Cautionary Women

Delia is the daughter of the Antichrist on  Omen IV: The Awakening , the direct-to-TV sequel of the Damien trilogy. Like dad, like daughter: She rips evangelical pamphlets and does pretty much all the sine qua nons for a diabolical spawn. People die horrific deaths if they cross her, let alone make the Sign of the Cross, all while first-rate hellish energies whirl around her. Canadian actress Asia Vieira played the devil-child. She was last seen on TV in 2006 in Gospel of Deceit. Asia all grown up in 2002's  Guilt by Association (via Lisa Roxia ) 

Like everyone else, Neil Gaiman  depicts witches as extremely vainglorious beings obsessed with youthful beauty. His 1998 novel Stardust  tells of three sisters known as the Lilim, witches with ineffable powers. When their kingdom sank under the sea, the witch-queens, heretofore unfamiliar with aging, started withering away.  Gaiman never named them. But in the 2007 film version , the three witches adopt names. Michelle Pfeiffer plays the eldest and most nefarious among them, Lamia, push-up corsets and all. As in the novel, the sisters search for fallen stars, whose hearts can supply them hundreds of years of youth. They found a fallen star before, but its heart is now running out, the effects of age fast catching up. They need a new fallen star to murder and eat. Yet another witch, Ditchwater Sal, who defected from the group, wants to get any new fallen star for herself. But Lamia hexed her such that she would not recognize the s...

Legend has it that in Blair, Maryland, there once lived a witch named Elly Kedward. In 1785, several children testified that Elly lured them into her house to siphon blood from them. Kedward was consequently banished from the town amid the intolerable winter. Next year, many village children went missing. Townsfolk attributed their disappearance to Kedward’s curse on their community and moved all at once. It was not until 1824 when the area of Blair was settled once again. The new town became known as Burkittsville. Barely a year later, a ten-year old girl disappeared. Witnesses said they saw a hand reach out from Tappy East Creek to the girl, who then presumably drowned. Mysteriously, bundles of sticks constricted the flow of the creek for more than a week thereafter. In 1886, an eight-year old kid vanished and a search-and-rescue operation was initiated. Although the kid returned, many of the searchers did not. They were discovered utterly disemboweled.   From 1940 to 1941, ...

"Mother knows best!" Once upon a time, a childless couple lived beside an enchantress who owned a garden. The wife, who was pregnant, coveted the enchantress’ rampions so much that her husband stole some for her. Eventually the enchantress caught him and threatened punishment but the man asked to be spared. In exchange for her absolution, the man gave away his wife’s child at —oh what’s the point. Rapunzel by Walter Crane , circa 1899 (via National Geographic ) Disney always reworks anything by Grimm anyway. In 2010’s Tangled , their long-gestating Rapunzel movie, the wife was a dying queen whose condition could only be cured by a magical flower. A very old woman has tended the flower in hiding for hundreds of years, her youth preserved by its power. With the help of his scouts, the king was able to procure the flower, saving the queen who went on to sire a baby girl. But then the old woman spirited away the child, who somehow inherited the flower’s magic, and has since ra...

You just know this mutt isn't going to last. Forget Leighton Meester in The Roommate . Jennifer Jason Leigh as Hedra Carlson in Single White Female (1992) is the real deal .  Next time you feel apprehensive about a roommate, feel validated. Your fears may just be not unfounded.

Twihards hate Victoria. They really do. Victoria is that evil, i.e. she wants to do away with a vampire dreamboat named Edward Cullen and his wifey Bella Swan, whom they unanimously sympathize with. This much is clear: Victoria had been a bad, bad vampire. She was even worse when Edward Cullen killed her mate James in order to protect Bella. Grudge in heart, she has since instigated a massive reprisal against the Cullen coven, entailing the creation of an army of “newborn” vampires in Washington (where the action is in Stephenie Meyer’s universe). Victoria is no creature to mess with. If anything, James coupled with her for her unique power of “self-preservation,” which comes really handy. This means Victoria has the ability to be literally steps ahead of anyone. In the bestselling books, Meyer wrote how Victoria’s "feet were dragged to safe spots and places." Time for a new hair dye Bryce Dallas Howard played Victoria in Eclipse , the third Twilight movie, after Rachel...

Glorificus is the ultimate proof of Buffy Summers' impregnability. By engaging a god, which Glorificus is, Buffy vindicated her status as the world’s strongest woman. Vampire ass-whomping suddenly became so yesterday when Glorificus came to Sunnydale.   Buffy: "Cullens? No-brainer ." To fight Glory, Buffy Summers needs to flex every superhuman muscle at her disposal. Glory is impervious to almost everything, the big immortal that she is. No collapsing building or rampaging truck could stop her. She can outrun any earthly creature, speak all human languages, and practice magic beyond compare. These are just the least she can do while on earth. Glory came from hell. Banished to earth by two rival hell gods, she has since sought the Key—in the form of Buffy’s newfound “sister” Dawn—to unlock the doors home. On earth, she quickly gained a reputation for unspeakable evil, aptly earning her the title “That Which Cannot Be Named." Medieval knights and monks referred to ...

