Monster / Buffyverse

aka: Angel

"It's no big mystery, man. (Humans) suffer, they die. That's what they're there for."

Kurt Rendor: This is no mere human with whom you must deal, nor is it a feral beast of blood with little to consider beyond its hunger. The countess is no doubt the worst of both the light and dark worlds, a human with a soul who walks in the day, but who possesses the black heart of a devil.
Ildikó Géllert: It is hard to believe such a person exists. To slaughter so and be without conscience — perhaps she is in league with a vampire, or under the spell of a demon. Because to be so evil and still function beneath the eye of God in the sunlight...

—On Elizabeth Báthory, "Die Blutgrafin" short story

Amongst the numerous vampires, demons, and other creatures inhabiting the Buffyverse are some loathsome villains, whether Big Bads, arc villains, or one-shot villains. Some are actual monsters, while others are just monstrous.

All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!

---

Main Universe

• Angelus, born Liam, set the gold standard for evil in the Buffyverse. For well over a century he was the scourge of Europe, with countless murders, rapes and torture to his name. When he returned home, fresh from the grave, his little sister who opened the door remarked that he "had returned to her an angel". After slaughtering his entire village, he adopted the Latinate of angel, Angelus, as his name to mock that comment. Refusing to kill a longstanding nemesis vampire hunter, Angelus contented himself by murdering the man's wife and baby son, turning his young daughter into a vampire to force her own father to destroy her. His self-admitted masterpiece was seducing Drusilla, a pious, tormented girl with psychic powers, murdering her family and driving her to a convent before slaughtering everyone in the walls and turning her into a vampire to preserve his insane, broken work of art forever. When his soul is lost again, Angelus delights in psychologically tormenting his former beloved Buffy's friends and family out of disgust for the human feeling Buffy gave him. The ultimate culmination of this was his brutal murder of Jenny Calendar, leaving the corpse for her lover Giles to find in a parody of a romantic rendezvous — then torturing Giles for information with her apparition. Angelus's evil extended to his hope of awakening a demon to suck all of humanity into a hell dimension for eternal torture, solely for the fun involved.
• The Senior Partners, originally known as the Wolf, the Ram, and the Hart, were three demons who envisioned a way to become the strongest of their kind: by corrupting institutions and fomenting evil within the hearts of man and other races. Establishing Wolfram & Hart across multiple worlds, the trio cause murder, oppression, war, and genocide to feed themselves, with their servitors doing all they can to proliferate evil in all its forms. Attempting to corrupt Angel himself, the Senior Partners plunge LA into hell and force the spirit of Angel's friend Wesley to aid them, torturing him if he refuses. Intent on eventually turning the Apocalypse to their own ends, the Senior Partners stand as a dark contrast to the Powers That Be.

Buffy the Vampire Slayer (both the TV series & the comic book)

