Villain-Based Franchise

"One, two, Freddy's coming for you"... again, and again, and again...

"If you continue with the villain as the center of the story, which is certainly the Nightmare paradigm, you simply have to introduce a new set of victims every time. And after a while that becomes quite repetitive when you have no real story continuity except the villain. So then you sort of have to continue to concoct things like Freddy's youth or Freddy's this or that...but I think it gets stretched thinner and thinner."

— Wes Craven, discussing the potential pitfalls of this trope.

A franchise linked by a recurring villain. The heroes and the locations may change or be dropped, but the central link remains the villain. The villain is frequently the Big Bad of the franchise and most or all of its installments, though this doesn't have to be the case to qualify for the trope.

This is not the same as a franchise with a Villain Protagonist, which may introduce a whole new set of heroes with each installment, but usually keeps the villain as the protagonist.

This trope is very popular with the Slasher Movie genre, probably because the heroes can die off in the end without ruining the series. Often though, the villain will appear to die at the end, to allow closure to the series if another one is not made. The End... Or Is It? ending optional. Naturally, Joker Immunity is in full force. There are a few iconic horror heroes, like Dr. Van Helsing, but they're usually a lot less prominent and iconic than their respective villains. Ash Williams may be the only real exception.

The trope's idea started with Pulp novels and villains like Fu Manchu or Fantômas.

If the franchise is named after the villain, do not confuse this with Antagonist Title. If the villain themselves appears as a mascot, they are a Mascot Villain. While the recurring villain in a Villain-Based Franchise usually features as the Villain Antagonist in the individual installments rather than as an outright Villain Protagonist, they are still the overarching main character in the series as a whole, disqualifying them from this trope.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The Time Bokan series has the most focus on the villains than the heroes. The Doronbo Gang from Yatterman in particular serve as the mascots for the whole franchise.
• Although most of the Puella Magi Madoka Magica spin-off works have at least something to do with the protagonists of the main show, this is not always the case. For those works, the presence of the Incubator Hive Mind aka Kyubey is by necessity what links them together, as they have to be there to make the characters Magical Girls and manipulate them into falling to despair, which is the focus of the franchise.
• Kichikujima has the family of cannibal mutant Cultists the most prominent being Kaoru,his father Yoshikazu,and his sister Mari appearing in the prequel series Zoumotsujima and other spin-offs.
• The plot of Monster is driven by its titular Big Bad, Johann Liebert, for whom said nickname is very well-earned.
• Paranoia Agent does have recurring heroes and side characters with their own story arcs, but the show never focuses solely on one of them, while every single episode focuses at least somewhat on Li'l Slugger/Shonen Bat, the serial assaulter. (As well as fictional character Maromi, because it's eventually revealed that they are basically the same thing, or at least connected phenomena.)
• Tomie, by Junji Ito, is this kind of series. The only truly recurring character across the various story arcs is Tomie herself, a seemingly demonic teenage girl whose very presence causes other people to fall madly in love with her and eventually kill her, over and over again.

Comic Books

• Batman: The Joker had a short comics series of his own in the 1970s.
• Doctor Who: The BBC attempted to give the evil Daleks their own spinoff in The '60s, but all it ended up amounting to were a few Dalek comic books.
• Spider-Man: The series took a stab at this after a storyline in which Doctor Octopus successfully pulled a Grand Theft Me on Peter Parker, resulting in the book being retooled into Superior Spider Man. As with Lex above, the reset button was eventually pushed on this, but Marvel milked a couple of years worth of stories and plenty of outrage sales out of the stunt.
• Superman: Following Brightest Day, the Superman-based title Action Comics was retooled to star Superman's Arch-Enemy Lex Luthor, even being billed as Lex Luthor's Action Comics. This lasted about a year and followed Luthor's quest at godhood, which culminated in him actually getting it only to lose it when a condition of the godhood was that he couldn't use his new power to harm Superman.
• The Tomb of Dracula: The series stars Dracula, of course.

