"How do you get rats off an island?" From Skyfall's Silva to Harry Lime, we took at the menacing little stories told by 20 screen villains.
Occasionally, a movie villain will pause for a moment to deliver a brief story or anecdote. And often, these apparently incidental tales tell us a lot about an antagonist's state of mind, experiences or warped worldview.
We've compiled a selection of 20 here. Some of them are blackly funny. Many are disturbing. One or two are even moving. The first one's very strange. All of them bring something unique to each particular film in which they appear, and all of them are laced with a delicious hint of menace.
20. Xander - Enemies Closer (2013)
"When I was a little boy at my grandmama's place, she had a lovely goose. I named her Edith, after the French singer Edith Piaf..."
We begin with a delightfully weird story from Peter Hyams' 2013 thriller, Enemies Closer. Unusually, Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a villain here - the mop-haired drug boss Xander, who's after a missing consignment of pharmaceuticals.
Midway through the film, Xander subjects a helpless old man to a very strange story about his childhood affection for a goose named Edith. "I truly loved that goose," Xander tells us. But there's a cruel twist to the tale: one day, Xander's grandmother - who was clearly as crazy as Xander is - turned to her son at the dinner table and said, "Edith tastes good, no?"
"I puked up, I cried like a child," Xander says. "Ever since, I became a vegan..."
19. Brick Top - Snatch (2000)
"You got to starve the pigs for a few days, then the sight of a chopped-up body will look like curry to a pisshead..."
There's a distinct lack of poetry in this lecture from Brick Top (Alan Ford), but in the vulgarity lies the horror. As Brick Top talks, matter-of-factly and with great detail, about a pig's ability to devour human flesh in the right circumstances, we gain a disturbing insight into just what a nasty piece of work the character is.
18. Raoul Silva - Skyfall (2012)
"So, how do you get rats off an island? Hmm? My grandmother showed me..."
Bond villain Raoul Silva (Javier Bardem) tells us this story during his grand entrance near the start of Skyfall, and it tells us everything we need to know about him - his madness, his anger, his flamboyance. Silva's tale also leads us to suspect that he shares the same sadistic grandmother as Xander in the entry above - who else would think of trapping rats in an oil drum for days on end, thus creating a new breed of cannibal rats trained to cleanse the island of their own kind? Once again, cruelty seems to run in the family; Silva soon proves to be as wily as his grandparent, as he leads Bond on a merry dance around England and Scotland.
Future events are all foreshadowed in Silva's dark story. "Now they don't eat coconut anymore. Now, they only eat rat. You have changed their nature. The two survivors - this is what she made us."
17. Vincenzo Coccotti - True Romance (1993)
"Sicilians are great liars. The best in the world. I'm Sicilian. My father was the world heavyweight champion of Sicilian liars. From growing up with him I learned the pantomime. There are seventeen different things a guy can do when he lies to give himself away. A guys got seventeen pantomimes. A woman's got twenty, but a guy's got seventeen... "
Christopher Walken's gangster Vincenzo Coccotti only appears in one solitary scene in Tony Scott's True Romance, but he makes every syllable of Quentin Tarantino's screenplay count. Here, he's interrogating Clifford Worley (Dennis Hopper), the luckless father of Clarence (Christian Slater), who's accidentally skipped off with a huge consignment of drugs.
It's unusual to see Hopper playing a relatively placid individual here, but it's more fascinating still to see the sparks fly between two great actors. Walken's "show and tell" speech is full of menace, and Hopper character, quickly realises that his days are numbered, counters with a story of his own - one expressly designed to enrage Coccotti as much as possible.
It's a classic scene, with two stories delivered by two true acting greats. "I haven't killed anybody since 1984..."
16. Emperor Palpatine/Darth Sidious - Star Wars: Revenge Of The Sith (2005)
"Darth Plagueis was a Dark Lord of the Sith who lived many years ago. He was so powerful and so wise that he could use the Force to influence the midichlorians to create life... He had such a knowledge of the dark side that he could even keep the ones he cared about from dying..."
The Star Wars prequels aren't commonly remembered for the charisma of their stars of the quality of their acting, but Ian McDiarmid surely deserves props for his superb performance in the midst of a decidedly bumpy trilogy.
One of the highlights of Revenge Of The Sith is the scene in which McDiarmid's Palpatine (known to his evil friends as Darth Sidious) tells Anakin Skywalker (Hayden Christensen) the tragedy of Darth Plagueis - a Sith lord with the power of life and death.
