Roy Batty is truly one of the best of the worst

George Bernard Shaw observed, "Really bad men are just as rare as really good ones."

That's certainly true of Hollywood's rogues gallery. For all the action thrill rides, chillers and comic-book adaptations produced each year that hinge upon acts of villainy, betrayal and lawlessness, few cinematic evil-doers make an imprint as effectively as Heath Ledger's vicious Joker in The Dark Knight. Expect him to be an automatic addition to the ranks of all-time cinematic killers and creeps, typified by the following esteemed (and not-so-esteemed) company:

10. Hans Gruber (Die Hard, 1988): As this thriller's upscale hostage taker, Alan Rickman exuded a calculating intelligence that not only adroitly countered Bruce Willis' blue-collar cop, but stood apart from the monosyllabic no-neck knuckle-draggers who menaced Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger in the 1980s. If it's true any action film is only as compelling as its antagonist, then Die Hard's status as one of the smartest and exciting ever made is due in no small measure to Rickman's Gruber.

9. Frank Booth (Blue Velvet, 1986): Dennis Hopper received an Oscar nomination for his willies-inducing performance as the gas-inhaling sadist at the black heart of David Lynch's masterwork of small-town dementia. A rapist and killer, Frank has at least two personalities: "Baby" and "daddy." Unlike most big-screen schizoids, though, both of them are equally foul and unforgettable.

8. HAL (2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968): Unlike other homicidal machines, the HAL 9000 (voiced by Canadian Douglas Rain) is not programmed to take lives, making its murderous malfunctions in Stanley Kubrick's opus a result of flawed design and psychological dysfunction. In that respect, he may be the most movingly human villain on this list.

7. Anton Chigurh (No Country for Old Men, 2007): Javier Bardem's sociopath is less a person than an unstoppable force of nature, the embodiment of fate and the cruelty of luck. As Woody Harrelson's character says when asked how dangerous is Chigurh: "Compared to what? The bubonic plague?"

6. Roy Batty (Blade Runner, 1982): Another man-made creation driven to violent self-preservation, Rutger Hauer's "replicant" is a desperately-hunted futuristic slave in search of his God. When he finds him and is asked what he wants, his answer -- "I want more life, f---er" -- is devastating and evocative. He was built, after all, to be more human than human.

5. Annie Wilkes (Misery, 1990): It's fitting that Stephen King's most-memorable monster would be an unbridled perversion of fan worship. Kathy Bates won an Oscar for her performance as a sledge hammer-wielding nurse whose existence seems increasingly prescient given our current celebrity culture.

4. Keyser Soze (The Usual Suspects, 1995): "The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist." So says lowly crook Verbal Kint (Kevin Spacey), the narrator of this labyrinthine crime drama in which Soze and the filmmakers succeed at the same sleight-of-hand: Orchestrating a tale that is all smoke, mirrors and few answers.

3. Norman Bates (Psycho, 1960): Anthony Perkins was so convincing as twisted mama's boy Bates he found himself straitjacketed by the role for the rest of his career. Just as difficult to imagine as Alfred Hitchcock's classic without Perkins, though, is what the film landscape would look like if not for Bates, arguably the original movie psycho.

2. Darth Vader (Star Wars, 1977): Say what you will about George Lucas' prequels -- which made the galaxy's most-feared figure into a whiny kid and simpering teenager -- but few villains suggested as much menace or mystery as when the fallen Jedi Knight first strode onto screens in the 1977 classic, armed with a scuba-gear-inspired breathing apparatus and James Earl Jones' legendary voice.

1. Hannibal Lecter (Silence of the Lambs, 1991): Before he stumbled into all the traps most pop predators do -- lesser sequels, inclusion into the lexicon as more a punch-line than a personification of evil -- Anthony Hopkins' Lecter (and before him, Brian Cox in 1986's Manhunter) was a perfect storm of intelligence, manipulation and sadism (he is nicknamed "Hannibal the Cannibal" for a reason) -- all of it contained behind a cage presumably intended to make us and his visitors feel safe. It doesn't.