Films — Animated

• Disney Animated Canon:
  • Disney Villains. Most animated Disney films that failed at the box office will inevitably become this.
  • When The Black Cauldron failed, the Horned King became the only character from the film to ever appear in the merchandise.
  • Although 101 Dalmatians did fine at the box office, this has definitely happened with Cruella de Vil. Since the original release of the animated film, she's become a Breakout Character of the franchise. When the 1996 live-action film came along, Cruella de Vil was treated as the starring role and the central character, with Glenn Close's name written in big letters on all the posters, and the 2021 prequel was outright titled Cruella. There's also a Broadway musical, and again Cruella (played by Rachel York) was treated as the starring role.

Films — Live-Action

• The Abominable Dr. Phibes and its sequel, Dr. Phibes Rises Again. Each gives the eponymous abominable doctor a new nemesis, with the only other recurring characters being a pair of ineffectual detectives.
• The Alien franchise are all linked by the titular alien species that serves as the villains. While the original film series all featured Ellen Ripley as the protagonist, the introduction of the prequels, without Ripley, turned it into a villain-based franchise. The aliens also provide the villains in the Alien vs. Predator series since the Predators are the Lesser of Two Evils between them—as murderous as they are, they can at least potentially be reasoned with.
• Art the Clown is a character created by Damien Leone as the villain of the short films The 9th Circle and Terrifier, later compiled into the Genre Anthology film All Hallows' Eve, followed by the feature film Terrifier and its sequel. Played by Mike Gianelli in the short films and David Howard Thornton in the feature films, Art is a Monster Clown slasher villain characterized by Black Comedy, the brutality of his kills, and his Monster Misogyny.
• The Child's Play series featuring Chucky, a Killer Doll possessed by the spirit of the Serial Killer Charles Lee Ray. Like with Freddy Krueger in A Nightmare on Elm Street, Chucky has been voiced by Brad Dourif in every film barring the 2019 remake, which cast Mark Hamill. Notably, the series itself calls them "Chucky movies"; every film after Child's Play 3 has been titled some variation of "[blank] of Chucky", and the TV series is titled simply Chucky, largely due to a complicated legal tangle.^note Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer owns the rights to the first movie and the Child's Play title, but Don Mancini owns the rights to the sequels and the franchise. This is why the 2019 remake had to heavily alter Chucky's backstory, as using the one from the films would have run up against Mancini's property. The later films Bride of Chucky and Seed of Chucky added a secondary villain in Chucky's lover Tiffany, voiced by Jennifer Tilly. The first three movies featured a central hero, Andy Barclay, but after the commercial failure of the third movie it was decided to retool the franchise into this (though Andy has returned in the more recent films as an adult after being Put on a Bus through the 2000s).
• The Doctor Mabuse series is one of The Oldest Ones in the Book, starting before talkies.
• The Final Destination series, where the recurring villain is Fate or Death itself. There are only two recurring characters: William Bludworth, who functions primarily as a creepy Mr. Exposition for the doomed heroes in each film, and the first film's Final Girl Clear Rivers, who gets killed off in the second film.
• Rob Zombie's "Firefly Trilogy" of House of 1000 Corpses, The Devil's Rejects, and 3 from Hell has the Firefly family, a family of backwoods serial killers based on the Sawyers from the below-mentioned The Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Notably, it's a franchise in which they were elevated to outright Villain Protagonists by the second movie.
• The Friday the 13th series featuring Jason Voorhees. The first movie did not have Jason as the killer, but his crazy mom instead, while the fifth movie features a Jack the Ripoff killer imitating the dead Jason. Even so, however, Jason is so deeply associated with the series that the titles of the last three films before it was remade (Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, Jason X, and Freddy vs. Jason) don't even have the full title of the series in them — but do prominently feature Jason's name, such that the series as a whole is often called simply "the Jason movies" without any confusion as to what the person using the term is talking about. Otherwise, the closest thing the series had to a recurring protagonist was Tommy Jarvis from the fourth, fifth, and sixth films.
• Godzilla, on the occasions that he's a villain.
