The nursing profession is fitting for the kindest of souls since patients generally require plenty of love and reassurance to help them get through tough times. Such individuals are always required to be very keen and competent because there is never room for mistakes when lives are on the line. However, Hollywood movies are packed with nurses that are more nefarious than empathetic.
Over the years, audiences have been introduced to numerous caregivers that were either mean or simply straight-up murderous, hence triggering plenty of medical mayhem in the process. These characters never felt the slightest bit of remorse regarding their evil actions and kept on terrorizing both patients and outsiders before they received their comeuppance. Unfortunately, a few others never faced any serious consequences.
10Abby Russell (Nurse 3D)
InNurse 3D, Abby is more concerned with matters that don’t fall under her job description. As an advocate for fidelity and poster lady for self-righteousness, she makes it her mission to murder men that are cheating on their partners. Her kills are conducted using medical procedures, notably triggering paralysis using vecuronium bromide and slicing the femoral artery.
Abby bosses the proceedings from start to finish, and her high kill count givesNurse 3Da case for inclusion in discussions regardingthe most underrated serial killer movies. Despite her flawed moral perspective, she gives the impression of a trustable nurse for most of the film because she doesn’t harm patients. However, this changes in the final act where she goes on a rampage at the hospital after being cornered. Sadly, she dodges retribution by assuming a new identity.
9Mildred Ratched (One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest)
Nurse Ratched not only ranks fifth in the American Film Institute’s “Greatest Movie Villains” list, but Louise Fletcher also received an Oscar for her magnificent portrayal of the Oregon State Hospital honcho inOne Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. In the movie, the vile and overbearing medic uses her authority to terrorize patients and make them do her bidding, aware that there is nothing that they can do to her since she has total authority in the facility.
RELATED:10 Most Terrifying Female Movie Villains of All Time
As someone who is keener on discipline than cure, Ratched is definitely the kind of nurse that many people would rather avoid. Over the course of the film, the ruthless villain employs tyrannical tactics to keep patients in line. From using electric shock therapy to setting up a network of informants, she goes over and beyond to ensure everyone fears and obeys her. Besides that, her decision to have the protagonist, McMurphy, lobotomized eventually leads to his death.
8Red Nurse (Silent Hill)
Generally considered one ofthe finest video game adaptations, Roger Avary’sSilent Hillsticks to many aspects of the Konami game while still taking a number of necessary creative liberties. For example, Lisa Garland only appears as The Red Nurse, a visibly scarred roaming physician that the protagonist, Rose, encounters at a hospital when she finds herself in the eerie town known as Silent Hill.
Even though Rose is looking to get the best treatment for her daughter, The Red Nurse is not someone she would ever consider to help with that. Her appearance is likely to make any other patient feel uneasy and so Rose quickly avoids her as soon as she encounters her. In the movie, The Red Nurse also appears to be in a zombie-like dazed state, meaning she would be unqualified to handle any patient.
7Nurse Charlotte Diesel (High Anxiety)
High Anxietyis an expertly made satirical comedy. It brilliantly spoofs several Alfred Hitchcock movies but when it comes to Nurse Diesel, there is nothing to laugh about. The greedy board member at the Psycho-Neurotic Institute for the Very, Very Nervous is a symbol of the dark side of capitalism. She is also the type that both patients and insurance companies hate since she values revenue over health. Because of this attitude, she makes a habit of exaggerating the extent of illnesses in order to ensure wealthy people stay admitted for longer.
Diesel’s malice doesn’t start and end with financial practices. Anyone that discovers the truth eventually gets killed. In addition to that, she is more interested in pleasure than work. At some point in the movie, she is seen shamelessly engaging in a BDSM session with her cohort, Dr. Charles Montague on hospital grounds. Worse of all, Diesel practices sorcery, and her beliefs make it even harder for her to embrace medicine since it normally relies on science.