Examples

• Season 5: Glorificus, aka Glory, is a narcissistic hell goddess who seeks to return home no matter how many lives must be destroyed in the process. After being exiled from her home dimension by her former partners, Glory began seeking the Key, the mystical energy that would allow her to return home. After killing the monks that hid the Key from her, Glory begins searching for it on Earth. Along the way, she keeps herself sane by feeding off of other people's sanity, driving dozens of people into an insane yet self-aware state. Upon discovering that Buffy is protecting the Key, Glory threatens to kill all of her friends and family while she can only watch unless she hands it over. When Glory later learns the Key is human, she begins making good on that promise, first by torturing Spike for the Key's identity, then later driving Tara insane in front of Willow. After slaughtering the Knights of Byzantium and capturing Dawn, Glory reveals that she's aware that opening the portal to her home will destroy the Earth, but that she doesn't care, even gloating that Buffy may have to kill her own sister to save the world. Caring for nothing in the universe except for herself and viewing guilt as beneath her, Glory's childish behavior only further showcases her monstrous sadism and depravity.
• Season 7 ^Episodes "Dirty Girls" through "Chosen": Caleb is a defrocked priest who serves as the right-hand-man of the First Evil. Having already been a Serial Killer of young women, Caleb uses the trust people have in him to get close to his victims, utilizing the same trick in his first appearance to gut a Potential Slayer as a message for Buffy. As the First's primary conduit, Caleb slaughters a church of innocents in search of the Slayer Scythe; blows up the Watcher's Council to kill most of its members; and coordinates the attacks on the Potential Slayers, resulting in numerous deaths and Faith being attacked in prison. When Buffy tries to fight him, Caleb nonchalantly kills multiple Potentials himself, then gouges out Xander's eye for no reason, all while making sadistic jokes about his methods. When Buffy finds the Scythe, Caleb willingly lets himself be bolstered by the First's evil power so he can take her on one more time, then murders the last Guardian of the Scythe to spite her. As a vile misogynist, Caleb believes that his victims deserve what he does to them and willingly sets the apocalypse in motion, wanting nothing more than to annihilate all who don't share his insane beliefs.
• Season 9:
  • Simone Doffler initially started out as a rebellious Slayer who didn't see the value of the lives of others and believes that Slayers are superior to normal people, and therefore should rule over them. In an attempt to soften her she was put under the watch of Andrew Wells; instead she goes rogue and steals a demon to use as a weapon and asks Buffy to turn over Andrew, who she wants to kill since he annoyed her. She also led a small but growing army of rogue Slayers who set up base on a small island, where Simone beat up an old woman who gave them food and shelter. Simone's gang would later commit acts of terrorism, including raiding a military base and killing their general, relishing in the fearsome reputation it gave the Slayers. Later Simone learned of the zompires, and plotted to find a way to become one and keep her mind intact, for the sole sake of killing Buffy, with which she has become obsessed. To experiment, she feeds her own followers to them. When she learns Buffy's sister Dawn is dying, she manipulates their friend Xander with a chance to save her by finding the deeper well. Her true intention was to awaken the Old One, Maloker, so that he would sire her into a vampire.
  • Maloker is an Old One responsible for all of the horrors that vampires have wrought over millennia. As humans became strong enough to force him off of Earth, Maloker sired the first vampire in the hopes of creating an army, only to fail. Woken up by Simone Doffler in the present day, Maloker massacres and eats the Magic Council members attempting to stop him, later on beginning a rampage in San Francisco when awoken in Dracula's body. Seeking nothing less than the total destruction of humanity, Maloker's evil even surpasses his fellow Old Ones.
• Season 11: The unassuming White House Press Secretary Joanna Wise is really the orchestrator of the Supernatural Crisis Act and the Pandora Project. Summoning a Chinese storm dragon, Wise sets it loose on San Francisco alongside a giant tsunami, killing thousands. The backlash resulting in increased hate crimes against magical beings and practitioners of Wicca and the government cracking down on magic users, having them detained in the hellish "Safe Zone" prison and stripping them of their human rights. Putting the detainees to work on a magical draining device, Wise is apathetic to the fact many species need magic to survive. After a breakout in the Safe Zone, Wise has a town eradicated to frame an army of escaped vampires, increasing tensions; and when the Scooby Gang investigate the Pandora Project, they discover Wise conducts experiments on humans and animals to create her own brainwashed army and intends to use satellites to have her machine drain magic across the world. A depraved megalomaniac who ultimately intends to rule a world where only she has access to magic, in her final fight with Buffy, Wise even drains her own dragon to bolster her magical strength.
• "Anne": The demon known as "Ken" poses as a friendly man who runs a shelter for troubled teenage runaways. In truth a slaver, Ken lures them in and takes them to his dimension where they are tortured and enslaved in backbreaking labor. Not content with this, Ken has them mentally tormented, grinding down their self-esteem and forcing them to admit they are "no one", killing any who resist. After decades of work in his dimension, Ken throws them to the streets of LA, broken and insane, to die when they cease to be of use, gloating that his realm is hell solely for the pure absence of hope those who enter it suffer.
• "Bargaining" two-parter: Razor is the leader of the Hellions, a demon biker gang who goes from city to city causing as much destruction as they possibly can. After learning that the Hellmouth is unguarded, Razor has his gang assault Sunnydale, throwing the entire city into complete anarchy overnight. Once he's moved in, Razor's gang captures, kills, and rapes anyone they happen to come across, with Spike revealing this is the routine they've pulled all over the country. After dismembering the Buffybot with his motorcycles to christen their homecoming, Razor then confronts the Scooby Gang, intending to rape Tara and Anya to death with his gang.