• The Hatchet films have Victor Crowley, who is notably played by Kane Hodder, the most famous of the various actors/stuntmen to play the aforementioned Jason Voorhees. While the first three films do have a recurring heroine in Marybeth Dunston, she was recast in the second film (with Danielle Harris replacing Tamara Feldman) and is outright gone from the fourth film outside The Stinger, while Hodder played Crowley through all four films. The fourth film, in fact, is simply titled Victor Crowley.
• Jurassic Park trended this way with the later films, with the dinosaurs, particularly carnivores like the Tyrannosaurus rex, as the iconic villains. The series does have recurring characters like Alan Grant, Ellie Sattler, Ian Malcolm, Owen Grady, and Claire Dearing, but they don't appear in every film.
• The titular Living Dead are the only common link in the Living Dead Series by George A. Romero and John Russo, as well as The Return of the Living Dead by Russo (a spinoff that takes the original Night of the Living Dead (1968) as a form of Fiction as Cover-Up) and Zombi 2 by Lucio Fulci (an independent film that was marketed as an unofficial sequel to Dawn of the Dead (1978), which was titled Zombi in Italy).
• The Halloween series featuring Michael Myers. Laurie Strode and Dr. Sam Loomis did serve as heroes for most of the series, but Laurie was absent from the fourth, fifth, and sixth films (the "Curse of Thorn" timeline; all of these, incidentally, had Michael Myers' full name in the title), while Loomis was absent from the H20 timeline (which also includes Halloween: Resurrection) and the 2018 timeline, save for a flashback in Halloween Kills. Notably, John Carpenter originally wanted to avert this and turn Halloween into a Genre Anthology series, making the third movie, Halloween III: Season of the Witch, about a wholly separate story from the first two. Fan and critical backlash to that film caused him to sell the rights to Moustapha Akkad, who brought Michael back with the fourth film, titled Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers to signify that The Shape was returning. After that, there was no looking back.
• The Hellraiser films eventually became one of these as they focused more on Pinhead, played by Doug Bradley for eight films, from the original up until Hellworld. The series did initially have a recurring protagonist in Kirsty Cotton, but she was Put on a Bus after the second film and only brought back with the sixth film, Hellseeker, as a villain. Bradley eventually left the series when the poor quality and Ashcan Copy nature of Revelations proved to be too much even for him to take, though the part was simply recast from there and the series kept going.
• Jaws with the titular sharks. While the series did have some recurring characters like the Brody family and Mayor Larry Vaughn, the recurring plot element in each film was a Threatening Shark attacking a seaside resort and eating people, and some of the sequels either imply or explicitly state that their killer sharks are related to the one from the original.
• The Leprechaun series with the titular character, played by Warwick Davis in every film except the 2014 reboot Leprechaun: Origins, and the continuity ignoring sequel to the original film Leprechaun Returns from 2018.
• The Maniac Cop trilogy featuring Matt Cordell, a deranged former cop who now kills innocents instead of protecting them.
• Angela in the original Night of the Demons (1988) was just another demon-possessed person. In the second and third films, she is the leader of the demonic debauchery.
• The A Nightmare on Elm Street series featuring Freddy Krueger. While the series did have recurring heroes in Nancy Thompson in the first and third films and Alice Johnson in the fourth and fifth, Freddy is the common denominator throughout the series; like with Child's Play and Friday the 13th above, they are often called "Freddy movies". Furthermore, unlike some horror franchises, it features the same actor recurring as the villain throughout. Excluding the 2010 remake (which cast Jackie Earle Haley), Robert Englund reprised his killer role as Freddy Krueger in all eight original-series films.
• The Phantasm series featuring the Tall Man. Though the heroes return as well... sort of.
• The Predator films all feature at least one member of an alien species that serves as the villain. The Alien vs. Predator movies also feature them.
• The sequels to the original Prom Night (1980) tried to become one with Mary-Lou Maloney. She was dropped from the fourth movie.
• The Psycho Cop duology with Joe Vickers, a Satan worshipper who kills anyone whom he deems to be guilty.
• The Ring has its famous Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl, known as Sadako Yamamura in the original book and the Japanese films and Samara Morgan in the American films.
• The Saw franchise is centered around the Poetic Serial Killer Jigsaw, who puts people into Death Traps and gives them a chance to escape before death claims them. He serves as the main plot driver for the first three movies, then his apprentices and a copycat take his place.