Ursula marks a milestone as the first villain in the Walt Disney Renaissance, a period in which the studio released its string of highest-grossing traditionally animated films. She is also notable for being the Disney Renaissance’s only female villain. Small wonder Disney decided not to repeat itself with another female baddie, as Ursula was a tough act to follow. One can straight away see who the villain in The Little Mermaid (1989) is. Ursula is the lone octopus person or cecaelia in a kingdom of merfolk led by King Triton. Evidently, Ursula represents one of many liberties Disney took with the Hans Christian Andersen fairy tale on which the film is based. Illustration for the original sea witch in  Fairy Tales by Hans Christian Andersen (via bridgeman )   Disney even intended for Ursula to be Triton’s sister. Ursula has a sister though, Morgana, the villain in the straight-to-DVD sequel The Little Mermaid: Return to the Sea (2000). Ursula unfortuna...

Age is nothing but a number in hell, where Samara Morgan obviously came from. That cherubic face belies an evil so sublime it rubs off on VHS . Alive, Samara is a walking wrecker's ball, causing miscarriages and driving horses mad. In death, Samara manages to be even more deadly, tape-recording perpetual curses. Hey, at least she leaves 7-day notices by phone.   Only the future-forward Japanese could think of high-tech horror as this. Samara is the American version of Sadako, the antagonist in the original movie, Hideo Nakata's Ring  (リング) .   Shiny mane. Here is the trailer of the American remake, which launched a thousand Halloween costumes around the world:

"I hate it when things don't go my way. It makes me so horny." - Kathryn Merteuil, Cruel Intentions (1999) Before Gossip Girl , there was Cruel Intentions, a modern retelling of Choderlos de Laclos' 18th century novel  Les Liaisons dangereuses . It reacquaints us with the amoral Marquise de Merteuil, recast as Kathryn Merteuil (Sarah Michelle Gellar).  Upper East Side 's teenage queen bee, Kathryn is the best engineer of sex for miles around her campus—more than she cared to admit publicly. Virgins and prudes are eyesores to her. She made a bet with her stepbrother, Sebastian Valmont ( Ryan Phillippe ), to deflower the prissy Annette Hargrove ( Reese Witherspoon ), the stakes of which are a Jaguar and a one-night stand.  In a related scheme, she sought to avenge herself on the man who rejected her by pimping his new cherie , the innocent Cecile Caldwell (Selma Blair). The two even shared a picturesque kiss, forever setting the b...

Heather Locklear was megabitch par excellence as Amanda Woodward in Melrose Place (1992 to 1999). Having learned from the pumas of  Dynasty , Locklear edged her claws to their sharpest as the catty D&D Advertising executive.  Woodward has bedded nearly every man, with wife or otherwise, inside the titular apartment complex and outside it. By the end of the soap, Amanda Woodward had become Mrs. Parezi Burns McBride Blake McBride Burns. In between the man-eating, Amanda backstabbed and schemed her way to the zenith of D&D, bumping weaker cats off it.  Like Joan Collins before her, Locklear entered a TV series on a ratings stalemate.  Melrose Place , as if by Alexis Carrington magic, then went on a crazy upward trajectory, even endearing her character to the gay community. Locklear also bagged four Golden Globe Award nominations for Best Actress in this role. 

Roald Dahl’s the Grand High Witch is one of the most scary-as-shit characters in children’s literature, at least from a tot’s POV. Creatures whose sole onus in life is to kill children can be scary. But it’s their leader who incites fear. Scary book and it's not even by Stephen King. While children’s imagination tends to run aflutter, Jim Henson proved to have the wilder one. Warner Bros. engaged his first-rate puppetry services to bring Dahl’s The Witches to cinemas in 1990, scaring Generation Y way before Jersey Shore did. All glamour outside, all evil inside It certainly helped that Anjelica Huston  exuded her signature dark looks in the movie, foreshadowing her bewitching role a year later: Now that, my friends, is no evil. Morticia Addams is just idiosyncratically morbid. Here's how to dress up like Morticia . In the film as in the book, the Grand High Witch is evil queen of the first degree, able to brew designer potions for lesser hags and shoot lethal ...

Now this woman is hands full with mischief.  Spiral intermittently serves as the right hand—no pun intended—of Mojo, also known as Marvel comics ' megalomaniacal dead-ringer for Jabba the Hutt . She had been an ordinary human named Ricochet Rita when Mojo held her captive and modified her into a semi-cybernetic, living Shiva . Like the Hindu god, Spiral often dances to bring out her powers, which straddle magic and technology.  Spiral has racked up atrocity after atrocity at the bidding of Mojo, who runs a TV-like network in Mojo World. On her own Spiral has proved to be just as fearsome. For some time, Spiral ran a business on Earth called the Body Shoppe (not that Body Shop ), where she installed cybernetic body parts on people—if not made them cyborgs altogether. Lady Deathstrike was one satisfied customer.  By her own initiative, Spiral virtually made a soap opera out of Psylocke's life, who had otherwise starred in a Mojo-produced TV...