Angel (includes the IDW comic)

Examples

• Season 2 ^Episodes "Over the Rainbow" through "There's No Place Like Plrtz Glrb": Silas, the head of the Covenant of Trombli, is the dictator of Pylea and the primary leader of its human slave trade. Alongside enslaving every human that enters Pylea, Silas is also affiliated with the Senior Partners, intending to ensure the visions of the Powers that Be end up under his control. When Cordelia arrives and has a vision, Silas tortures her to determine if she has the sight, then, in accordance with a prophecy, makes her princess of the dimension, then reminds her who is really in charge by decapitating Lorne and showing Cordelia his head out of spite. After almost forcing Cordelia to mate with the Groosalugg and killing one of his own slaves, Silas manipulates "Groo" into attempting to kill Angel just to torment her some more. When the rebels arrive, Silas moves to kill all of the slaves under his control, gloating about the power he wields over the "cows" he's captured.
• Season 4: The Beast is the chief enforcer of the fallen Power Jasmine. One of the most powerful demons to walk the earth, the Beast roamed the world in search of wanton slaughter, encountering Angelus when it tried to get him to kill the Svea Priestesses (Svear) before they could banish him. Returning to massacre the Svear, the Beast initiates a huge Human Sacrifice to unleash a rain of flames over LA, and slaughters most of Wolfram & Hart to kill the Ra-Tet and drain them. Blackening out the sun over LA with the intent to spread it over the world and causing a rampage of supernatural monsters, the Beast intends to unleash Jasmine to enslave the world and devour countless innocents.
• "Hero": Tiernan and Trask are leaders of the Scourge, a group of purebred demons who believe themselves to be the Master Race. In their campaign against those they deem inferior, the Scourge eradicate every man, woman, and child they can find, wiping out entire clans of demons in pursuit of their agenda. Upon tracking down the Lister demons to Los Angeles, Trask leads his troopers in finding them, setting fires in the streets to lure them out of hiding and recruiting Angel when he proves his mettle by snapping Doyle's neck. When a human gives them the location of the clan, Tiernan vaporizes him with the Beacon, then has Trask place it on the ship so as to wipe out all humans and demons in a quarter-mile radius, all of which is merely the start of a genocidal campaign to wipe them all out entirely.
• "The Ring": Darin MacNamara is a greedy ringmaster and a demon slavedriver. Running an arena where he kidnaps demons and forces them to fight to the death, Darin refuses to let any of them go until they've had their 21st kill. Anyone who tries to escape or refuses to fight gets incinerated by an electric bracelet they are forced to wear. After luring Angel into his trap and watching his brother be taken hostage, Darin simply shoots his own brother dead, only saying "now he's my dead brother". After Angel refuses Darin's offer to be let free for his own financial gain, Darin, believing Angel had outlived his usefulness, puts him in a fight against the ruling "champ", who's at his 21st fight, in hopes of him getting killed. Greedy, ruthless, and seeing even his own brother as a mere tool, Darin stands out as the worst of humanity's evil.
• "Billy": Billy Blim, despite appearing to be a normal young man, is a half-demon with the ability to incite violent misogyny in other men. Not harming his victims himself because he prefers to watch, Billy uses his power on unsuspecting men, resulting in women being harmed and killed in various ways. Among his various crimes are having a husband hack his wife into pieces; thanking his rescuer Lilah by having her rival Gavin savagely beat her; having a taxi driver viciously kill one of his customers; and, when a pair of police officers arrests him, making one attack the other and forcing her to shoot him in self-defense. Seeking to escape the country, Billy blackmails his cousin by threatening a couple at one of his parties, knowing his volatile powers make him a threat to everyone there. Even using his powers on Angel, the man who freed him from a hell dimension, in order to attempt to make him kill Cordelia, Billy is a smug sadist driven by a pathological hatred for women and the sheer amusement he derives from the carnage he causes.
• "Hell Bound": Matthias "The Reaper" Pavayne was a Mad Doctor and Serial Killer who was sacrificed by Wolfram & Hart to deconsecrate the holy ground on which they built their Los Angeles office. Enduring as a ghost, Pavayne avoids his fate of being sent to hell by torturing the souls of others who died in the building, condemning them to hell in his place and reveling in his power over others. Cheating damnation for over two hundred years, Pavayne targets a ghostly Spike as his latest victim, tormenting him with visions of Pavayne's past victims before revealing himself and moving on to physical and psychological torture. When Angel and his team bring in a psychic to help Spike, Pavayne gruesomely murders her to avoid detection. When Fred tries to make Spike corporeal again to save him, Pavayne starts strangling her, intending to force Spike to choose between saving himself or saving Fred and allowing Pavayne to send him to hell.