• The Scream franchise zig-zags on this trope. On one hand, the series has a collection of recurring heroic characters like Sidney Prescott, Gale Weathers, Dewey Riley, and (starting with the fifth film) the Carpenter and Meeks-Martin siblings, and the villain Ghostface is a Legacy Character, with the films all having different killers taking up the persona. On the other hand, the plot of each film is entirely driven by the actions of the villain, and Ghostface's iconic white mask, black robe, hunting knife, menacing voice (provided by Roger L. Jackson in each film, justified in-universe by the killers using voice-changer devices to mask their identity), and M.O. of making Harassing Phone Calls are constant throughout the series and collectively treated as a character in their own right. In fact, when Dead by Daylight made a Scream-inspired expansion, all they had to do was license the costume (the rights to which are held by a separate company) rather than the movies themselves and create their own original killer inspired by the films, such is Ghostface identified with the series.
• Shocker featuring Horace Pinker was an attempt to create one, but low sales ended these plans.
• The lesser-known Sleepaway Camp series. Notably, the killer's identity is the subject of the big twist in the first film (and a famously shocking one at that), but in the second and third films, Angela's face is put right up on the posters.
• The Stepfather films with Jerry Blake.
• In a way, the Terminator series, with Skynet. The movies do have central protagonists in John Connor and his mother Sarah, but not only is the villain always a Terminator Killer Robot — even if it's not one that looks like Arnold Schwarzenegger — but some media only feature said machines.
• The Texas Chainsaw Massacre has Leatherface and, more broadly, the entire Sawyer family, the Cannibal Clan he serves as The Heavy for, hunting down and butchering their victims. The series as a whole is known for not really caring about continuity beyond treating the first film as canon, but the lone constants throughout the series are Leatherface and the Sawyers.
• Tremors: While Burt Gummer is a recurring character in most of the franchise, he cannot really be said to be the primary one. The Graboids and their different life cycles are the center of attention.
• Universal Horror as a whole is an entire universe composed of multiple Villain-Based Franchises, with the monsters having been marketed together by Universal ever since The '40s. They eventually tried to revive the concept as a Modular Franchise with the Dark Universe, though The Mummy (2017) intended to lead off the franchise, instead strangled it in its crib.
  • Dracula, with a host of books and movies based off the bloodsucking fiend. The most famous examples include the Universal films starting with Dracula (1931), and the Hammer Horror films starting with Horror of Dracula. In Hellsing, the Count is the titled Sociopathic Hero protagonist who ends up victorious, lampshading the whole 'Dracula returns' at the end.
  • Frankenstein is a similar case, with Universal's 1931 adaptation spinning off a series of horror films that may or may not have featured Dr. Victor Frankenstein or his descendants, but always featured the Monster front and center. This trope is best evidenced by the fact that people frequently refer to the monster himself as "Frankenstein", even though that was the name of his creator. (The movie I, Frankenstein had it both ways and had the monster take on Frankenstein as his last name, seeing the man who created him as his 'father'.)
  • The Mummy (1932) and its quasi-remake in 1940, The Mummy's Hand, the latter of which spawned multiple sequels. The titular mummy was named Imhotep in the original (which the 1999 remake also used) and played by Boris Karloff, and named Kharis in Hand and its sequels and played by Lon Chaney Jr., but the Broad Strokes are similar enough that Hand is often mistaken for a sequel.
    • The Kharis series did have a few recurring characters other than Kharis himself, with the human heroes of The Mummy's Hand returning in The Mummy's Tomb... only to get killed off to make way for a new generation of heroes. There was also Andoheb, The Man Behind the Man to Kharis, who appears throughout the series, but is much less recognizable, and, well, the movies aren't named after him.
  • The Invisible Man. Technically a Legacy Character, as the title character in The Invisible Man Returns was a different person, but the common denominator in both films is a man who turns invisible and uses the freedom offered by his new power to go on a rampage.
  • There were three Creature from the Black Lagoon films, all of which had the Gill-man (played by Ricou Browning in the underwater scenes) and no other returning characters.
• The Warlock trilogy featuring the titular character. The origin stories of the character in each film are too inconsistent for it to be the same Warlock however, making it more a Legacy Character.
• The Wishmaster series is centered around an evil genie, although the one in the third and fourth movie seems to be a different Djinn from the one in the first and second.

