The 10 Deadliest Fictional Teachers
Breaking Bad is back for its final few episodes, so here’s our rundown of the most lethal educators in movies, TV, and comics.
Breaking Bad is back, and the biggest question everyone has is, who the hell is Walter White going to kill with that huge machine gun? The guy sure has come a long way from the mild-mannered chemistry teacher we met in season 1, but he’s not the first murderous teacher we’ve seen. Warning: Major spoilers follow.
10. John Kimble from Kindergarten Cop
Photo: Universal / Everett Collection | Licensed to Alpha Media Group 2013
Subject: Kindergarten
Body Count: 1
We’re actually surprised that Arnold only killed one person in this movie – he had plenty of reason to take out at least half of those rotten kindergartners. First, they laugh at him when he sits on the piano, then they make a mess of the classroom. One of the little bastards eats other people’s lunches, and another couldn’t stop talking about penises and vaginas. We’re also pretty sure that ferret had it coming, too. Throughout it all, Arnold shows tremendous restraint and doesn’t kill anyone except the bad guy at the end. Even the kid who told Arnold he had a tumor managed to live through the movie!
9. Severus Snape from Harry Potter
Photo Courtesy of Warner Bros. Pictures
Subject: Potions/Defense Against the Dark Arts/Headmaster
Body Count: 1 (that we know of)
When Hogwarts’ Headmaster Dumbledore needed somebody to kill him, he turned to the biggest jerk he knew, Severus Snape. Severus Snape had gone back-and-forth between being a good guy at Hogwarts and a bad guy with the Death Eaters so much that you could never tell what the guy was up to. When the Death Eater Draco could not follow through on killing Albus Dumbledore, Dumbledore asked Snape to do it so that Lord Voldemort couldn’t kill him, thus escaping the embarrassment of being killed by a guy without a nose. Snape followed through and cast the “Killing Curse” (apparently, there are no guns or sharp objects at Hogwarts). We only ever saw Snape kill Dumbledore, but he sure spent a lot of time with the Death Eaters, so there’s a fair chance he’s killed others.
8. Ms. Trunchbull from Matilda
Photo: TriStar Pictures / Everett Collection | Licensed to Alpha Media Group 2013
Subject: Headmistress
Body Count: 1 (but probably a lot more)
Now, Miss Trunchbull is someone who knows how to handle bratty little children, since she unapologetically hates them to the point where she denies ever having been one. Whereas guys like Snape and Kimble use strict discipline to control their students, Trunchbull uses outright torture. We only know for sure that Miss Trunchbull killed one person (surprisingly, an adult), but Trunchbull’s methods are so horrible, it’s hard to say how many victims she’s had. We know that she once threw a little girl over a fence by her pigtails, force-fed a boy a huge sheet-cake, and even threw a kid out a five-story window. Worst of all, her idea of detention is a small cupboard that she converted into a makeshift Iron Maiden with broken glass and jagged nails. That’s surely not AFT-approved equipment?
7. Hal Petersham from D.O.A.
Photo Courtesy of Touchstone Pictures
Subject: English
Body Count: 3
Remember Marv? The goofy, hapless crook who takes orders from the equally stupid Joe Pesci in Home Alone? We all love Marv and all of his futile attempts to murder a small child in that movie. What most people don’t know, is that a few years earlier, Daniel Stern played a teacher who actually murdered a child, and it wasn’t nearly so funny. In D.O.A., he plays assistant professor Hal Petersham, who kills a kid to steal his book, then poisons Dennis Quaid and murders Quaid’s ex-wife to cover his tracks. Comparing these two Daniel Stern movies really makes one wonder: In Home Alone, if Marv and Harry had succeeded in robbing that house and killing Kevin McCallister, would it still be the enduring Christmas classic that it is today? We’re guessing…maybe.
6. The Teachers from The Faculty
Photo Courtesy of Miramax Films
Subject: High School
Body Count: 3
When compiling this list, we knew we’d have to include The Faculty. A high school faculty getting taken over by evil aliens seems like the perfect fit for murderous teachers, but we were really surprised just how few people die in this movie. One old chick’s face peels off, the aliens take the skin of Bebe Neuwirth and Salma Hayek, and really, that’s it. Why not kill some of those annoying teens who star in the movie? Like the football jock who’s suddenly tired of being popular, or the bitchy cheerleader/newspaper editor, or that hot lesbian that didn’t make out with any of the other girls in the film? Really, these aliens had a pretty pathetic plot to take over the world – the idea of starting by taking over a high school is almost as bad as E.T.’s feeble attempts to murder that family with cold germs.
