"I will make that fat fuck's crimes look like a Boy Scout jamboree!"
Man: As long as there is a God, men like you can kill thousands. Millions. But you won't ever find peace.
James Patrick March: [laughs] Well, then, I guess I'm just going to have to kill God. That is my message to the world. [smacks the man in the back of the head with his hammer, killing him]
James Patrick March: [laughs] Well, then, I guess I'm just going to have to kill God. That is my message to the world. [smacks the man in the back of the head with his hammer, killing him]
— Hotel, "Chutes and Ladders"
While American Horror Story is an incredibly dark anthology series filled with rapists, psychopaths, and murderers, there are still some characters who manage to go above and beyond the rest. These are the most vile, disgusting villains that this already twisted series has to offer.
All spoilers are unmarked. You Have Been Warned!
Franchise-Wide
- Satan himself is the Greater-Scope Villain of the American Horror Story universe. As the orchestrator of several tragic events throughout the anthology, Satan directly assisted the perpetrator of the Night Stalkers murders that started in 1984, Richard Ramirez, granting him immortality and breaking him out of San Quentin State Prison to take more lives. Arriving at Briarcliff Asylum through Jed Potter, Satan possesses the young and innocent Sister Mary Eunice, driving her to lewd behavior and trapping her in perpetual agony. Inside Mary's body, Satan personally murders people; helps a Nazi war criminal with his unethical experiments on inmates; inspires a budding psychopath who proceeded to kill her entire family; and unleashes a mass murderer on Sister Jude. When Jude is stripped of her position, Satan tortures her to the point where her reflexes are severely impaired and later rapes Monsignor Timothy Howard solely to debase him and mock his vows of celibacy, intending on rising to the top of the Catholic Church and destroy it from the inside. Using the ghost of Tate Langdon as a conduit at the Murder House to give birth to The Antichrist via rape, Satan watches from behind the scenes as his son kickstarts the Apocalypse in his name with a nuclear holocaust.
Original Series
- Asylum: The friendly-seeming Dr. Oliver Thredson is the true identity of the original Bloody Face. To deal with his own Parental Abandonment, Bloody Face kidnaps women whose skin he thinks feels like his mother's, killing and skinning those whose skin fails his macabre test to make masks or furniture. As Dr. Thredson, he is tasked with evaluating a man accused of the Bloody Face murders, which he takes advantage of by convincing the man to confess. Tricking protagonist Lana Winters into trusting him, Bloody Face lures her from the insane asylum to his house, where he reveals that he has murdered her girlfriend and kept the corpse on ice. Tormenting Lana, Bloody Face tries to get her to become intimate with the corpse and then rapes her when she tries to flee. Willing to kill Lana even after she has become pregnant with his child, Bloody Face smugly states his intent to get away with his crimes using the insanity defense.
- Freak Show: Dandy Mott is a wealthy, spoiled young man who turns to violence to alleviate his boredom. Beginning by killing cats around the neighborhood, Dandy soon graduates to murdering other people when he slashes the throat of his housekeeper Dora in a fit of anger. When Dora's daughter attempts to have Dandy arrested, he bribes the police officer to kill her and become his Dragon. After his mother attempts to get him psychological help, Dandy shoots her, before bathing in her blood and turning her corpse into a marionette. Viewing the Tattler Twins as possessions, he allows them little privacy or agency during their stay at his house. When Jimmy shows up to take them back to the freak show, Dandy is furious and later gets revenge by slaughtering a group of women and framing Jimmy for the murders, getting him sent to prison. When the twins become interested in Chester, Dandy researches Chester's background and learns that he has a history of mental illness. He uses this information to manipulate Chester into complete insanity, reducing the man to a wailing, delusional wreck. Finally, after buying the freak show, Dandy treats his new employees horribly, and causes them to walk out on their contracts. In response to this, he strolls calmly around their campground shooting them dead as he sees them.
- Hotel: James Patrick March, the deceased first owner of the Hotel Cortez, is a wealthy man who murdered countless people in life and continues to do so as a ghost. When he learned that his wife was still interested in her former lover, March had the man sealed up behind a wall in an abandoned wing of the hotel and left him there to die. March has also served as an Evil Mentor to some of history's most prolific serial killers, and is responsible for corrupting John Lowe into becoming the Ten Commandments Killer. This is part of a project of his in order to "kill God," purely to spite a particularly defiant religious man he killed while alive. March is completely self-centered in his desire for the Countess, arranging her death so that she will be forced to spend eternity trapped in the hotel with him. Finally, March controls the Addiction Demon, a strange rapist creature with a drill for a penis whom March uses to threaten others into following his orders. A sadistic, brutal savage who hides his true nature beneath a veneer of class and aristocracy, March is the only member of a morally ambiguous cast without a single redeeming quality.
- Roanoke:
- Scáthach is behind centuries of countless disappearances and murders in name of her Religion of Evil. An avid worshipper of the Old Gods who pledged her alliance to them to avoid her execution at the stake, Scáthach killed several British soldiers and left Native Americans to take the fall for the murders. Coming across Thomasin White after she had been exiled by insurgents of Roanoke, Scáthach saved her in exchange for her soul, corrupting Thomasin into her personal executioner, and forcing the colonists to follow in her religious ways by practicing Human Sacrifice, with not even children being safe. Declaring them to be "children in need of discipline" for wanting to stop the bloodshed, Scáthach performs the ritual of the Blood Moon on the land to enslave their souls for all of eternity. With the Lost Colony slaughtering anyone who comes near Roanoke and adding their souls into their ranks as fresh slaves, Scáthach still oversees them to make sure that her sacrifices are carried out.