Literature

• The Night of the Living Dummy series from the Goosebumps books.
• Hannibal Lecter, who became more and more the protagonist as new books came out, though he suffered from Badass Decay. Downplayed, to an extent, as he was never the out and out Big Bad of any of the novels; he was a supporting antagonist in Red Dragon, an Evil Mentor in The Silence of the Lambs, a Living Macguffin in Hannibal, and finally the protagonist in Hannibal Rising. There's yet to be a Big Bad in the Hannibal series who survives the end of the novel.
• Sax Rohmer's Fu Manchu series — sure, Fu's nemesis Nayland Smith was in all of them, but who got title billing?
• Fantômas, from the series of French pulp novels written by Marcel Allain and Pierre Souvestre (and later by Allain alone after Souvestre's death) starting in 1911.
• A lot of the Old Republic era of the Star Wars Expanded Universe is linked by the Sith. In recent years, practically every villain in every era has been a Sith.
• An in-universe example is the fictional Emperor Zhark series mentioned in the Thursday Next books.
• Disney Chills' main draw is the Disney Villains, as each book stars a different one and more often than not they end up winning.
• De Griezelbus: Onnoval and Beentjes are the only characters to appear in every book. The main protagonists are different groups of children. A few characters like Eddy C. and Liselore do reappear in later books.

Live-Action TV

• Seigi No Symbol Condorman: Condorman may be The Hero and title character, but the Monster Clan get an equal amount of focus to him in most episodes. In fact, both the opening and ending themes are devoted to the Monsters and feature them prominently.

Multiple media

• Scream
  • The franchise became a clear-cut example of this with its TV adaptation. As noted above, the films on their own zig-zag this trope, featuring several recurring characters while Ghostface is a Legacy Character. However, the only thing linking the TV series to the films is the presence of a killer named Ghostface who wears a white mask and black cloak, uses a hunting knife as a weapon, and taunts victims through Harassing Phone Calls before attacking them. It was especially the case with the reboot Scream: Resurrection, which not only brought back the original Ghostface mask from the films (the prior two seasons used a different mask due to copyright issues) but also brought back the original voice of Ghostface, Roger L. Jackson, while remaining in a wholly separate continuity.
  • Interestingly, Scream's in-universe counterpart, the Stab series, is an example. The Stab movies were initially based on the events of the Scream films (specifically Gale's True Crime books about them), but after the third, Sidney sued to stop them from using her story as further inspiration for lurid slasher flicks. And so, starting with Stab 4, the Ghostface identity became the only recurring character.

