"And that's all there is to report from the happiest place on earth: evil family members, psychotic killers, and of course the prince of all darkness himself, Satan."
The Mad Doctor: The Mad Doctor is a one-shot character *
aside from Epic Mickey
for Disney. He was an insane, amoral and power-hungry Mad Scientist. In the short, he kidnaps Pluto and plans on chopping off his head and grafting it to a chicken, for no other reason than For Science! (and to discover what sound the resulting animal would make afterwards). Not to mention that he decidedly cut apart Pluto's cartoon Living Shadow for his own amusement. He also traps Mickey Mouse, after he went searching for Pluto, and prepares to saw his body in half, laughing while doing it. Thankfully, turns out it was All Just a Dream by Mickey.
When The Mad Doctor strapped the dog to a chair while wearing a mask, a captive chicken looked a bit alarmed, but not profoundly upset. As soon as The Mad Doctor took off his mask, the chicken broke down in tears, implying in turn that, at least in the chicken's presence, The Mad Doctor has done things far worse than drag a dog around and strap said dog to a chair. Sweet dreams!
In The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Judge Claude Frollo is likely one of the most evil characters the company has ever invented. The opening riddle regarding him and Quasimodo is even "Who is the monster and who is the man?" Most Disney villains want to do things like... take over a kingdom. Old-school villainy. Frollo wants to...er, commit genocide. His creepy, creepy lust for Esmeralda only heightens the revulsion audiences have for him, and there aren't any other Disney villains who've tried to burn entire innocent families alive in their homes, either. A notable exception to other Disney Laughably Evil villains. Even being a classic case of Knight Templar, the things he does casts his "good intentions" as being sham and hollow.
The Coachman from Pinocchio. Seemingly a kindly old gentleman, he kidnaps a bunch of troublesome boys who willingly went through with it so they could do whatever they wanted without adult supervision, and laces their cigars and beer with something that, when they act like jerks, turns them into donkeys he then sells as ordinary animals (one crate is even marked "SALT MINES". Considering the Real Life work conditions there, that's a Fate Worse than Death right there). Nightmare Fuel much? From what he says to "Honest" John, he has been doing this for years, and the police have never caught him because by the time they arrive, the boys have all become donkeys, leaving no evidence that they were even there. The transformed boys who can still talk are locked up in a pen (it is unclear what becomes of them, though we're probably better off not knowing). Worst of all, he is a Karma Houdini*
Although you do kick his ass in the SNES game of the same name.
.
The Horned King from The Black Cauldron. A dark, terrifying, power-hungry tyrant with a god complex and absolutely No Sense of Humor (a rare case for a Disney villain which makes him more creepy). He plans to obtain the powers of the titular Cauldron in order to raise an army of undead skeletons to rule the world and so destroy thousands of human lives. He stops at nothing to achieve his goal, even if it means kidnapping and/or killing an innocent girl or a harmless little pig.
He also has a bit of an ego to him. His motive behind conquering the world is forcing all of humanity to worship him as a god.
Percival McLeach from The Rescuers Down Under. It starts with his kidnapping Cody, a child who confronts him about his poaching, and then McLeach tricks the authorities into thinking Cody is dead, by throwing Cody's backpack to the crocodiles. From there he tosses knives at Cody, locks him in one of the cramped cages he keeps the animals he's captured in, and to top it all off, ties Cody to a crane and lowers him into another river filled with crocodiles, only to raise him back up — then almost does it again just to toy with him. When the power on the halftrack goes out, stopping him from lowering Cody, McLeach takes out a gun and shoots the rope holding him above the river, which suggests that he was originally intent on murdering Cody anyway, and that he wanted to torture him first regardless. Oh, and it is heavily implied that the reason he is a poacher is specifically because he enjoys hurting and killing animals.
Suggest? It's clear from the start that McLeach was going to kill him. Cody knew where McLeach's hideout was, knew what he was planning, and was all in all too much of an inconvenience to let live. What makes it worse is that McLeach is ENJOYING torturing Cody while he is dunking him in the crocodile-filled water. He is deeply annoyed and disappointed only at the thought that he has to do it quickly when Bernard ruins it for him.
