Buffalo_Nickel at 2012-01-12 20:06:12:

D.B. Norton (Meet John Doe)) Apollo Creed (Rocky) Lex Luthor (Superman 1978) "The Stasi" East German Secret Police (The Lives of Others) The Velociraptors (Jurassic Park)

Teddy Pasternak at 2012-01-12 21:36:26:

Nurse Ratched - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest Bishop Edvard Vergerus - Fanny & Alexander Hamidou (The Prison Guard) & Rifki (The Snitch) - Midnight Express Bytes & Night Porter - The Elephant Man Mountain Man & Toothless Man - Deliverance Dr. Szell - Marathon Man The Penguin - Wallace & Gromit in The Wrong Trousers Frank Booth - Blue Velvet "The System" - Franz Kafka's The Trial

Atlanta at 2012-01-12 22:41:43:

Alan Rickman in anything brings awesome nemesry (nemesishood?) to life. Die Hard, Robin Hood, Closet Land, Galaxy Quest (in which he got to externalize his always-cast-as-nemesis frustration), Harry Potter. Characters packed with personality. In the Harry Potter Lego game, generic grunts replace dialogue, works for all the characters except Rickman's Snape, for whom grunts laden with disdain and discontent were wisely swapped in.

Ben O'Rourke at 2012-01-12 23:26:04:

Lecter crackles off the page in the Silence of the Lambs script. The first encounter with Starling is a model of dialogue and subtext, and something I refer to often. Alonzo Harris is also a great one... I guess a common theme with me is the ins and outs of the mentor villain -- there really is an ebb and flow here that goes beyond a villain as simply an obstacle. There's a deep psychological element with the mentor villain that really appeals to me. I'd also like to mention what I call the "mirror protagonist"... like American Gangster... two protags in direct opposition to each other, and the film moves between each's point of view so we sympathize with both.

Sean Z P Harris at 2012-01-13 02:19:14:

Kevin Spacey as John Doe in Se7en immediately springs to mind. As a child, the alien in the film Alien terrified me (my dad made us watch the film thinking it was only a sci-fi. Not sure why we carried on watching when it gradually dawned on us that it was a horror). Later, in my early teens, this was replaced by The Thing (John Carpenter). Man, space was a scary place for me in my youth. But in my youth, a good nemesis seemed to be one that scared the crap out of me. Nowadays, a good nemesis for me is one that that pushes the protag to his/her/its limits. I'm sure it's pretty widely acknowledged that a hero can only be as good as their nemesis.

jwebb66 at 2012-01-13 05:29:03:

Poor Regan MacNeil listed at No. 9, shouldn't that be Pazuzu? I like the triangular nemesis relationship in the good the bad and the ugly, the constant one upmanship and double crossing

Belal Khan at 2012-01-13 09:26:53:

Cool, so for "what makes a memorable nemesis?" I've got: - complexity in personality - smart psycho-or-sociopath. (Hannibal/joker) - relationship with protag that goes beyond simply being an obstacle. - Something that scares the crap out of you I never thought about the whole mirror progtag like American gangster. This sort of reminds me of the nemesis from the TV series "Chicago Code" and even "Rise of Plane of the Apes"

Daniel Smith at 2012-01-13 11:05:46:

I think the best nemeses (is that right?) strike a balance between viscerally showing how bad and driven they are ... and leaving their future actions up to the imagination of the viewers (which requires lots of possible directions the action could take). "What are they plotting?" "What are they capable of?" The less this requires a build-up period the stronger the emotional response will be. * Joker - The Dark Knight * Cruella De Vil - 101 Dalmations * The Penguin - Wallace and Grommit * Hans Gruber - Die Hard There is another requirement: There must be a logical motivation for a Nemesis character's actions that is anchored in their personality or past. I love the Hans Gruber line in Die Hard: "When they touch down, we'll blow the roof, they'll spend a month sifting through rubble, and by the time they figure out what went wrong, we'll be sitting on a beach, earning twenty percent." It's the plan, it's the motivation, and it underscores Gruber's cold personality in a single line. No monologue needed.

Scott at 2012-01-13 17:50:26:

Oh, from my youth, I've never shaken this moment from To Kill A Mockingbird: A drunk Bob Ewell stalking Scout while she's stuck in her father's car. My father had been transferred to the Air War College in Montgomery, Alabama in 1963, and it was my first experience with racism [the state was segregated at the time], so that probably had something to do with my reaction to Ewell... and why TKAM is one of my top 5 favorite movies.