Top 10 Movies with Crazy Psychotic and Disturbed Characters

New Movies tend to reflect, and sometimes exaggerate reality. It is no surprise then that many crazy, psychotic and disturbed characters are an intrinsic part of our  Top Movies. Their presence provides a certain edge to the experience of watching cinema and makes the movie all the more gripping and terrifying. Here is a list of movies with crazy, psychotic and disturbed characters that have enthralled us and made an indelible mark on the psyche of popular culture.

Snatch with Boris ‘The Blade’

Snatch is a film directed by Guy Ritchie and is based in London. In the movie that deals with the shenanigans of a promoter of an unlicensed boxing ring and that of an underworld crime ring which specializes in coups of stealing, Boris is an ex-KGB agent of Russian-Uzbek origins. That is sufficient to create an aura of distrust as well as invincibility around him, but we are also informed that he is called the ‘Bullet Dodger’ because it is has proven impossible to kill him despite many attempts. Boris is an arms dealer who provides illegal guns and gets involved in trying to get a large stolen diamond from Franky ‘Four Fingers’ who has managed to steal it and is supposed to carry it back to America. When he does get his hands on the diamond, he shoots Franky so that the fact that Russians have gotten hold of the diamond remains a secret and eventually, chops off Franky’s arm along with the briefcase attached to it, since they didn’t know its combination. Boris is killed from gunfire by one of the hired killers of people interested in buying the stolen diamond. He is hard to kill and the shooter has to pump him with a whole lot of bullets before he dies.

Deer Hunter with Nick

The Deer Hunter is the story about the savage effects of the Vietnam War and brilliantly portrays the psychological violence it does to the people involved in the war, whether they survive it or not. It relates the story of 3 blue-collared Russian American friends whose lives change dramatically and unpredictably with being sent to Vietnam during the war. Mike is a serious thinker, but a control freak, Nick is quiet and introspective, while Steven is sensitive.  During the war, they are captured by the enemy and are forced to play Russian roulette for their lives. Steven attempts to kill the captors and is incarcerated in a half submerged wire cage, full of rats. Eventually, Mike saves Steven and all three escape. However, only Nick gets on the American helicopter, while Steven falls into the river and Mike jumps to save him. Nick is forever traumatized and stays in Vietnam playing Russian roulette. When Mike arrives back in Vietnam to take Nick back, he finds that Nick has lost all memory of his old life and believes that only he has survived amongst the three. They play Russian roulette together and at the end of the game, Nick blows his brains out.

American History X with Derek Vinyard

American History X is a disturbing movie dealing with racism where the main antagonist does find redemption, but not without suffering irreparable loss. Derek Vinyard starts out with wanting to become a Neo-Nazi after his father was killed by a black drug dealer. When three blacks attempt to steal his car, he kills two of them and is sentenced to 3 years in prison. In prison, he gets disenchanted the Aryan organization he joins and is brutalized and raped in the showers when he stops associating with them. He has a change of heart, but finds that his younger brother Danny is following in his footsteps. He tries and finally manages to convince Danny by telling him his own story of prison life, but Danny is killed by a black kid he had fought with the previous day.

Psycho with Norman Bates

A cult figure in the genre of horror/suspense film, Norman Bates can never really be kept away from a list of psycho, crazy and disturbed character. Based on a real person, Norman Bates suffers from Split Personality Disorder, where he frequently ‘becomes’ his mother. His mother Norma is a highly dominating person, traumatizing Norman emotionally all life. When she takes up a lover, Norman kills them both out of jealousy, but preserves his mother’s corpse. When faced with complex situations, the shy and reticent Norman lets his mother take over and the only way the mother knows to tackle problems is to eliminate them. So, Norman kills Marion Crane, is discovered, and finally, is institutionalized. The crazy and deluded world of a seeming boy-next-door is considered a benchmark among psychotic movie characters.

Sin City with Devon Aoki

Sin City is based on 3 graphic novels written by Frank Miller and is a visually brilliant film. We come across Devon Aoki as Miho in ‘The Big Fat Kill’ where she plays a Japanese assassin who protects the interests of a group of prostitutes led by Gail. She is one of the few female psychotic characters that have made a mark for her in mainstream cinema.  In the movie, she incapacitates Jackie Boy when he tries to kidnap one of the girls and later decapitates him as he is slow to die. When another character Dwight agrees to dispose Jackie boy’s body, who is now discovered to be a cop, he is attacked by hired mercenaries and almost drowns before Miho saves him. They then attack the mercenaries and retrieve Jackie Boy’s head. Miho also performs admirably when the entire ring of prostitutes brutally attacks all the mercenaries who have to come to trade Jackie Boy’s head for Gail’s life. What makes the character of Devon Aoki highly disturbing is that she never speaks a word ever, exciting rumors that she is mute.