Boom! Studios Universe

Examples

• Buffy the Vampire Slayer:
  • Drusilla, reimagined here as both more intelligent and far more brutal, is an ancient vampire who seeks to cause as much destruction as she possibly can. Arriving in Sunnydale looking for a way to become invulnerable, Drusilla quickly abandons this goal in favor of emotionally breaking Buffy as much as possible. Catfishing Xander into believing he's going on a date with Buffy, she mentally breaks him until he agrees to be sired, ultimately leaving him to die on Giles's doorstep. Seeking to open the Hellmouth, Drusilla threatens an entire room full of innocents to receive the necessary tools, then stabs Spike in order to open the Hellmouth with his blood. After draining another innocent girl to finalize the ritual, she is betrayed and imprisoned by the Hellmother, yet still takes the time to turn Angel and Buffy against each other, willing to doom all of Earth just because she can.
  • Silas the Worldeater, also known as the "multiverse man", is a being who seeks to consume all life in the multiverse. Having already destroyed multiple worlds in the past, Silas has his demonic Lurkers patrol the multiverse, catching and consuming any who cross universes and setting his sights on the "World Without Shrimp" when Anya manages to cross over twice. Upon attacking Earth, Silas has his Lurkers attack anyone in sight, consuming their memories and leaving them as brain dead husks, eventually consuming most of Sunnydale, including Giles and Anya. Once forced into direct combat, Silas chops off two of Faith's fingers despite claiming to relate to her; forcefully removes Willow's last memories of her best friend Xander; ejects Ethan Rayne's ghost from his body to remove him from the battle; and consumes Buffy's memories with sadistic glee, forcing her into a world of endless nightmares.
• Hellmouth: The Hellmother is the Goddess of the Hellmouth who seeks to escape her confinement so as to destroy Earth. After Drusilla opens the Hellmouth, the Hellmother repays her by imprisoning her and using her as a puppet, drawing Angel and Buffy into the Hellmouth to utilize them in her escape. Mentally tormenting them with change demons to show them the friends they've failed to save in their journeys, the Hellmother also attempts to make the benevolent demon Augie kill Angel, mentally torturing him and breaking her promise to stop when he complies. Possessing Angel's body and attempting to drain Buffy's blood to escape, the Hellmother reveals that she has already destroyed multiple other dimensions before, reacting to her impending loss by trying to take Buffy with her.
• Angel/Angel + Spike:
  • Angelus is once again shown to be an utterly vile creature. Upon being sired at the age of 18, Angelus became a one-man scourge of humanity, traveling around Europe with the express purpose of killing everyone and everything he came across. Along the way, he sired dozens of convents around the continent, converting them into asylums for innocent girls to be thrown in and fed on in his name. In one specific instance, Angelus corrupted the noble demon hunter Mara into his greatest weapon, first by making her beg to be sired, then torturing her into accepting the thirst and then christening her Marius, his axe, so that they could destroy humanity together for another century. Not limiting himself to humanity, Angelus killed other demons as well, believing that the planet exists only for vampires to live on and ultimately seeking to wipe every other species off of the planet.
  • Issues #1-4: Amarkax is a demon that thrives off of human vanity. After spending centuries lurking in mirrors and paintings, Amarkax moves on to social media, tricking his victims into opening a link that makes them bring death to themselves and others. Introduced when he takes advantage of a young girl's self-esteem issues to make her burn her house down with herself and her parents inside, he goes on to possess Brewster, attempting to make her kill Fred to prevent Angel from forming the team he needs. When Angel enters Amarkax's dimension, he's found using dozens of his previous victims as a throne, sending apparitions of Angel's previous victims and dead friends to mentally torment the vampire into giving up and staying in his hell for all eternity.
• Chosen Ones' "The Mission": Father Luis is the Spanish leader of a Christian mission to the Americas. In truth a vampire seeking to create a "better world" for himself, Luis's mission attacks the village that will later become Sunnydale, enslaving the Natives to turn them all into cattle they can eat at their leisure. Although the village flees their assault, Luis tracks them down and kidnaps them all, intending to sacrifice them all in order to create a Hellmouth where he and his vampires can feed freely, purely out of the belief that eating the "savages" isn't a sin and that God is on his side. While Luis is stopped before the Hellmouth can be opened, he manages to create it, making him also directly responsible for all of the suffering Sunnydale and Buffy endure in the future.

