15 Movies Where Every Character Is A Villain

Don't Breathe is a thriller with a nifty twist. Three young people in need of money decide to rob the home of a blind veteran who supposedly received a ton of money from a wrongful death settlement. They break in, thinking the job will be a breeze. However, the guy (played by Stephen Lang) figures out intruders have entered his home. He shuts off the power while the trio is in the basement, leaving them as sightless as he is. The only difference is that he knows his way around, whereas they don't.

In real life, someone like the blind man would simply call the police. In this case, however, he reveals a sadistic side, siccing his dog on the intruders and proudly brandishing a weapon. Later, there's a revelation that he's got a woman bound and gagged in the house. That, and what follows, is a game-changer. We're rooting for him at first, and then suddenly, we're not rooting for him at all. He's even worse than the young would-be burglars. 

Gone Girl looks at what happens in a marriage when both partners are terrible human beings. The movie takes us into the relationship between Amy (Rosamund Pike) and Nick (Ben Affleck). They once promised to love each other "for better or for worse," but it's mostly just become the "worse" part. Of course, if you've seen the film, you know that Amy goes missing, making Nick the prime suspect in an intense police investigation.

How miserable are these people? Well, he kind of hopes some horrible fate really has befallen her, while she, it turns out, staged her own disappearance in order to get him in trouble with the law. These two make the central couple in The War of the Roses look tame in comparison. 

Nightcrawler is a searing indictment of American media, specifically its tendency to sensationalize tragedy. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Louis Bloom, a petty crook who buys a camcorder and follows police and ambulance calls throughout Los Angeles, hoping to sell his graphic footage to TV news stations. At one point, he even enters a crime scene in order to get some "juicy" footage. Riz Ahmed plays his assistant, and Rene Russo is the local news producer more than happy to pony up the cash for his recordings. 

There truly is no one heroic in Nightcrawler. The film suggests that there are plenty of leeches in the world willing to exploit the tragedies of others to make a fast buck. Just as bad, there are also plenty of news outlets looking to bump up viewership or readership via the most exploitative means available. The movie takes an in-depth look at how that sick dynamic works in today's society. 

From the beginning of his career, Quentin Tarantino has had a fascination with wrongdoer types. In The Hateful Eight, he presents an entire pack of them. Samuel L. Jackson plays a bounty hunter snowed in at a lodge during a winter storm. Also stuck there is a fellow bounty hunter (Kurt Russell), his fugitive (Jennifer Jason Leigh), a former Confederate general (Bruce Dern), and several additional shady types.

Jackson's character comes to believe that someone in the group is planning to knock off all the others in order to help the female fugitive escape. This sets off a wave of paranoia among the group. Distrust runs rampant, leading to shocking - and sometimes unwarranted - acts of violence against one another. When suspicions fester and grow, none of the story's inhabitants can be counted on to act morally. And none do. 

Incredibly desperate people often fall into the trap of doing things that are inadvisable in order to get themselves out of bad situations. Pain & Gain is filled with such characters. Mark Wahlberg stars as Daniel, a Miami personal trainer who wants to become the kind of person who pays for services rather than someone who gets paid to provide them. He hatches a plan to extort money from a wealthy client. Helping him out are two fellow bodybuilders. Adrian (Anthony Mackie) is a steroid abuser and Paul (Dwayne Johnson) is a recent parolee with a substance problem.

The three succeed in extorting the client, Victor Kershaw (Tony Shalhoub), but he's not exactly what you'd call an "innocent" target. Kershaw vows revenge against the trio, putting the wheels in motion to make that happen. Stuff gets gruesome from there. Pain & Gain is not what anyone would call a subtle movie. It does, however, show the hideous lengths people will go to in order to gain - or hold on to - wealth. 

In the comedy Very Bad Things, a group of guys hire an exotic dancer for a bachelor party. One of them accidentally kills the woman, and when a security guard discovers her body, another member of the group offs him. The buddies then concoct a plan to cut the cadavers into pieces and inter them in the desert. The stress of the situation ends up pitting the men against each other. What can we say? It's called Very Bad Things for a reason.

You might think that the bride would be the one sympathetic character in the movie. Nope. Played by Cameron Diaz, she grows angry upon learning what the guys did because it threatens to ruin her special day. In fact, she demands the wedding proceed as if nothing happened. 

Literally every single major character in this dark comedy is someone you wouldn't want to meet in real life.