What Complete Monster list involving would be complete without a mention of Sykes? This is a villain who is willing to roll up a car window against the neck of someone who failed to pay back a loan, (Sykes later releases attack dogs against the pet dog of the same victim) or to kidnap a little girl to try to extort money from her wealthy parents. Oh, and when said girl and the in-debt-guy from earlier are trying to escape via vehicle, he chases them into the New York subway system with his expensive car and attack dogs. Said attack dogs are also incredibly vicious, which leaves one wondering how Sykes raised them.
There's also his phone call; he seems to be talking to another mobster who is about half-way through the process of killing somebody, and actually gives him advice on how to do it.
What makes Sykes a true monster is probably the fact he's one of the most realistic Disney villains- he's a crime boss and during the phone call he talks about "cement shoes" which were used by the American Mafia for a method of execution that involved weighting down a victim and throwing him or her into the water to drown.
Even Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, the very first Disney Animated Canon movie ever, arguably has a Complete Monster in the form of Queen Grimhilde. This sinister queen/sorceress can't stand the idea of someone being more beautiful than herself and she is cruel enough to take drastic steps to ensure this will never happen. It is shown when she orders to kill her own stepdaughter and then having her heart put in a box, in order to have the proof of her death. When she figures out The Huntsman failed her she, ironically, transforms herself from a beautiful, yet evil woman into an old, grotesque and frightening one to cover her indentity, and plans to poison Snow White with the Poison Apple. Although she reads that the victim of the poison can be revived by 'Love's First Kiss', she convinces herself (with fiendish glee) that the Dwarfs will bury Snow White alive. Once she gains the Hag form, she becomes more excited and sadistic, starting to feel the enjoyment in what she is doing and becoming more sinister. It is no longer a necessity to kill Snow White, it is a pleasure.
The queen's excitement at the idea of Snow White being buried alive was her most disturbing and horrifying moment. Can you imagine what it'd be like to be buried alive? How sick would you have to be to enjoy the thought of someone suffering that?
John Silver, the main antagonist of Treasure Planet is one of the most sympathetic villains in the Disney Animated Canon, but that film still has a pretty clean-cut Complete Monster in Scroop, the "spider psycho" secondary villain. He gleefully murders Mr. Arrow for virtually no reason at all and then makes his death look like it was Jim's fault and it's pretty clear that Silver is the only thing stopping him from also murdering everyone else. He also mocks Silver for the affection he for Jim in an implied attempt to get the rest of the crew to overthrow him.
Mulan: This trope is basically the entire characterization of Shan-Yu. He commits atrocities (slaughtering an entire village of innocents just to destroy the emperor's army, for instance), is feared by every character who doesn't follow him, has no excuse other than wishing to prove his power, sadistically enjoys his atrocities (he's smiling when talking about murdering a child), and naturally, he isn't redeemed.
Hopper from A Bug's Life merits a mention. He terrorizes a peaceful colony (including the children), steals so much food that said colony faces starvation, and plans to murder their queen. It is later revealed that he and his gang don't even need what they're stealing and he kills three members of his own gang when they point this out!
Unlike most Pixar villains like the ones mentioned below, Hopper has no known Freudian Excuse, which even other Complete Monster Pixar villains tend to have.
Pixar villains nothing, Hopper tends to have less of an excuse for his evil than most Disney villains as a whole. Even Frollo, often regarded as one of Disney's darkest and cruelest villains ever, might at least think he's the good guy here (or at the very least think think he is carrying out God's will by doing these acts), whereas Hopper's expressed motives are all about "keeping those ants in line." Needless to say, watching him get eaten by a bird is very satisfying.
Earlier in the movie he tells his dimwitted brother he would've killed him years ago if not for his mother's wishes to watch over him, and at one point he tries to punch him but he cannot due to the oath and punches out a smaller weaker bug instead.
