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The Joker
Heath Ledger's performance as the Joker in 2008's The Dark Knight, delivered with an unpredictable, anarchic physicality and a scarred, smeared makeup design distinct from earlier comic and film interpretations of the character, won a posthumous Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor after Ledger's death in early 2008. The character's philosophy in that film — presenting himself as an agent of chaos with no coherent motive beyond disrupting order itself — distinguished him from more traditionally motivated screen villains and became widely quoted, including his line "some men just want to watch the world burn." Jack Nicholson's earlier portrayal in Tim Burton's 1989 Batman leaned into a more theatrical, gleefully campy version of the character, reflecting an entirely different tonal approach that nonetheless became one of the most commercially successful villain performances of its era. The character's multiple distinct film interpretations across different decades — including Joaquin Phoenix's Academy Award-winning 2019 solo film portrayal — reflect the Joker's unusual durability as a role capable of sustaining radically different actors' and directors' interpretations while remaining one of cinema's most consistently compelling villains.
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Norman Bates
Norman Bates, portrayed by Anthony Perkins in Alfred Hitchcock's 1960 film Psycho, established the template for the psychologically complex, sympathetically portrayed screen killer, presenting an outwardly awkward, soft-spoken motel owner whose dissociative identity disorder drives him to murder while believing himself innocent. The film's twist revealing that Bates's domineering mother, whom audiences hear and believe to be alive throughout the film, has actually been dead for years — with Bates himself adopting her personality and voice — became one of the most influential plot reveals in horror film history. Bates's shower scene murder of protagonist Marion Crane, achieved through rapid editing and a shrieking string score rather than explicit graphic violence, remains one of the most analyzed and imitated sequences in film history, and its combination of suggestion over explicit gore became a defining technique for psychological horror going forward. The character's influence on the subsequent development of the slasher genre, along with the specific "motel run by a disturbed killer" setup, has been directly referenced and imitated across decades of horror filmmaking, and the real Bates Motel set built for the film remains a preserved attraction on the Universal Studios lot to this day.
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