Cape Fear with Max Cady

Max Cady of Cape Fear is one of the most sadistic and cruel movie characters and has earned the 28^th rank on the American Film Institute’s list of the top 50 movie villains of all time. Max Cady is a professional criminal who has just spent 14 years in prison. He was imprisoned for the rape and battery of a woman. Cady wows to avenge himself against his defense lawyer, Sam Bowden, for suppressing evidence that could have acquitted him. Once he is out of prison, he goes about cruelly destroying everything and everyone who is close to Sam, even brutally raping and beating a colleague who he may be having an affair with and almost seducing his daughter. Cady even overpowers the goons the Bowden sets upon him. Bowden sets a trap for Cady and Cady does arrive at the house, albeit without their knowledge, and kills the private investigator hired by Bowden as well as his housekeeper. The Bowden family flees to Cape Fear and Cady follows them. He beats and ties up Sam in his houseboat with the intention of raping his wife and daughter in front of him. Eventually, a storm breaks the boat and allows Sam to overpower Cady. But, as he hurls a rock to kill Cady, Cady is carried away by the current, speaking in tongues. He then submerges beneath the waves.

Reservoir Dogs with Vic Vega

Reservoir Dogs was the first film by writer/director Quentin Tarantino and went on to become a cult film and has been named “Greatest Independent Film of all Time” by Empire. It has all the major film techniques used by Tarantino in his later films: violence, gore and profanity. Vic Vega or Toothpick Vic, is a sadistic and torture inflicting psychopath, who didn’t hesitate to kill a number of innocent civilians during a heist gone wrong. He is almost gleeful as he tortures a policeman, going as far as slashing his face, chopping off one of his ears and pouring gasoline on him, to set him on fire. He stops for the only reason he would have stopped- he got pumped full of bullets by another member of the gang.

The Shining with Jack Torrance

The Shining is a movie that reached cult status among horror films and is considered one of the greatest films ever made. Jack Torrance is the main antagonist of The Shining and has been voted the ‘25^th greatest villain of all time’ by The American Film Institute. Jack Torrance takes up the position of a caretaker of a closed hotel for the winter. Though he hopes to re-connect with his family, he is losing his fight against alcoholism and is also troubled by writer’s block. His son ‘Danny’ has a special supernatural ability, the shining, that allows him to see into the past and the future. It is interpreted that the evil spirit of the hotel uses Jack as an instrument to kill Danny so that it can use Danny’s powers to free itself from its physical limitations of existing only in the hotel. Jack gets turned onto his own family and this is when his true psychopathic nature reveals itself as he arms himself with an axe to kill his family. One of the scenes is now iconic, where Jack, whose middle name is John, hacks into the bathroom door shouting, “Here’s Johhny!” The book and the movie which is based on the book differ in the way they end. In the book, Jack gets redemption at the hands of his son, whereas in the movie he does not.

Taxi Driver with Travis Bickle

Taxi Driver is one of the most popular and gritty film depicting the alienation of man in an urban setting. At the same time, it harks back to the extensive psychological damage done to the men who saw the Vietnam War at close quarters. Given the horrible Watergate scandal, Nixon’s resignation and the awareness that the war was not fought to preserve American values turned the vast majority against the war and veterans got treated extremely shabbily in the aftermath, as opposed to getting the returning hero treatment they would have been right to expect.

Bickle is a 26 year old, honorably discharged ex-Marine, assumed to be a ‘Nam vet, whose social alienation finally unhinges him and he feels driven to cleanse society of all it scum. Bickle attempts to foster a normal relationship with an attractive woman, but fails. This failure accelerates his downward spiral, until he feels he can only be redeemed by an act of violence. He attempts to kill the Presidential candidate but fails to do so. He has met a 12 and a half year old prostitute in the meantime and after the failed assassination attempt, he is hell bent on rescuing her from her pimp and her current life. He gruesomely kills the pimp and the manager of the hotel where he operates, while blood splattering all around him. He is himself deeply injured and tries to commit suicide as redemption. However, all his guns are empty and he is left in pools of his own blood until he is rescued by cops and hospitalized. The alienated, psychopathic taxi driver receives great public admiration for his deed of cleansing with such crazed manslaughter.

A ClockWork Orange with Alex

A Clockwork Orange is a dark, violent film based on a book of the same name by Anthony Burgess. It is a story of a ‘young man whose principal interests are rape, ultra-violence and Beethoven.’ In the movie, Alex, the anti-hero, performs acts of horrifying violence and sex along with his friends. In the film, Alex is arrested after his friends plot to betray him and is sentenced to 14 years in prison. After a couple of years in prison, the Governor offers a new ‘aversion therapy’ that can ‘cure’ the badness that exists in people. The questions raised by the film through its main character are: should the state have the power to deprive an individual of free will in order to maintain law and order? Deprived of choice between good and bad, does a person become less human? What makes us human? Is it our free will?

The ‘aversion therapy’ includes watching films with extreme violence, including shots of actual Nazi camps on drugs that create a sense of extreme revulsion towards everything he has watched. When Alex realizes that the movies include music from his favorite composer, Beethoven, he tries to stop his treatment, but his ‘reconditioning’ is complete.

Alex is freed from prison, but his former enemies recognize him, he is mercilessly beaten and eventually he finds himself locked in the house of a man who he had assaulted and whose wife he had raped. This man knew about the treatment Alex received and starts to play Beethoven’s music loudly, knowing it would cause Alex tremendous pain. Alex jumps out of the window to save himself from further torture. He wakes up in a hospital, with the Governor apologizing to him for the treatment and offering him a job. And then Alex discovers that Beethoven’s music now excites him sexually. We are left with him whooping for joy. And, the question remains- Was Alex really cured? Is it right for us to try to cure him? How can government deal with problems of teen delinquency effectively?

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