58. Scarecrow

Few villains have done more with less. The pencil-thin Crane has one of the most effective attacks of DC's Rogues Gallery. How many other villains have routinely made Batman afraid? Crane's downfall is his own shortsightedness. But as the creepy figure in the night, he helps open up interesting avenues into the Dark Knight's psyche. That's true power.

Dr. Jonathan Crane is one of the most formidable and thematically intriguing Batman villains of all time. As a child, he was bullied and tormented, so he decided to research the human psyche and how people dealt with fear. After being fired from a teaching position, Crane decided to use his knowledge to literally scare people to death for the supposed trauma he suffered in his life. Scarecrow wants nothing less than everyone in Gotham to be as afraid as he once was.

The Dark Knight's single greatest weapon in his war on crime is fear, and the Scarecrow is the only villain truly capable of taking that advantage away from him. The sole fact that the Scarecrow is often capable of bringing the Dark Knight to his knees by inducing hallucinations of his greatest tragedies - his parents' murder, Jason Todd's death at the hands of the Joker, etc. - makes him a no-brainer for this list. That he also happened to play such a huge role in revitalizing the Batman film franchise makes him rank even higher on our evaluation of best comic baddies.