Unsurprisingly, given that 2018 has boasted a bumper crop of real world horrors, the worlds of film and TV have been littered with larger-than-life heroes and villains. From Annihilation to Sharp Objects, we’ve had some terrifying film villains and some inspiring TV heroes.

In order to escape the fact that Trump is the President, climate change is real (and about to kill us all), and Malcolm Turnbull somehow isn’t the worst person to lead the Australian Liberal party, we’ve collectively to decided to bury our head in the cultural sand.

To that end, our screens have been overstuffed with knights in shining armour to save us, and demons to be slayed.

So many, in fact, that it feels appropriate to arrange the best heroes and villains of film and TV in list form, which we have done right bloody here, just for you.

The Heroes

5. Joaquin Phoenix as Joe — You Were Never Really Here

Joaquin Phoenix’s Joe is a perfect example of heroes as they actually appear in our lives. After all, a real hero isn’t some knight in shining armour with a steadfast moral compass and an uncanny knack when it comes to making the right choices. Real heroes are often strange, conflicted, and violent people, capable of committing good and bad acts in equal measure.

That’s Joe to a tee. A suicidal Army vet haunted by past horrors, he stumbles into a child prostitution ring utterly by chance, and kills his way to its centre with the impassive grace of a shark. He’s one bad day away from being a villain — and that’s what makes him so goddamn compelling.

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4. Victoria Pedretti as Nell Crain — The Haunting Of Hill House

Let’s be honest: this list could be made up entirely of members of the Crain family. Every one of them is an unfailingly wholesome, fascinating hero in their own right, from the haunted Luke to the snobby and confused Steven.

But it’s Nell who earns her place on this list. Not for her strength, or for her intelligence, but for her extraordinary kindness. It is, after all, her kindness that draws the Crain family together; kindness that saves them in The Haunting Of Hill House‘s fraught climax.

Without Nell, the Crains would be a bunch of strangers, fighting their own complex demons. With her, they become better people.

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3. Tom Cruise as Ethan Hunt — Mission: Impossible – Fallout

Y’all haters are corny with that “Tom Cruise is good at running and nothing else” mess, and Ethan goddamn Hunt is the proof.

For six films now, Hunt has proved himself as one of the most relentlessly capable, loveable heroes in modern action history. The dude can do it all: fight off baddies on a train; punch a man through a mirror; save his wife from a murderous Philip Seymour Hoffman; pilot a helicopter through snowy ravines; and not crack on to his much younger female leads.

He is the modern Renaissance man, if the standards by which we measured such things involved being able to fend off attacks from a rifle shaped like a flute.

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2.  Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode — Halloween

Laurie Strode is a survivor. Over the last four decades, she’s been killed by Michael Meyers, and she’s killed him in turn. She’s transformed from an uptight, prissy fusspot into a gun-toting matriach and then back again. And in 2018’s Halloween, the first film in the series to properly give her the dues that have so long been owed to her, she is a genuine force of nature.

No longer the mouse to Michael’s cat, she is now a fully fleshed-out hero, both ever-aware of the trauma of her past, and yet utterly unprepared to let it define her. Now, let’s have one thousand more Halloween sequels headed up by badass Laurie, please.

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1. Andrea Riseborough as Mandy — Mandy

A lot of the discourse around Mandy, Panos Cosmatos’ bat shit bonkers revenge head trip, has centred around Nicolas Cage’s performance as hero Red Miller. It’s not hard to see why — Cage tears up the screen, downing whole bottles of vodka, getting into chainsaw fights, and coming face to face with a tiger.

But, as the title makes clear, the film’s emotional centre isn’t Red but his wife, the Black Sabbath-loving Mandy. It is, after all, Mandy who provides Red with his purpose in life; Mandy who suffuses the otherwise hard-to-watch film with light, and with joy; and Mandy who mounts the most cutting defence against the film’s toxic villain, Jeremiah Sand, laughing in the wizened man’s face.