Professional Wrestling

• Kaiju Big Battel's Big Bad Dr. Cube is also the most recognized figure in the promotion. This is partially because his helmet is the logo. Though he eventually dies.
• The Fuyuki Army promotion was a bit of a mixed bag. The intent was pretty clear, given that it was an FMW spinoff and the wrestler it centered around, Kodo Fuyuki, was on his way to a Tyrant Takes the Helm plot in FMW, but fans who better knew Fuyuki for his work in All Japan Pro Wrestling were likely to cheer for him.
• WCW tried to do one with the nWo, to turn it into its own brand. However, people started to view the nWo as boring invincible villains at the time, so giving them their own show where surprise, surprise, the nWo won every match, turned out to be a turn off to many viewers.
• WWE Raw from 2002 until 2005 with Triple H.
• While the joshi fed GAEA was active, Mayumi Ozaki waged a personal war against it and founded an "Oz Academy" in 1998 to train new wrestlers to help her in this cause. When Chigusa Nagayo opted to discontinue GAEA and retire however, Passing the Torch to Meiko Satomura, Mayumi turned the Oz Academy into its own full-fledged promotion to rival Meiko's GAEA successor, Sendai Girls.
• Kai En Tai, a power stable with the humble origin of menacing Michinoku Pro Wrestling later expanded into the United States via ECW's bWo Japan, which lead to one half of the stable's Dream Chasers Tag Team, TAKA Michinoku, founding a "KAIENTAI Dojo" in Puerto Rico during the year 2000. A year after ECW closed, TAKA returned to Japan and started running his own shows with the students from said dojo.
• The Apache Army, a promotion primarily made up of former FMW wrestlers that primarily invaded other promotions while FMW was inactive.
• Los Perros Del Mal, a Card-Carrying Villain Power Stable who operated in CMLL and AAA, later founded their very own wrestling promotion, named after themselves, Perros Del Mal Producciones. They remain the bad guys even on their own show.

Video Games

• The Ape Escape series has a different Kid Hero each game, but evil genius monkey Specter is always the villain.
• Castlevania is linked by its main villain Dracula. This even extends to Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow and Castlevania: Dawn of Sorrow, which are set in the future after Drac being Killed Off for Real. Who is the player character? His reincarnation!
• Diablo is based upon the eponymous demon lord, who always seems to return to threaten the fate of the world. Diablo II and Diablo III bring in the other six Great Evils for some scheming of their own, but Diablo's still the one to take center stage by the end.
• The Far Cry series, starting from the third game, began angling its advertising around each installment's villain, emphasizing their charisma and sociopathy. Their popularity is so great that by Far Cry 6 an entire DLC is centered around getting to play as the villains of the third to fifth games.
• The Five Nights at Freddy's series has a different protagonist for (almost) every game, but the villains are always animatronics and occasionally humans, but the award has to be given to Freddy Fazbear or William Afton.
  • Freddy Fazbear is of course the titular character, who has the biggest amount of counterparts and appears in every game, no matter if he's withered, a hallucination, or a dream.
  • William Afton, on the other hand, kickstarted the entire franchise and has been linked to every single entry in the franchise (with one, non-canon exception). While he took the role of the Big Bad in only three games (and he's part of the Big Bad Duumvirate in one of them), he's without a doubt one for the entire series, with every single event being linked to him. Not to mention his Joker Immunity, a contrast to Freddy, who's been Killed Off for Real as early as the third game and had different counterparts replace his role.
• With the exception of the fourth game (though they still influence the plot to a degree), Resident Evil centers around the Umbrella Corporation and its successors.
• The heroes asking the question cycles depending on the series, but they're always asking the question "Where in |the World/America/Time/Hell/etc.| is Carmen Sandiego?"
• SHODAN is so synonymous with the System Shock series that the second game featured her on the cover despite her mere presence in the game being a massive spoiler at the time. Years later, SHODAN's voice would be one of the very first things revealed for the third game.
• In one way or another, the main stories of the Fatal Fury and Art of Fighting series seem to revolve around Geese Howard. By the time The King of Fighters 2002: Unlimited Match comes around, he's also present in that as a secret boss, out-bossing a considerable cast of SNK Bosses. Also, in Capcom vs. SNK, Geese is Ratio 6 when fought as a boss, since you fight him twice as Ratio 3, when the highest a character goes in the game, Akuma (Gouki) as a secret character, is Ratio 4.
• The most iconic characters in the Tekken franchise are Heihachi and Kazuya Mishima, who alternate between the roles of Big Bad and Villain Protagonist depending on the game. Heihachi is the only character to be playable in every instalment, and appeared as a Guest Fighter in Soul Calibur II, while Kazuya represents the series in Super Smash Bros. Ultimate.