Lotso from Toy Story 3 . He allows the toys to be tortured by the too-young toddlers in the Caterpillar room, and will do anything just to keep his reign. Here's just a short list of his atrocities: lying to Big Baby and Chuckles just so he wouldn't be alone in being lost, ordering the resetting of Buzz Lightyear, watching him beat down his former friends with a cold sense of satisfaction, beating Chatter Telephone to a pulp in order to find out about Woody's escape plan, and, in the climax of the film, he leaves Andy's toys to burn in the Incinerator after they risked their lives to save him! And he does so with a SMILE, a mocking salute and while yelling out "Where's your kid NOW, sheriff?!" And while he does have a sad backstory, there's a scene where Woody point blank calls him out on how weak it is (his owner replacing him with a new Lotso was, considering she doesn't know toys are alive, a sign of how she loved Lotso; bascially Woody says that it was Lotso who abandoned HER.) He is likely competing with Clu and Judge Frollo for Disney's most evil villain. Karma does kick him in the balls when he gets condemned to an eternity in a dump due to the very emotion that he scorned.
In fact, as a result of his actions, Lotso was so hated that even the DISNEY STORE CLERKStried discouraging a IMDb commentator's mother from buying a real Lotso bear at the Disney store in the local mall. When Disney creates a character so thoroughly despised that even the Disney staff want to prevent his merchandise from being brought, that's saying something.
TV series
Mirage (Name's the Same not that one), because unlike the other villains, she has no motivation in destroying Agrabah other than for her own malice. Iago even mentions her a evil incarnate.
The best example is Sa'Luk from Aladdin And The King Of Thieves. He is very ruthless, showing a very cruel sense of humor and he has a pleasure in killing! He is also willing to betray and/or kill his own people in order to get what he wants and he also manipulates many characters!! In the end when he finds Aladdin and his father with a golden hand of Midas, he demands them to give it to him, or he will kill Aladdin. When they give it to him, he decides to kill Aladdin anyway, just for pleasure! It is very satisfying to see him than turn into gold.
For the most part, this series has a well-deserved reputation for sympathetic and three-dimensional villains - Xanatos pets at least as many dogs as he kicks, while Demona has an involved and tragic backstory that keeps her sympathetic despite the often extreme evil of her present appearances. There are, however, a few unrepentantly horrible ones, and perhaps most extreme of these is the sadistic Psycho for Hire Jackal. In most of his appearances his employers manage to keep his evil somewhat in check, but the episode "Grief" more than cements his presence here - upon acquiring the power of Anubis, he attempts to wipe out every living thing on the planet just because he can.
From the same series, the Archmage is also a candidate, as is Thailog depending on how squickily you want to interpret his relationships with various other characters, particularly the clones.
Thailog DEFINITELY qualifies from what he did in the first comic arc to Goliath. Shoved a blade into his "father"'s stomach just to collect his DNA, and collected the DNA of the other clones and the rest of the Clan. As well as before, making the Clones beat the shit out of Maggie who had gotten pregnant. And before he made Demona think he loved her so he could get her and Macbeth to kill each other due to their Taking You with Me curse, and ordered Delilah-the Half-Human Hybrid clone- to shoot Angela when Demona couldn't do so.
Proteus, a shapeshifting Serial Killer who wants to destroy his own people's city. While in confinement he gets his kicks by shapeshifting into the form of the Security Chief's father, the previous Chief whom Proteus murdered. Let me reiterate that: After being sent to prison for trying to commit genocide on his own people by destroying their city and murdering the cop who stopped him he gets his kicks by tormenting the cop's son with his dead father's image.
Anton Sevarius probably also counts, using his knowledge of genetics to create not only the numerous clones but also a disease that Demona nearly used to wipe out all humanity (though being human, he presumably he didn't realize she had the magic to achieve that). Since he's Thailog's "third" father this might explain something.
