain to the story's heroes, who are played by the band.
WWE wrestler Kane became bald when he lost his mask in a match. By no coincidence, this is also when he started getting really, really evil. Like, cackling horror-movie-villain evil.
King Kong Bundy was the greatest example. Apart from his eyelashes, he was completely hairless.
Genki Horiguchi of Dragon Gate literally calls himself H.A.G.E of Evil (hage is Japanese for bald).
The Straight Edge Society in the WWE is a whole stable of these. Inverted in the leader, CM Punk, whose mane is the whole selling point of the gimmick...
Punk lost to Rey Mysterio at Over the Limit 2010 and got shaved bald, but it's averted(?) in that he covered it up with a black mask.
Radio
This even shows up in Adventures in Odyssey, a radio show. For a long while during the Novacom saga, Mr. Charles was informally known as "the bald guy."
Mark Kermode and Simon Mayo even made up a rule about it (when reviewing Prince of Persia).
"Never trust a bald man with mascara."
Tabletop RPG
Paranoia plays to this in its 2nd Edition art; the "Ultraviolet-Clearance" section contains pictures of a "typical GM", an evil-looking robed fellow who is usually seen cutting up the rules or cracking a whip and is, of course, completely bald.
One of evil magocracies of Forgotten Realms is Thay, where ruling Red Wizards (both men and women) has shaved and tattooed heads. This tradition was questioned when Lauzoril (the most charismatic leader there) ignored it and broken when traditional power structure was smashed by internal strife.
Artwork of various Chaos leaders, especially sorcerers, in Warhammer 40000 usually portrays them as bald, with various Chaos symbols worn on the scalp.
Video Games
Kane from Command & Conquer is an example of the aforementioned bald-with-goatee combo.
Yuri from Red Alert 2 also counts and, like Kane, has an evil beard.
Knights Of The Old Republic has several examples, including the Big Bad Darth Malak, his apprentice Darth Bandon, and Sith Academy headmaster Uthar Wynn.
And let's not forget about Darth Vader himself. And Jabba, I guess...
Moebius, servant of the Elder God from the Legacy of Kain series, is a conniving manipulator who eschews hair of any sort and is notably bald even in thousand year old murals depicting his younger days when he led the rebellion against the vampires who ruled over humanity in the past.
Minor characters Azimuth and Marcus, both antagonists, are also bald.
The Helghast in the Killzone series are all bald. Apparently, this is a side effect of having emigrated to a Death World.
Mr. Big from the Art of Fighting series: a crime boss who kidnapped a teenage girl to blackmail her father and force both her brother and her best friend to fight him.
Both Sarevok of Baldur's Gate and Jon Irenicus of Baldur's Gate 2 had shaven heads.
Bitores Mendez, one of the villains of Resident Evil 4, was both bearded and bald. In fact, he looked a lot like Rasputin.
Vigagi and Sikalog, both of the Inspectors from Super Robot Wars. The first shaves his head bald (or so he says, and doubles as a Berserk Button), and the second was apparently born that way.
Default Male Shepard of Mass Effect if you go Renegade (Paragon Shepard gets the other kind). Seriously, genocide of an entire race AND several helpings of good old fashioned murder. And this guy's the hero. Also, the sequel has Dark Action Girl Jack, who comes along with massive helpings of bod tattoos.
The Dark Templar was a definite subversion. On the first game, they were largely regarded as a bunch of dark, shady heretics. One of their defining traits is that they don't have tendrils on the backs of their heads (the protoss equivalent of hair), making them essentially bald. Zeratul is the most obvious example. It turns out that they are actually one of the most heroic characters in the game.
Not quite completely bald; if you look closely, he's got a sparse brown crew cut covering the crown of his head. But close enough.
However, The Order of the Stick contains numerous aversions; for instance, the other two bald guys in the Order itself, Roy and Durkon, are both Lawful Good.
Richard from Looking for Group is most likely bald, since one statue depicting a hoodless near-lookalike of him was bald, a glimpse of him having his head healed didn't show any indication of hair, and an early page where we see an x-ray version of Richard didn't show any hair outlines. Also, we get a few "up-hood" shots, and the fact that the scarily-similar Sisters have little-to-no-hair themselves does not help matters.
In The Gamers Alliance, Lucky the elven mercenary is bald and very much evil.
The Watcher in KateModern is an obvious example, although the show also features Tariq Bhartti, who has a shaven head and is a likable enough individual.
Secondary Broken Saints villain (and big-time sleazebag) Mars is severely bald on the top of his head, with only some grey around the sides and what's left in back pulled into a ponytail.
Darth Apparatus in The Gungan Council is universally known for his bald head, having the nicknames "Chrome Dome" and "Bald Nugget".
Professor Farnsworth in Futurama, although he's too much of a crazy ineffective old doofus to be truly evil. Plus, he's technically a good guy, as far as taking sides is concerned.
Zuko, from Avatar The Last Airbender, was at his most evil when he had the least hair. (Maybe his ponytail is symbolic of his inner goodness.)
Long Feng isn't quite bald, but he mostly fits the bill. By what may or may not be coincidence, his voice actor, Clancy Brown, also played Lex Luthor in Superman The Animated Series. (Not to mention the Kurgan, who shaved his head.)
Jonny Quest's greatest adversary has always been Dr. Zin, who has always been distinctly bald.
Asajj Ventress from Star Wars: The Clone Wars, one of the few female Balds of Evil and surprisingly good looking.
Freakshow of Danny Phantom. Arguably, his whole outfit has a villain look, but when surrounded by Goths, not so much.
Baron ?derbheit in The Venture Brothers. The show, however, also subverts this trope in that Rusty Venture is bald and Brock shaves his head at the end of Season 3.
On the other hand, it might not be so much of a subversion, when you consider the fact that it would be difficult indeed to ever see Rusty or Brock as anything close to being GOOD - one's a Jerkass and the other is basically a Sociopathic Hero.
In Iron Man: Armored Adventures, Obadaiah Stane's baldness carries over from the comics, down to being conspicuously clean-shaven when compared to Jeff Bridge's recognizable beard from the film. His head of security, O'Brien, is also bald. He carries it well.
The Hood, from Thunderbirds.
While being masked for most of the series, once The Huntsman reveals his face (in his last five or so minutes left of screen time before he gets Killed Off for Real), he fits the bill.
The irony is that the Aryans now commonly known as skinheads weren't the original skinheads, but copied their image from a counter-culture movement made up of immigrants mostly from India and Asia. The original movement still lives on in Ska, which is a racially heterogeneous international scene.
Anton LaVey, the founder of the Church of Satan, followed this trope consciously, although the only evil he ever did was the most banal everyday kind, completely unrelated to his choice of religion. In religious matters, he was simply a Large Ham.
The press and those who saw serial killer Andrei Chikatilo during his trial stated that he looked even more evil and insane after the authorities forcibly shaved his head. They were right◊.
