The most terrifying villain in movie history carries a cattle gun, wears a ridiculous haircut and looks like he would rather be anywhere else than work.
He is Anton Chigurh, and Javier Bardem’s portrayal of him in the Coen brothers’ 2007 masterpiece No Country for Old Men remains the most frightening characterization ever put on film, regardless of EW’s preferences. Chumps.
Nothing comes close.
Entertainment Weekly recently published its list of the 25 most terrifying horror movie villains, a collection stretching from Dracula to the Babadook. Hannibal Lecter ranks second, Norman Bates fourth and Michael Myers fifth. The shark from Jaws swims in at No. 13.
It’s a respectable list, which is precisely why it deserves an argument. These rankings exist to start fights among movie lovers. But this one raises a more interesting question: What, exactly, constitutes a horror movie?
Jaws was marketed as a thriller. The Silence of the Lambs won Best Picture as a psychological thriller. Yet both occupy permanent places in the horror canon. And if a great white shark qualifies, surely the Xenomorph from Ridley Scott’s Alien deserves a seat at the table.
Death can be a horror. Shopping at Ikea can be a horror. Anyone who has endured a family Thanksgiving understands what terror requires.
Horror is an experience before it is a genre.
And few movies understand that better than No Country for Old Men.
Consider the celebrated monsters on EW’s list. Dracula has his appetites. Freddy Krueger enjoys his work. Hannibal Lecter savors the intellectual pleasures of murder. Michael Myers has elevated relentless pursuit into something approaching a religious calling.
They are theatrically aggressive. Their menace requires a performance. Even their silences have a theatrical quality.
Chigurh seems vaguely inconvenienced by the entire business.
He moves through the world with the weary bearing of someone who has another appointment. His face registers little beyond mild irritation. His victims receive the same consideration a plumber might give a clogged drain.
Killing is his occupation, and he appears to dislike his job.
But that interpretation only gets us halfway to the character’s horror.
Anton Chigurh is death itself.
He is mortality given human form, moving across the Texas landscape with the indifference of a natural process. He seems to regard murder as an administrative duty, something required of him rather than desired.
And the cruelest part is that he occasionally lets people believe they have a say in the matter.
His coin toss with a gas station proprietor is terrifying precisely because Chigurh appears willing to accept either outcome. When the man survives, Chigurh seems almost pleased. For a fleeting moment, he reveals something resembling human satisfaction.
There is another glimpse of emotion in his opening murder, when his expression carries an almost sexual suggestion. The violence seems to excite him before his customary indifference returns.
The rare exceptions make his emotional vacancy more chilling.
Most cinematic monsters are driven by appetites. Their cruelty has a motive, however deranged. Chigurh operates beyond appetite. His philosophy turns murder into fate, although he alone decides whose fate deserves consideration.
Carla Jean Moss ultimately exposes the fraud when she refuses his coin toss. The coin decides nothing. Chigurh does.
And therein lies the horror.
We fear death because it operates beyond reason. It can arrive through accident or disease, indifferent to virtue or deserving. Chigurh possesses that same terrible impartiality, with one crucial distinction: He has appointed himself its instrument.
Spielberg made us afraid of the ocean. Hitchcock made us nervous about taking a shower. The Coen brothers made us afraid of an ordinary conversation.
Perhaps No Country for Old Men is a western. Perhaps it’s a crime thriller. Genres are classifications invented by people who need somewhere to put things.
Fear observes no such boundaries.
And Anton Chigurh remains its most convincing human incarnation, because the most frightening thing about death is how little it seems to care.
He already knows how it ends.
