yes, definetly voldy, but I am also a fan of Saint Dane from the Pendragon series.  oh, and Count Olaf is brilliant (Lemony Snicket's a Series of Unfortuante Events)  and if you've ever seen the movie Twelve Rounds, the villain is quite smart and crafty. his name is Miles something.

AWFUL VILLAINS:

Victoria from Twilight is actually quite pathetic!

I'm not sure if Axel would count as a villian either but I still think he's awesome.

*agrees with everything Falmiriel said in the above post* I also like Opal Koboi from the Artemis Fowl series (Compliment me on my boots or DIE!!)... and Orannis the Destroyer from the Old Kingdom series. He's a giant column of flames. It gets no cooler than that. XD

I disagree with #1. Complete Monsters are only fun if they're handled properly, otherwise they're boring.

Take Voldemort, for example. There's a reason he's distinctly meh in canon, and it happens to be one of the major reasons I'm such a gung-ho, no-holds-barred BellaxVoldy shipper (the other being that I think they're too "perfect" and too fun a pair for it not to have been canon, and also that I feel horribly sorry for Bellatrix (ask Mary, she'll tell you...)). Canon Voldy, you see, was a textbook Complete Monster evil megalomaniac who claimed to be a Nietzsche Wannabe but really just wanted power and more power. That was his sole motivating factor, and, yes, he was scary and a darn good villain. Yes, he was easy to hate, but that's just the problem I have with him in canon.

I like to have at least a tiny little bit of connection to the villain. It makes them all the scarier if they seem human. Take Umbridge vs. Voldemort. Voldemort was an insane, power-hungry, genocidal wizard Hitler, essentially, and he was terrifying at some points. Umbridge, by the end of the series, was also revealed to be an insane, power-hungry, genocidal witch, but she also liked the colour pink and loved cats, and THAT's the reason she's hated (and feared) much more than Voldy ever will be. That difference is the reason Voldy has a widespread, well-known nickname and Umbridge doesn't.

My point is, unless the villain really is a nonhuman of some sort, they need to have some semblance of humanity in them if they're going to be really scary, creepy, and evil.

Take Mr. Teatime from Hogfather. Mr. Teatime was an orphan, taken in by the Assassin's Guild out of pity (they only found out later that he was probably a Self-Made Orphan). He was a brilliant student if overenthusiastic about the whole assassination part. He might have been a sociopath, sure, but he was ambitious within the Guild and he had a hobby- even if it was a morbid one like thinking up ways of killing, say, the Hogfather, the Soul Cake Duck, even Death himself. He was respectful of his betters and ruthless towards those he was to... inhume. He was ingenious, fearless, yet childlike. He saw things differently from other people (and one of the ways he saw things differently was seeing other people as things), and he was proud of it. He had the audacity to threaten Susan- Death's *granddaughter*- with Death's own sword. He hated it when people pronounced his name wrong ("It's pronounced 'Teh-ah-time-eh, sir"). He wasn't interested in power or wealth, just being an assassin and getting people to pronounce his name right without resorting to excessive force.

And he was unbelievably creepy. If he had just been a sociopath and not cared about being an assassin or getting people to pronounce Teatime right (and, for that matter, his obsession with calling everyone- even his victims- his "friends" and insisting that he would hate to think he isn't among "friends") he would still have been a great villain but he wouldn't have that skin-crawling creep factor that made him so brilliant (and that's not even starting on the way Marc Warren portrayed him in the movie version- with the high voice and that- that giggle. And the baby curls hair. Sooooooooooooooooooooooo creeeeeeeeeeeeeepy.)

Whereas, as I said, Voldy is this flattish, power-hungry, immortality-obsessed guy who just wants to kill everyone. Scary? Yes. Creepy, interesting villain? Not so very much. Well, I guess the graveyard sequence in GoF is creepy, but that's it.

Which is why my version of Voldy is still relatively power-hungry (but more of a Vetinari power hungry, i.e., not the whole world) and still immortality-obsessed (because it's such an integral part of his character that it'd be horribly OOC to make him not care about being immortal), and still homicidal (because I love homicidal characters), but there's more. Most notably, Bellatrix. Depending on how I'm feeling at any given time, I range from the heavily implied love/hate thing they had going on (see DH) to a complete AU with requited love and a Rodolphus ranging from concerned and purely platonic towards Bella all the way to jealous and vindictive and mean. And adding in just that relationship tends to add in a lot of additional depth and points of sympathy with the character, which makes him all the more interesting and makes him a good deal scarier and creepier, because, frankly, if you hate everything including, on some level, yourself, it's easy to want to turn the world into a terrified, oppressed wreck and commit mass genocide. If you have a human capacity to care for someone or something (other than power, of course), it's much more likely that you actually, you know, have a conscience and that somehow makes it all the scarier that you're genocidal and actively trying to take over the world or part of the world. Does this make sense, or am I just rambling? I'm not sure as it's past midnight.

On a similar note, take Sweeney Todd. Originally he just sort of killed people for fun and for profit. His was an interesting and disturbing on many levels kind of story, but he was so... flat. He hated everything. He didn't care about anything but his own neck. Mrs. Lovett, too, originally was horribly flat, selfish, and greedy.

Enter Stephen Sondheim, who, like many before and many to come, decided to make an adaption of the Victorian urban legend. Only he set it to a brilliant, complex score and got excellent actors (stares pointedly at Angela Lansbury) and opened it on Broadway.

Sondheim's version had Sweeney as a man who had been wrongly exiled to Australia for fifteen years, now back and looking for vengeance. Mrs. Lovett is still quite selfish, yes, but now she's arguably the smartest character in the entire show, despite her major failing at picking a decent love interest (but everyone needs a flaw). We get to see Sweeney developing into the mad, cynical, bloodthirsty serial killer he was in the original story, get to cheer for him as he finally gets his revenge- and then feel horrible for him when it all comes crashing around his ears. We also get to giggle nervously at the brilliance that is A Little Priest, because it is talking about cannibalism but it is still unbelievably funny, but that's an entirely different matter.

Again, the point is, villains who have human qualities- love, bitterness and cynicism, wide-eyed optimism (in Mrs. Lovett's case...), multiple personality disorders (like Azkadellia, though hers was justified), sadistic, manipulative agendas which masquerade as revenge shticks pretending to be caring, sympathetic aunts (yay Ursula), ambition unrelated to megalomania (Teatime!), Tastes Like Diabetes (Umbridge), etc. ect.- are the ones who really succeed as villains. They're the ones who are absolutely terrifying and/or creepy.

Though, as you say, it is nice if they have a point other than just making life miserable for the heros. Of course, all villains on some level are just there "for the story", but the good ones are the villains who have well-developed ideas, motivations, ambitions, and most of all a purpose in life other than just being evil or pursuing a life of crime. Backstories should be well thought out and not slapped together in traditional Start of Darkness fashion. Like Ursula's backstory- queen of half the sea, got overly ambitious, made her brother nervous, got banished by her brother, furious about it, determined to "get the good times back" and return to her sadistic, cruel, and most of all (for her) fun rule, willing to do whatever it takes to do it- up to and including using her youngest niece as a lever with which to torture and manipulate her brother... Yes, the fundamental reason she's there is to provide a solid conflict for the story, but she exists seamlessly in the plot itself. She's part of the world. She wasn't tacked on at the last minute; she's there "for a reason" as you put it. 

Me too!