• Every Kingdom Hearts game in the Dark Seeker Saga (Kingdom Hearts to III and every spin-off or side game released in-between) is linked by Master Xehanort, an elderly Keyblade master who just won't stay dead, and his many incarnations. He's even the Villain Protagonist of Dark Road, and his influence lingers beyond the saga's events in Melody of Memory. Whether a new villain will antagonize the next several games or if the series will move on to one-off villains is yet to be seen.
• The Mother series is a special case. None of the heroes ever return, but the Big Bad from the first one reappears in the next one, in which a Dragon for him is introduced. The third one then features only The Dragon from the second one, since the original Big Bad was killed in the second game. A couple of characters (how many exactly depends on the player) from the second game appear, though, and Ness, the hero from it, is referenced a lot.
• The Tale of ALLTYNEX of course focusing on the malevolent A.I. Alltynex.
• Twisted Metal: While Monster Clown Needles "Sweet Tooth" Kane is the Series Mascot, in-game he is only one of many playable drivers. Narrative-wise, the most important character in Twisted Metal is Calypso, the nefarious host of the tournament, as some version of him is always present, being the common link between all of the drivers' stories.
• The main focus of the First Encounter Assault Recon series is its resident Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl/Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds Alma.
• In its final years, the arcade division of Irem produced several post-apocalyptic action games whose only real link was the villains, a terrorist organisation know as the "Dark Anarchy Society". The games part of this universe are (in order) Air Duel, Undercover Cops, Fire Barrel, In the Hunt and Gunforce II.
• The Donkey Kong series is an interesting case. The title character starts out as a villain in Donkey Kong (with Mario aka Jumpman as the hero), reappears as Distressed Dude in Donkey Kong Jr. (with Mario as the villain) and again as a villain in Donkey Kong 3 (with Stanley as the hero). Later he becomes the hero in the Donkey Kong Country series and several other games. Meanwhile, the protagonist from Donkey Kong, Mario, got his own spin-off series named after himself. Donkey Kong reappears as a villain in the Mario vs. Donkey Kong series, but this time his opponent Mario is in every one of the games.

Visual Novels

• The When They Cry series centers around its villains, many of them as the result of progressing insanity. Also an example of a Villain Protagonist, not that the characters themselves realize it until it's too late. Though subverted as it is mainly because of a Hate Plague, with the Big Bad causing it not being revealed until the end of the seventh chapter.
• Danganronpa has Monokuma, the sadistic robot Killer Teddy Bear who pushes the cast of each game into killing each other. By extension, Junko Enoshima is often revealed as the main antagonist of each entry in the Hope’s Peak Saga, and the main recurring character- every other villain often has some connection to her. In Danganronpa 3 Side:Future and Danganronpa V3: Killing Harmony, even though Junko is dead/fictional respectively, her influence still lingers on, with the anime mastermind having been corrupted by a minion of her and the V3 mastermind being a Loony Fan of her.

Web Originals

• The Slender Man Mythos. Many authors, many situations, one Humanoid Abomination.
  • Its spin-off, The Fear Mythos, features roughly twenty additional abominations running around causing havoc.
• This post from C.T. Phipps' blog The United Federation of Charles goes into detail on the subject. He specifically describes it as the difference between Slasher Horror and Survival Horror; the former is about the villains killing people in creative ways, while the latter focuses on the heroes fighting for survival. While he prefers survival horror, and thinks that the worst slasher horror can run afoul of the Eight Deadly Words as the audience lacks any reason to care about the people dying, he thinks the slasher approach has merit as well, especially when it comes to creating memorable, personal villains.

Western Animation

• Each season of Code Lyoko has a plot that focuses almost entirely on XANA's schemes, attacks and evolution. Which is kind of ironic, considering he is never actually seen or heard in person.
• Attack of the Killer Tomatoes! couldn't exist without the eponymous killer tomatoes.
• In Spiral Zone, the name of the show itself is the thing that the heroes are trying to fight; a Synthetic Plague/Fog of Doom created by Overlord to Take Over the World.

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