- Thomasin White, the chief acolyte of Scáthach, is best known by her title "The Butcher". The leader of the Roanoke Colony who pledged herself to the ancient witch for power, the Butcher instituted mass human sacrifice before murdering every colonist with her own son to bind them to the hellish existence of being tied to the land. Rising again every Blood Moon, the Butcher leads the violent murders of anyone who sets foot near her land with gruesome and sadistic methods. Throughout the series, the Butcher massacres numerous victims, including trying to kill a child, while slaughtering the actress playing her in the mockumentary. Ending the series victorious, the Butcher leads the colonists down to slaughter a group of police and reporters.
- Apocalypse: Jeff Pfister and Mutt Nutter are the childish co-founders of Kineros Robotics, using their company as a front to conceal their real identities as vile supporters of the Cooperative. Assisting Michael Langdon in his endeavors as the son of Satan but frustrated at his lack of vision, Jeff and Mutt come up with the plan to annihilate mankind by guiding Michael into becoming the leader of the Cooperative to launch their nukes around the world, proudly noting that seven billion would die in the first ten minutes. As apathetic participants in Michael's personal war against the witches, they are also responsible for the near-extermination of the New Orleans coven.
- 1984: Both members of the Big Bad Duumvirate are equally nasty:
- Margaret Booth is a deranged camp counselor who gradually evolved into a Serial Killer. Upset over the various counselors who bullied her at Camp Redwood, Margaret tried to persuade Benjamin Richter into murdering them for her. When he refused, she killed them all herself and framed Benjamin for all the murders, which led to him being tortured inside of a mental institution for fourteen years. After Benjamin escapes and goes on a killing spree as Mr. Jingles, Margaret decides to murder the new employees at Camp Redwood so she can pin the blame on him again. When this fails, she frames Brooke Thompson instead, resulting in the latter spending five years in prison and seemingly being publicly executed. When Margaret becomes wealthy exploiting various massacre locations as tourist attractions, she decides to do the same for Camp Redwood by holding a musical festival there. After the members of Kajagoogoo are killed, and Margaret runs into Richard Ramirez and another serial killer inspired by Ramirez's murders, Margaret sanctions them to slaughter dozens of musicians and civilians at the festival just to thrive off the camp's subsequent infamy.
- Richard Ramirez, aka the Night Stalker, is reimagined as Satan's own bloodthirsty Psycho for Hire. A sociopathic murderer who nearly decapitated an elderly woman, Ramirez follows Brooke Thompson to Camp Redwood and makes the sympathetic Benjamin Richter sell his soul to Satan to recruit him as an unwilling partner-in-crime, returning to Los Angeles and spending a year killing random innocents with no signs of stopping while Benjamin had to watch everything. After Benjamin finally exposes him, Ramirez breaks out of prison to get his revenge. Finding Benjamin's family in Alaska, Ramirez murders his wife and challenges Benjamin to a duel for the safety of his baby son. Slaughtering the members of Kajagoogoo, Ramirez is happy to assist Margaret Booth in her plan to massacre dozens of people. Despite having a tragic upbringing, Ramirez openly embraces his unholy master and proudly refers to himself as pure and uncut evil.
- Double Feature:
- Red Tide: Ursula Khan is a snarky literary agent who progresses from being simply shallow to wickedly heartless when given a chance to make more money. Visiting Provincetown to investigate the sudden rise in creativity of her "favorite" client, Ursula uncovers the existence of Muse, a drug that enhances talent but also turns most of its users into Feral Vampires. Coming to see the Gardners as mere pawns in her game, Ursula disposes of Harry and his wife before going to Los Angeles with a new supply of Muse, distributing the drug to several people—including an entire class of writing students—and flooding the streets in blood to satisfy her bottomless greed.
- Death Valley: Theta is an emotionless human-alien hybrid with no regard for the lives of others, thinking of her own humanity as her greatest shame. Hired as part of the coalition between the US government and the invading extraterrestrial forces, Theta leads the Super Breeding Program on Area 51, where innocent men and women are both impregnated by the aliens to create more hybrids. Some of Theta's subjects are on the "annual plan"; these people have been immortalized and spend their eternal lives as breeding slaves. If the newborns are too abnormal to her liking—meaning all of them—Theta has their throats slashed and drowns them in a tank, feeling no remorse despite being a failed hybrid herself. When it is revealed that the aliens have no intentions to share the world, Theta coldly declares her allegiance to them and their plan to Kill All Humans.
- American Horror Stories's "Drive In": Larry Bitterman is a horror-obsessed filmmaker who experiments with the human brain to find a way to achieve the ultimate movie experience. Taking inspiration from MK Ultra to create his own masterpiece, Rabbit Rabbit, Bitterman hides subliminal triggers within his movie that result in people slaughtering each other and themselves. After his own editor mutilated herself and six people were killed because of him, Bitterman was sentenced to 15 years in prison for assaulting Tipper Gore when she protested his movie. Longing for his revenge, Bitterman sent his movie to the Starlite movie theater in Los Angeles to replicate and exceed the original massacre in modern day, killing over a hundred people. Bitterman's cruelty truly comes to light when it is revealed that he made a deal with Netflix to release Rabbit Rabbit on the internet, throwing everything into chaos for a chance to be remembered as one of the greatest directors of all time.