In the Gargoyles comic book spin-off, we get a glimpse of Dingo's past when he was just a boy: An acquaintance of his family, John Oldcastle, murdered his mother and lied to him by saying she just ran off since she's a free spirit. Oldcastle promise to take care of him until she returns. In truth, he just raised Dingo in becoming his partner in crime.
There are a few characters in Kim Possible who come pretty close to this. Monkey Fist becomes this in season 4 when he shows he's perfectly willing to kill and/or corrupt a baby and even makes a deal with a powerful and evil supernatural entity to do it. This is arguably Character Derailment and a source of debate among fans. Erik the Synthodrone after The Reveal in So the Drama. Finally, the Grand Finale brings us Warhok and Warmonga, a couple of powerful alien bullies willing to lay waste to an entire planet in retaliation forone human taking advantage of Warmonga's gullibility. They're also willing to kill a teenage girl and mount her on a wall as a trophy. These also happen to be the only villains to suffer karmic punishment: Monkey Fist is turned to stone after his Deal with the Devil goes awry, Erik gets bitten by Rufus and shuts down when his Syntho-goo leaks out, and Warhok and Warmonga get beat down by Mystical Monkey Powered Ron and actually die when he throws them at their own warship.
Penelope, in the Sonny With A Chance episode, Sonny With a Secret. While she seems sweet and innocent at first, that changes later in. Her atrocities include getting Sonny framed for stealing twice (once by sneaking an unpaid for necklace into Sonny's bag while she was shopping with her and Tawni, another by sneaking Grady's golden chocolate coin into her coat pocket while hugging her), and for plagarism, leaving Sonny's friends to die in an unpiloted plane without parachutes, and replacing Sonny's cheeseball with a bomb in an attempt to kill her when she sets it off at her high school ceremony. And she does this all because she was jealous of Sonny and Chad's relationship and wanted him to herself. Far beyond what you expect from your average kids sitcom.
Merlock from DuckTales the Movie: Treasure of the Lost Lamp. A power-mad Evil Sorcerer, he was able to bypass the three-wish limit on the magic lamp using his talisman, essentially getting as many wishes as he wants. Genie gives us a few examples of what he wished for: "You ever hear of Atlantis? It used to be everyone's favorite resort 'til Merlock couldn't get reservations. Then down she went! And poor Pompeii! Mount Vesuvius wouldn't have blown its top if Merlock hadn't blown his!" Oh, and his first wish was to live forever. In a nutshell, folks, Merlock is an undying tyrant with a hair trigger and a god complex whose idea of blowing off steam is murdering entire cities.
Taurus Bulba is probably a bigger Complete Monster than the rest of the villains with almost no ounce of comedy at all. The latter are at least over-the-top funny in their Complete Monster-dom half of the time. Taurus had Gosalyn's grandfather murdered, and when he was trying to get the code for the ram rod, he threatened to drop Gosalyn off a building if Darkwing didn't get the code, he had no proof that Darkwing was told of a code, and was willing to try it, and when he was resurrected by F.O.W.L., he destroyed the dang place. All played completely seriously.
Negaduck also counts. Though played over-the-top funny alot of the times, he's still treated as an extremely dangerous villain in-show, and some of the things that he does are pretty much Joker-level in their insanity and cruelty.
The Huntsman is the worst of them all, seeing as he is their leader. He kidnapped Rose at birth and is quite possibly the one who personally brainwashed her into believing in the Huntsclan way of life. As Rose's abduction means that this is probably the way that all Huntsclan members are recruited, this possibly gives him somewhat of a Freudian Excuse. However, seeing as his hatred has consumed him to the point where he has continued to kidnap infants from their parents despite knowing that he himself was kidnapped, he could be considered even more of a monster. The Huntsman has also killed a magical creature onscreen and, of course, who could forget that when he found out about Rose's Heel Face Turn, he threatened to kill her parents if she refused to help him acquire the means to kill every single magical creature on the face of the Earth.