Others

Literature

• The Book of Fours, by Nancy Holder: Cecile Lafitte is a voodoo priestess who serves the horrific demon known as the Gatherer, harvesting souls to give to him. Tormenting and experimenting on countless souls to make them into zombies, Cecile uses her descendants to return to life. In one case, upon returning to life, Cecile seduces plantation owner Duvalier, making him her servant, and has him burn his own family alive. In the present day, she aims to find and destroy Slayers to offer her master their special souls. Cecile destroys the Watcher of the previous Slayer Kendra before coming to Sunnydale, unleashing the Gatherer with the knowledge it will devour the world and all existence, keeping every soul it takes in unending torment within.
• "Die Blutgrafin" short story, by Yvonne Navarro, from Tales of the Slayer, Vol. 1: Elizabeth Báthory, the titular "Blood Countess", is a fiendish noblewoman who begins to abuse her servants before moving onto murder. Kidnapping hundreds of servant girls, Báthory has them starved and abused in squalid, filthy conditions. Savoring their pain, Báthory later has them tortured to death through various methods like the Iron Maiden, to which she subjects the heroine of the story, Slayer Ildikó Géllert. Báthory is a monstrous human who believes that bathing in the blood of her victims will give her immortality.
• Heat, by Nancy Holder:
  • Lir, Lord of Ice Hell, is a ferocious hellgod who is considered one of the most evil beings in existence. Pure evil from birth, Lir, eons before the novel, systematically wiped out every living thing in his dimension before attempting to move onto and take his killings to other worlds. Defeated by a Champion of the Powers that Be, Lir was sealed within the dimension of Sol and uses his son Emperor Qin as an avenue to free himself. In the present, Lir uses Qin to conduct a massive sacrifice of thousands of innocents to free himself. Lir later manipulates Jhiera into freeing him, intending to ultimately betray her and keep her as a Sex Slave as a symbol of his victory. Using his dragon Flamestryke, Lir sets waste to various locations all across the world, ultimately intending to slaughter the inhabitants of various dimensions across the multiverse to satisfy his sadism.
  • Qin Shi Huangdi is Lir's son and is just as evil as his demonic father. As the first Emperor of China, Qin spent decades killing, enslaving, and raping everyone he came across to form his empire, slaughtering dozens of villages along the way. In the modern day, Qin seeks to reawaken the dragon Fire Storm in the hopes to summon Lir and kill every non-Chinese human on Earth; the ceremony to do so requires having 1,000 souls ripped out of innocent sacrifices. Once Fire Storm is awake, Qin takes control of the terracotta soldiers in Los Angeles and marches them toward Fai-Lok's forces, leading to countless death and destruction as the soldiers kill everyone in their path. Caring for nothing but ultimate power, Qin causes so much destruction that the only way to repair it is for Wolfram & Hart to reverse time so that his crusade never began in the first place.
• Go Ask Malice, by Robert Joseph Levy: Kakistos, one of the oldest and most powerful vampires in history, easily earns his title as "The Worst of the Worst". For centuries, Kakistos rampaged across the world, destroying countless villages and towns in his wake. In each location, Kakistos would slaughter the men before capturing the women, torturing, raping, and branding them until they willingly called him The Father and served as his maenads. One such incident saw him capture the young daughter of a Slayer, Alexandria, and torture and rape her until it became clear she wouldn't break, at which point he threw her in his dungeon to die. In the present, Kakistos targets Faith Lehane by capturing her Watcher, Professor Diane Dormer, to lure Faith to her; when Faith arrives, Kakistos rips Diane in half, then attempts to enslave Faith herself.

