Psychiatrists studied 400 movies to find the most realistic psychopath — here are their 6 key takeaways

Orion Pictures

Psychopathy, loosely defined, is a combination of cold-heartedness and violence. The most extreme psychopaths may kill without remorse, mutilating victims with as much emotion as you or I might brush our teeth.

This is known as "classic" or "idiopathic" psychopathy, but sometimes the disorder is more covert, as with some manipulative smooth talkers who aren't necessarily violent.

In 2014, Belgian psychiatry professor Samuel Leistedt wanted to find out which movie characters embodied psychopathic traits best.

Leistedt called on 10 of his friends to help him watch 400 movies over the course of three years. The films spanned nearly a century, from 1915 to 2010. When the team finished watching all the films, they'd found 126 psychopathic characters. 

Here's a breakdown of their findings.

Anton Chigurh of "No Country for Old Men" was the most realistic psychopath.

Javier Bardem's character in "No Country for Old Men" is a classic psychopath, Leistedt and his colleagues concluded in their report.

Chigurh approaches murder with an uncanny sense of normalcy, perfectly happy to empty his trademark bolt pistol without so much as a wince.

"He seems to be effectively invulnerable and resistant to any form of emotion or humanity," the researchers wrote.

Honorable mentions went to two characters: Hans Beckert in "M" and Henry Lee Lucas in "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer."

In the 1931 German film "M," Peter Lorre plays a child-killer who embodies many of the traits now thought of as belonging to a child predator, Leistedt and his colleagues observed. 

"Lorre portrays Beckert as an outwardly unremarkable man tormented by a compulsion to murder children ritualistically," the researchers wrote.

In the 1986 John McNaughton film "Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer," the titular character's inability to plan ahead, coupled with his turbulent personal life and poor family relationships, make him a textbook idiopathic psychopath, Leistedt said.

Early representations of psychopaths weren't very accurate.

Characters like Tommy Udo in the 1947 film "The Kiss of Death" and Cody Jarrett in "White Heat" (1949) played to people's misunderstanding that "genre villains," such as gangsters or mad scientists, typified psychopathy.

"They were often caricatured as sadistic, unpredictable, sexually depraved, and emotionally unstable with a compulsion to engage in random violence, murders, and destruction," the team wrote, "usually presenting with a series of bizarre mannerisms, such as giggling, laughing, or facial tics, often creating famous and unreal characters."