The Dark Dragon is also a nasty piece of work. While he has much less screentime than the Huntsman, he makes up for it with the sheer scale of his evil. He basically wants to corrupt all magical beings and wipe out humanity. There's a reason the rest of the dragons consider him the Big Bad and not the Huntsman (though Jake and the Huntsman have a much deeper personal grudge).
Just an idea of how horrible the scales are: On a list dedicated to the 13 most evil beings in the Magical World, The Huntsman is only listed as #4, with the Dark Dragon taking the #1 spot.
The Tracker. His Nightmare Fuel appearance and complete lack of personality besides relentlessly trying to kill the heroes definitely solidifies him as the show's most evil character.
Buzz Lightyear of Star Command has some, but the particular example is Evil Buzz Lightyear from an alternate universe. He manipulates Gravitina, who's in love with him, by pretending he loves her as well, but when her life is in danger, he doesn't even try to help! He even reacts to her cries sarcastically. Let's also mention NOS-4-A2. He is a vampire robot who enjoys torturing other machines and he brainwashed XR into becaming evil. Actually, his goal is pretty evil. He wants to turn the WHOLE UNIVERSE INTO MACHINES! As a result, he's one of the few villains to get Killed Off for Real in his last appearance. Ironically, Zurg himself, who was considered as the most evil villain in the whole galaxy, avoids falling into this trope due to being very much an Ineffectual Sympathetic Villain.
Live-action films
Andrei Strasser from 1998's Mighty Joe Young is an Evil Poacher definetly turned Up to Eleven and possibly even worse than Percival McLeach since he's played on more realistic levels. Killing little Joe's mother was just the beginning, he also did the same thing to Dr Ruth Young when she tries to save the little gorilla (it's uncertain if he did it on purpouse, anyway he feels no remorse about it). He also owns a fake animal preserve while he actually secretly butchers endangered species and selling the animal organs off on the black market. This guy is so ruthless that even his partner in crime decides to quit when he arrives at trying to shoot Jill Young.
Clu. Here is a brief list of his atrocities: ordering the Holocaust-caliber genocide of ISO programs, manipulating the people of the real world in order to send the page to Alan Bradley, nonchalantly sending programs to their deaths at the Game Grid, blowing up the End of Line Club which killed Daft Punk and his loyal agents Castor/Zuse and Gem, killing Jarvis for letting the heroes escape, and, in the climax, he brainwashes programs into becoming armies. including the title character, hellbent on ridding the real world of its "imperfections." And even after crossing the Moral Event Horizon he steals Tron'sLight Jet and ultimately tries to kill Sam and Quorra instead of his creator near the end. All of these are found in a film AIMED FOR CHILDREN. Clu not only singlehandedly made this film Darker and Edgier than the 1982 original, he also established himself as the Judge Frollo of Live-Action Disney films.
And if anyone thinks that Clu was beyond forgiveness in the movie. Well, that was NOTHING compared to his portrayal in the tie-in game TRON: Evolution. You just have to hear him talk during the cutscenes and during the final fight against his minions to know that he doesn't care about anyone as long he gets what he wants.
Master Control in the original wasn't a slouch, either. He was just as bad about "re-purposing" Programs into his armies, inflicting persecutions against any Program that still believed and served the Users, forcing the Programs into Involuntary Battle to the Death against their fellow conscripts, Cold-Blooded Torture against enemies that he didn't put in the Games (Dumont, Clu 1.0), and casually letting Dillinger know that he was "bored" with corporate systems and was going to take over the Pentagon and Kremlin within a few weeks if Flynn, Tron, and Yori hadn't taken his ass offline!
Judge Doom (played totally against his type by Christopher Lloyd) from Who Framed Roger Rabbit. We all deduce he's a bad guy the first time we see him but we don't know he's a bit more than a classical villain. He's the much feared Hanging Judge of Toontown, who thinks - as he says - the only way to "put an end to insanity is make sure toons respect the law''. So - in order to give examples - he mercilessly executes any harmless toon who stands on his way (which particulary enjoys it) - melting it in the Dip (a mixture of turpentine, acetone, benzine and the only way to kill a toon). In one of the most infamous scenes of the movie he even melts a poor little toon shoe. It's then revealed he's the mind behind the murders Marvin Acme (which Roger Rabbit has been framed for) and RK Maroon and he intends to erase Toontown and its citizens from the face of the Earth to build a freeway due its profit and benefits. Ironically he is also revealed to be actually a psycho redeyed toon killer himself in human disguise who killed Eddie Valiant's brother long ago, and dies melted away by his own creation (the Dip itself).