Indeed, Mandy is exactly the kind of hero 2018 needs: a strong, empowered, independent person, who stays centred as the world around her whips itself to shit.

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The Villains

5. That Horrifying Fucking Bear — Annihilation 

As someone who has seen Grizzly Man too many times, lemme tell you: bears are straight-up terrifying most of the time. They are, however, notably more terrifying when they’re skull-faced beasts birthed from a mysterious alien zone known as the shimmer.

Annihilation‘s fucked-up bear only pops up for a few, brief scenes, bursting into the picture with a bunch of anarchy in its tow (“Is that a bear?” is all Natalie Portman’s Lena can whimper when the thing first appears) and leaving some 20 minutes later. But the rest of the movie feels somehow indebted to that goddamn grizzly – the mark it leaves lingers for a long, long time.

Oh, and the fact that the creature was designed by the FX team responsible for Paddington, the world’s most adorable bear, only makes it that much more awe-inspiring.

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4. Benedict Hardie as Fisk — Upgrade

Upgrade‘s Fisk looks more like a Silicon Valley bro than your typical action movie heavy — he’s closer genetically to Elon Musk than he is Die Hard‘s Hans Gruber. But that’s exactly the point. He is a villain perfectly suited to a film about technology and capitalism gone wild; a stunningly authentic vision of what tomorrow’s evil masterminds will look like.

With his perfectly maintained pencil moustache, his air of homicidal smarm, and his ability to sneeze tiny, lethal nanobots, Fisk is a bold new villain for the distinctly depressing information age.

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3. Patricia Clarkson as Adora Crellin — Sharp Objects 

Everybody knows an Adora Crellin. A constantly soused, long-haired she-witch, Adora slowly infiltrates the echelons of Wind Gap, the fictitious Southern town in which she lives, and turns the denizens against each other. She is a master manipulator; the owner of an acid tongue, and a woman who can devastate an entire family with one carefully placed quip.

Even before she transforms into a fully-fledged threat in Sharp Objects‘ final two episodes, Adora knows how to hurt. She doesn’t need to resort to weapons, or to fucked-up bear powers like the other villains in this list. All she need to do is make up a mojito, take a seat in a comfy, padded chair, and spit some of the most lethal barbs imaginable.

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2. Alexander Skarsgård as Vernon Sloane — Hold The Dark

Turns out Bill isn’t the only scary Skarsgård

Vernon Sloane isn’t really a human being. An ex-soldier who moves through Hold The Dark clad in a wolf mask and armed with a truly eye-watering array of knives, pistols and rifles, his motivations are never really revealed to the audience, even by the film’s finale.

He kills people he has reason to spare, and he spares people that he has reasons to kill. Even his ‘mission’ – to avenge his wife after she murders his son – collapses by the climax. He’s just a rangy force of nature; a sociopath with no interest in societal convention, or in useless words like ‘morality’.

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1. Tilda Swinton as Madame Blanc — Suspiria

In the original Suspiria, Madame Blanc is a steely-eyed, unknowable threat. She’s a villain in the classic mode, an obstacle for the hero with little to no obvious motivation of her own.

The Madame Blanc of Luca Guadagnino’s so-much-better-than-it-had-to-be follow-up, played with icy control by The World’s Greatest Living Actor Tilda Swinton, is a different proposition entirely.

This Madame Blanc isn’t even obviously a villain. Unlike so many onscreen antagonists, she is obsessed with change; desperate to see her beloved dance company move forward and into the future. But in order to achieve that, she’s willing to make a literal deal with the devil; to silence her enemies, and to seduce those who she thinks can work for her.

She never bursts into evil speeches, or stands at the end of a long table and announces her sinister plans. Instead, she schemes behind the scenes. She greases palms, and chops off heads, and she does it all in the shadows, where no-one can see her. She is the subtlest, most recognisable kind of villain of them all. She’s a fucking politician.

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Joseph Earp is a music and film critic who writes about horror cinema, bad TV, post-punk and The Muppets. He tweets @TheUnderlook.