All this stuff copyright 2019 Zoe Fraade-Blanar.

What do our movie-watching habits tell us about a century of national anxiety? Let’s find out. We took the top 100 movies of each decade and assigned them a primary villain, then charted the rise and fall of various bad-guy trends.

Note that this is not 100% scientific. Many movies have more than one villain, or the villain has a mix of characteristics. The bad guy could easily be a Devious Woman/Minority/Terrorist/Vampire, or a Terrorist group in which one is a Devious Woman/minority, but there are also Vampires, two very different situations. When there were multiple villains, or the villain falls into more than one archetype, we chose the villain type the audience is most supposed to “fear”. So for example, in Jurassic Park it’s true that the villain is human hubris, science, or hackers, but the thing we’re supposed to be afraid of is definitely the dinosaur.

Please also note that many early movies' plot lines have been lost, or there was not "plot" as we understand it now.

If you find any outright mistakes, please let us know so we can update the data. For questions, or a complete list of this data, including all possible secondary villains, contact Zoe Fraade-Blanar. A full analysis is to come, and will be published at Happy Octopus.