5. Professor X from X-Men
Photo Courtesy of Twentieth Century Fox
Subject: Genetics
Body Count: 8
For the “peaceful” leader of the Mutant Rights movement, Professor X has a surprising amount of blood on his hands. To start things off, when Professor X was still a baby in his mother’s womb, he strangled and killed his twin sister, sensing she was evil. Kind of a tough judgment call for a fetus to make, but he was sure of himself and aborted his sister. When she came back from the dead years later, she was evil, proving Professor X right, but you gotta wonder, maybe she wouldn’t have had such a chip on her shoulder if her asshole brother didn’t strangle her before she was born? In addition to his evil twin sister, in a variety of different universes, Professor X has killed Mr. Sinister, Apocalypse, Adolf Hitler, two innocent people, and even his own girlfriend, Moira. We also would like to point to the death of a little-known mutant named Changeling, a shape-shifter who Professor X asked to take his place when he knew his life was in danger. Swell guy, that Charles Xavier.
4. Walter White from Breaking Bad
Photo: Cathy Kanavy / AMC
Subject: Chemistry
Body Count: 10
Walter White used to be a pretty normal high school chemistry teacher until he was diagnosed with cancer. Cancer often causes people to take scope of their life: When Lance Armstrong was diagnosed, for example, he decided to fulfill his dream of becoming the biggest cheater of all time. For Walter White, he realized he hadn’t done too much, and started selling crystal meth to get money for his family. Like all teachers-turned-drug-dealers, Walter soon became a homicidal maniac and started killing people left and right. He kills one guy in the pilot by gassing him to death, then strangles another guy a couple days after. He later killed some rival drug dealers who were on his territory, and two guards who were holding Jesse captive. Following that, he blew up his boss, the boss’ bodyguard, and an old man in a wheelchair. And he most recently shot Mike, the beloved hitman on the show. And this doesn’t even include Gale, who Walter forced Jesse to kill, or the nine prisoners Walter ordered a hit on, or Jesse’s girlfriend, who Walter watched die as she choked on her vomit in her sleep, or the 167 people who died in a plane crash as a result of the dead girlfriend’s father being distracted at his job as an air traffic controller, or all of the people who may have died as a result of Walter’s blue meth being on the street. So, he’s either killed ten people, or several hundred, depending on how you look at it… Oh, he also poisoned a small boy, but he lived, so, it’s cool.
3. Professor Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes
Photo Courtesy of BBC
Subject: Mathematics
Body Count: Dozens (we think)
Okay, so, we really have no idea how many people Professor Moriarty killed. There’s, like, 6,000 versions of the character, including countless books, movies, TV shows – there’s even a Moriarty in a Tom and Jerry cartoon, and an evil hologram Moriarty in Star Trek. Each of these different versions seems to kill a few people, but the only death at the hands of Moriarty that really matters is in the pages of the Sherlock Holmes stories. When Sir Arthur Conan Doyle created Moriarty in 1893, he made him to kill off Sherlock Holmes, because he was sick of Sherlock and wanted to do other stuff, so the book ends with both Moriarty and Sherlock dying by falling over a waterfall. Soon after, Doyle’s fans began to riot and threaten his life, so he brought back Sherlock Holmes from the dead. And ever since then, countless versions of Sherlock and Moriarty have done battle in every conceivable form of media, making Moriarty the longest-lasting killer professor of all time.
2. Indiana Jones
Photo: Paramount / Everett Collection | Licensed to Alpha Media Group 2013
Subject: Archaeology
Body Count: Around 200
We never realized it before, but Indiana Jones is kind-of a mass murderer. He’s shot people, blown them up, crashed their motorcycles, run them over, burned them alive, fed them to killer ants, shot them with poison darts, strangled them with his whip, sent them plummeting to their death from a rope bridge, and even thrown them into boiling lava. It’s no wonder that when he made contact with aliens in Crystal Skull, he didn’t think twice about blowing their heads off. Honestly, Indiana Jones is such a prolific murderer, it’s hard to count exactly how many people have been victims of his wrath, as he has so often killed large groups of people at once. Most estimates seem to put him just shy of 200. We must make a note, though – this body count could be much higher, as we didn’t count all of the audience members that killed themselves after watching Crystal Skull.
1. Dr. Curt Connors (The Lizard) from Spider-Man
Photo Courtesy of Columbia Pictures
Subject: Biology
Body Count: Hundreds
Since his debut in 1963, Peter Parker’s teacher, Dr. Curt Connors, has racked up a whole bunch of bodies, far more than any other educator. Curt Connors was a brilliant biologist who lost his arm, then tried to combine reptile DNA with his own, turning himself into the supervillain, The Lizard. Since his inception, he’s kind of done the same thing every few months: He turns into the lizard, kills a bunch of people, then they find a cure to turn him back into the doctor. Inevitably, the cure wears off and Dr. Connors stupidly tries again to regrow his arm, only to turn into The Lizard again and kill a bunch more people. For 50 years now, Spider-Man and The Lizard have gone through this pattern. You’d think Connors would have learned by now to give up, or at least get one of those cool hook hands. What? A hook is better than a scaly claw, you guys.
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