Amanda Young

12: The Thing (1982)

11: Jack Torrance (The Shining)

10: Count Orlok (Nosferatu)

9: Amanda Young (SAW franchise)

8: Count Dracula (1931)

7: Michael Myers (John Carpenter’s Halloween)

6: John Kramer (SAW franchise)

5: Patrick Bateman (American Psycho)

4: Annie Wilkes (Misery)

3: Norman Bates (Psycho)

2: Pazuzu (The Exorcist)

Honorable Mentions

Leatherface (The Texas Chain Saw Massacre)

Freddy Krueger (A Nightmare on Elm Street)

The Beldam (Coraline)

Orin Scrivello (Little Shop of Horrors)

Audrey II (Little Shop of Horrors)

It/Pennywise (It)

Ash (Alien)

The Xenomorph (Alien)

Dr. Frank-N-Furter (The Rocky Horror Picture Show)

1: Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs)

The original Saw executed such a stunning and unexpected villain reveal - that the Jigsaw Killer was a cancer patient, John Kramer (Tobin Bell), hidden in plain sight - that the sequel had to pull out all the stops to have a chance of living up to it. For the majority of the movie it appears that Kramer is again working alone, no matter how implausible it might seem that a man increasingly ravaged by terminal cancer could set such a complex "game" up. But at the end of Saw II, it's revealed that Kramer had a secret apprentice helping him run the game all along: Amanda Young (Shawnee Smith), the drug addict who Kramer tested in the original movie. Amanda appears to be trapped in Jigsaw's new game throughout the film, though at the end it's revealed that she's been working with Jigsaw ever since she survived her original game, all with the intention of carrying on Kramer's legacy after he dies. Basically, she was put in Saw II's central game as a ringer to keep nudging the test subjects in the right direction. It was a fun reveal that worked because the audience simply wasn't suspicious of Amanda at all, and though the "secret apprentice" twist was wildly overused in the later sequels, here it felt totally fresh.

To be honest, I feel like it’s very unfair to her as a character and as a victim of jigsaw (although she did become a villain) to have her hobbies listed as s/h and doing drugs. although it is true, it reduces her character to nothing but the stereotype of “crazy unstable jealous bitch”, when in reality Amanda was a tortured woman desperately clinging to John because he was the only person who had ever demonstrated “care” for her. As someone with borderline personality disorder, Amanda is very heavily coded with it, and it hurts a lot to see her completely villainized and reduced to the pain and trauma she was put through.