WARNING: The following contains spoilers for How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, in theaters now.
The How to Train Your Dragon franchise has crafted some very interesting villains since it debuted in 2010. The first movie introduced the Red Death, a massive dragon who bullied smaller ones into scavenging food for it, which inevitably caused humanity to hate them. As for the sequel, it dealt with the merciless Drago, who hunted dragons to restore balance to the world.
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, however, produces a villain that's just as unforgiving and unflinching, but one obsessed with trophies. He may not be flashy as Drago or intimidating like Red Death, but Grimmel the Grisly easily carves his path out as the scariest villain in the trilogy.
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When we first meet Grimmel (F. Murray Abraham), he's not unlike other dragon hunters, mostly because of his red armor, but we quickly find out he hunted the Night Fury species to near extinction and is now desperate to finish the job with Toothless. His title of "typical hunter" is quickly shaken when we see the weapons Grimmel uses.
He doesn't have a Bewilderbeast that can control dragons like Drago, instead he uses stealth, traps and chemical concoctions, coming off like the series' Joker. He loves the thrill of the hunt and basks in the bloodshed, forcing dragons to bend to his will.
He does so by turning himself into a one man army who drugs up dragons and mind controls them using venom he has collected over the years. He's so effective at what he does that not even Toothless as the alpha can break them out of their trance.
Grimmel comes off as sadistic, torturing creatures in this way, even using them to tote his airship vast distances. When he infiltrates Berk and sneaks into Hiccup's (Jay Baruchel) room, the young Viking chief sees there's no rhyme or reason to his ways, which petrifies him beyond belief.
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Throughout the movie, we're waiting to hear how dragons killed Grimmel's family, leading to some sort of vendetta, but, sadly, he simply wants to wipe dragons off the planet because he loves chaos.
One would even think he'd build an army or work with other hunters, but he prefers to roll solo, even expressing a willingness to kill other hunters who get in his way. Judging from this hatred for his own fraternity, well, it's no wonder they call him Grimmel the Grisly.
The way he uses simple weaponry and serums, not to mention the Light Fury (Toothless' fellow Night Fury and love interest) as bait, are all such cerebral methods that they push Hiccup to the brink like never before.
Grimmel's dark nature is further magnified by the fact that he prefers to capture the creatures and execute them en masse, as he believes it'll make savoring this chemical genocide all the better.
It's so sick and twisted for a kids' movie, but, honestly, it's intriguing to get this kind of depth. This mature approach creates a multidimensional enemy in the form of a chemical terrorist and ultimately leads to Hiccup having no choice but to kill him.
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It's something he resisted in previous movies, but because he knows Grimmel will stop at nothing to annihilate the beasts, he's left with no choice. When you make your protagonist make decisions like that, you know you're the perfect villain, because nothing's better than driving a hero to break his moral compass.
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World, written and directed by Dean DeBlois, the film stars the voices of Jay Baruchel, Cate Blanchett, Craig Ferguson, America Ferrera, Jonah Hill, Kit Harington, Christopher Mintz-Plasse, T. J. Miller, Kristen Wiig and F. Murray Abraham, is now in theaters nationwide.