Just to clarify, he basically engineered the genocide of his own species to profit from another species' (humans') greed. The sheer wrongness of such a villain in an eighties family-friendly movie is astounding.
The second and third movie have a Complete Monster in Cutler Beckett, who goes so far as to order the deaths of anyone remotely associated with piracy, including the hanging of a 10-year-old boy. In a DISNEY film. Smug Snake, smug smile, smug everything...ugh.
There's also the fact that Beckett isn't having these people hanged because he's punishing them for their crimes, but merely because they're inconvenient to him. He also has Governor Swann, who was an ally, if a coerced one, and certainly wasn't a pirate by any stretch, killed just because he was becoming a liability. Oh, and per supplemental materials, he spent at least some time as a slaver. Values Dissonance aside, modern audiences are clearly intended to react to the guy as pure evil.
Arguably, by extension, every officer and soldier who thought that hanging a child was an acceptable act. The films are made for modern audiences, after all. When Beckett hung all those children, we're clearly meant to think of it as objectively wrong, not as Values Dissonance.
A particularly nasty one of those henchmen is Mercer. He is Beckett's only henchman who seems to enjoy serving to Beckett. When Beckett asks him for help in any act (often immoral), Mercer comes and takes joy in doing it. Oh, and it should be also mentioned how he killed Captain Hawkins, and reacted to this evil act with a dark humor!
Blackbeard from the fourth film is also an example: He enjoys torturing his prisoners, locks them in cages and burns them alive, punishes anyone who tries to disagree with him, his horrible treatment of Syrena, and in the end, he is ready to sacrifice his OWN DAUGHTER, to save his own life. His disregard for his own daughter's life was even implied when he was ready to force Jack Sparrow to jump the gorge under the threat of her death, and ordered a mook to load two guns with a bullet each, and keep even himself in the dark as to which guns are loaded, and later lied to his daughter about knowing which ones are loaded..
Although this is better for Literature, the adaptation of this book, Holes by Louis Sachar, was made by Disney. And it has a couple Complete Monsters but the best example is Trout Walker. He is the grandfather of the film's Big Bad. First he has a crush on a woman; it looks like he is a good guy. But when he notices her kissing a black man, what does he do? He tells this to the whole town, and first burns the whole school building, then he kills the black manand his donkey, Mary Lou. Later, after thirteen years, when he lost his fortune due to the fact that the lake dried up, and the woman he had a crush on came back, he asked her where she buried the treasure and he tried to torture her in a most painful way in order to find out. When the woman got bitten by a yellow-spotted lizard however, the only thing he could do was to dig. And he forced his granddaughter to dig with him, he was very abusive and he forced her to work even ON CHRISTMAS!!!! That being said, it makes even the Warden, who is said granddaughter of Trout Walker, and also horrific in her own right, someone to be pitied and felt sorry for.
Princess Mombi somehow manages to outdo the Wicked Witch of the West in sheer unpleasantness: let's start with the asking price for helping the Nome King- the heads of several beautiful women. Mombi keeps these heads, still alive and still conscious, in a hall of cabinets; every so often, she'll "slip into something more comfortable" by swapping heads. And when Dorothy arrived in the Emerald City, Mombi had her imprisoned, fully intending to keep her there until she reached adulthood just so she could have a fully-mature head to add to her "collection."
The Phantom in Phantom Manor - he kills Melanie's groom hanging him in the Stretching Room, condemns the Bride to haunt the mansion forever and now he taunts the guests (that's "us") with his sadistic tricks and humor.
