20 best film witches of all time
Jadis (The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)
There’s bad, and then there’s bad. As in, cosmically, eternally bad. So bad that you begin to believe that your tiny human perspective is perpetually unable to conceive of the utter evil of a thing.
Maybe this is all giving Jadis a little too much credit. Still, she remains one of the most frightening villains in the Chronicles of Narnia stories. As played by Tilda Swinton in the 2005 film adaptation of the first book in the series, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, she is particularly icy and terrifying.
In the novels, written by British author C.S. Lewis, we get at least a little insight into Jadis. She was once queen of a land called Charn. While in battle against her sister’s army, she utters a mysterious “Deplorable Word” that kills everyone but the speaker. She then goes into an enchanted sleep, only to be woken when two human children enter her realm and let her into the human world (in The Magician’s Nephew). The two children, Digory and Polly, manage to move her into Narnia.
Once in Narnia, Jadis quickly gets to work. By the time we see her in The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, she’s become an evil, despotic ruler of the realm. Even more, she’s plunged the entire land of Narnia into perpetual winter — one without Christmas, of course.
While the 2005 film got more or less positive reviews, Swinton, in particular, was singled out for her performance. In Swinton’s hands, Jadis is pristine in her evil. She’s so thoroughly bad that it seems nearly impossible for the film’s protagonists — just a bunch of kids, really — to defeat her.
They do defeat Jadis, of course, because C.S. Lewis isn’t going to let evil win in his giant, sprawling Christian allegory. Even though she tries to return later in Prince Caspian, it’s still no use. While she’s around, however, Jadis is both metaphorically and literally chilling.