Miscellaneous

• 1992 film & The Origin:
  • Lothos is an ancient vampire, famous and feared for killing numerous Slayers over the centuries. Arriving in Los Angeles, Lothos starts a new killing spree to track down Buffy and take over the city, having his follower Amilyn turn numerous people into his vampiric army for him and bring him new victims to feed on, even turning one of Buffy's friends to find her and killing another. During his first confrontation with Buffy, Lothos kills her watcher Merrick by turning his stake onto him, letting Buffy go at the time as he was expecting more of a challenge. Later, Lothos leads his minions on an attack at the school, killing several students. Lothos is completely indifferent towards his followers and their deaths, as seen when he refuses to save Amylin when Buffy stakes him, giving him an unsympathetic smile as he mockingly plays a fiddle. After Lothos fails to hypnotize and/or seduce Buffy, he stops his flirtatious advancements in favor of going in for the kill, putting his sadistic personality on full display as he notes to the rest of the students that he will kill them all himself once he's done with Buffy.
  • Amilyn is Lothos's right-hand vampire and just as cruel as his master. Having served Lothos with immense bloodshed for centuries, Amilyn proceeds to convert numerous humans into vampires to build Lothos a "new family", also having them kill multiple other humans while bringing victims to Lothos himself. Harboring an intense grudge to the human Pike for ruining his jacket and left arm, Amilyn intends to kill him slow and eventually leads a vampire attack on prom, with orders to kill everyone inside while he lures Buffy to Lothos.
• Past Lives crossover comic: Angelus remains as creatively vile as he always is. After meeting the vampire hunter Andrew Landry and deeming him arrogant, Angelus decided to break the man in every way he could. Beginning by murdering his fellow hunters, Angelus would then spend 15 years killing everyone the man so much as knew, including by shooting them full of arrows and presenting their decapitated heads on Andrew's front gates. When his plan began winding down, Angelus sneaks into Andrew's home and sires his wife, forcing Andrew to murder her and rendering him insane. Paying him one final visit in an asylum, Angelus reveals that he spared Andrew's son Alex in order to keep Andrew sane enough to comprehend what was done to him, alongside ensuring that Alex would grow up alone and miserable, all because Andrew once reminded him of his own father.
• Oz comic, written by Christopher Golden: Muztag is a demon Black Market trader who endeavors to control the entire Asian market. After previously being defeated by Master Shantou, Muztag gathered an army and stormed his monastery, killing or mystically enslaving everyone there except for him, just to spite his enemy. With Shantou crippled, Muztag begins rampaging across the countryside, destroying at least two villages within days and killing dozens of people in each one. After killing a prisoner who refuses to be enslaved by him, Muztag captures Shantou, intending to have him executed by one of his former students out of a sadistic sense of irony.

---