"He taught his apprentice everything he knew," Palpatine says, "and then one night, his apprentice killed him in his sleep. It's ironic that he could save others from death, but not himself. "
It's grimly fascinating to see Palpatine's intelligence at work here, as he nudges Anakin one step closer to the Dark Side while revealing to us a little more of his own villainous nature. While Palpatine doesn't tell Anakin who Plagueis's apprentice was, we can readily guess his identity.
McDiarmid, we'd argue, really doesn't get enough credit for his work in the Star Wars movies.
15. Uncle Charlie - Shadow Of A Doubt (1943)
"You live in a dream. You're a sleepwalker, blind. How do you know what the world is like? Do you know the world is a foul sty? Do you know, if you rip off the fronts of houses, you'd find swine? The world's a hell. What does it matter what happens in it?"
For this writer, Shadow Of A Doubt is one of the best films Hitchcock ever made, and at its centre is a terrific performance from Joseph Cotten as the enigmatic Uncle Charlie - a seemingly affable ladies man with something darker lying at the corners of his character. In one late scene, Charlie reveals something of his true nature to his teenage niece, Charlotte (Teresa Wright) - and it's a classic Hitchcock moment.
14. General Jack D Ripper - Dr. Strangelove (1964)
"Do you realise that in addition to fluoridating water, why, there are studies underway to fluoridate salt, flour, fruit juices, soup, sugar, milk, ice cream? Ice cream, Mandrake. Children's ice cream!"
Towards the end of Stanley Kubrick's legendarily brilliant Cold War satire, Dr. Strangelove, Stirling Hayden's General Ripper lets the full extent of his mania slip: he's sparked a nuclear war because he's convinced that the Communists have been polluting America with fluoride.
Ripper goes on to explain to the ineffectual Mandrake (Peter Sellers) that the Communists have been attempting to pollute the "precious bodily fluids" of Americans everywhere. Equally troubling, Ripper also appears to regard women as vampires; "women sense my power," he says between puffs of his cigar, "they seek the life essence."
"I do not avoid women, Mandrake," Ripper hastily adds, "but I do deny them my essence."
Thanks for clearing that up, General Ripper. Otherwise we might have thought you were weird or something.
13. Norman Stansfield - Leon (1993)
"I like these calm little moments before the storm. It reminds me of Beethoven. Can you hear it? It's like when you put your head to the grass and you can hear the growin' and you can hear the insects. Do you like Beethoven?"
Gary Oldman may have been typecast as a villain in the 1990s, but that's because he was so good at playing them. Corrupt, pill-popping, psychopathic cop Norman Stansfield is among Oldman's best creations - a bad guy who straddles the line between larger-than-life comic book charisma and outright menace.
Like "the calm before the storm," as Stansfield puts it, we know he's about to do something nasty when he starts wittering on about classical music - it's just a case of waiting for the storm to begin. Like Hannibal Lecter and numerous other villains, Stansfield is defined by his divergent interests in high culture and old-fashioned, primal cruelty.
12. Gabriel, The Prophecy (1995)
"I'm an angel. I kill firstborns while their mamas watch. I turn cities into salt. I even, when I feel like it, rip the souls from little girls, and from now 'til kingdoms come, the only thing that you can count on in your existence is never understanding why."
The outright brilliance of this quote really snaps into focus when you realise who says it - none other than Christopher Walken, who brings his demented charisma to the role of the archangel Gabriel, who's descended to Earth in search of an evil lost soul. Whether he's creepily teaching school kids to play the trumpet or menacing Elias Koteas' detective with stories about his lips, Walken's on superb form in The Prophecy.
11. John Doe - Seven (1995)
"On the subway today, a man came up to me to start a conversation. He made small talk, a lonely man talking about the weather and other things..."
In David Fincher's masterfully dark suspense thriller Seven, the killer John Doe sends shivers down our spines before he's even made his dramatic appearance. The quote above is an entry from one of the villain's huge stack of diaries, and read out by Morgan Freeman's world-weary detective William Somerset.
"I tried to be pleasant and accommodating," Doe's diary entry continues, "but my head hurt from his banality. I almost didn't notice it had happened, but I suddenly threw up all over him. He was not pleased, and I couldn't stop laughing."
It's an insight into the mind behind an increasingly disturbing state of murders - murders which, we later discover, are all part of a kind of sermon from John Doe. "Wanting people to listen, you can't just tap them on the shoulder anymore," Doe says of his hideous crimes. "You have to hit them with a sledgehammer, and then you'll notice you've got their strict attention."
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