6Edith Mortley (Death Nurse)
A title likeDeath Nurseprepares audiences for the kind of character they’ll be meeting, and the movie indeed delivers when it comes to turpitude. Events center around Shady Palms Clinic Proprietors Nurse Edith and her brother, Doctor Gordon, who murder the mentally ill patients that the county sends to them and still keep on billing the state by lying they are still alive.
Of the two, Edith is shown to be the more sadistic one. She kills anyone that asks questions and even goes as far as to feed dead bodies to rats. In addition to that, she uses humans as “lab rats.” One horrifying scene shows her trying to replace a man’s heart with that of a dog, only for a cat to interfere and ruin the procedure. It remains a mystery why the two wouldn’t just do their jobs properly. Thankfully, the slightly ambiguous ending suggests that Edith ultimately pays for her crimes.
5Annie Wilkins (Misery)
Annie is the antagonist of one ofthe most critically acclaimed Stephen King adaptations, the Oscar-winningMisery. The former nurse takes in her favorite author after an accident to care for him, but she soon begins torturing him in an effort to make him change sections of his manuscript. The terrifying character is portrayed very convincingly by Kathy Bates, who also received a Best Actress award.
Generally, nurses are supposed to remain professional, so Annie goes way out of life by demanding changes and going on to burn the manuscript. It’s hinted that she has unresolved issues from the past, since she even yells to the author that he is another “lying old birdie” while hitting his feet with a sledgehammer. At the end of it all, she makes the author suffer way much more than the accident did.
4Katie (Saint Maud)
Saint Maud’s Katie is yet another nurse who oversteps her mandate and tries to impose her will on a patient. After beginning work as a private palliative care nurse, she is assigned to a dancer named Amanda, who has stage four lymphoma. Unimpressed with her patient’s secular ways, she begins a mission of religious indoctrination, with the end goal being to force her to embrace Roman Catholicism.
Katie’s claims that she keeps seeing God are all very far-fetched, but delusion isn’t the only thing wrong with her. She happens to be homophobic too, so she attempts to block Amanda’s lover from visiting. It’s no surprise that she gets herself dismissed after striking her employee. But instead of taking that as a lesson and reforming, she becomes resentful and begins plotting to kill Amanda for hiring someone new.
3Nurse ‘Freddy’ (A Nightmare On Elm Street Franchise)
There are many bad kinds of nurses but none worse than one who is actually an impostor. Qualifications and expertise matter but things get even more horrific when the mission of the medic is to murder rather than to earn a living through pretense. Such is the reality that characters in theA Nightmare On Elm Streetfranchise find themselves in, thanks to the killer, Freddy Krueger, penchant for posing as other people
.RELATED:10 Most Quotable Movie Villains of All Time
The villain is seen masquerading as a caregiver twice. He first pretends to be Westin Hills Psychiatric Hospital’s Nurse Marcie in order to take advantage of Joey’s perverse “night nurse” fantasy and kill him in the process. He also pretends to be a school nurse in order to give Kristen a fatal injection. Joey isn’t so lucky in the long run, but Kristen is able to avoid harm just in time.
2Laura Harriman (The Nurse)
While there is some justification for Laura’s actions, she is still the kind of nurse many would avoid because she is driven by emotion and has a skewed sense of justice. Rather than let the police do their job, she takes matters into her own hands. It’s, therefore, likely for her to take extreme measures any other time she gets aggrieved.
1Mandy (12 Hour Shift)
In12 Hour Shift,it’s implied that there can be serious mental consequences when employees get overworked, but it’s still hard to justify Nurse Mandy’s life choices as she sinks into drug addiction and begins dealing in organ trafficking. In addition to that, she also steals and sells patient medication in order to fund her vices.
What’s sad about Mandy is that most of her actions prove futile. The transporter that she keeps giving the kidneys to, misplaces them many times hence many of the patients that she harvested the organs from die for nothing. The nurse never gets to pay for her actions either and in the final seconds, she is seen walking into the hospital again for yet another shift.
