Tomb

A good way to introduce a villain is to show the elaborate safety precautions needed to keep him safely behind bars. A regular old jail cell just isn't secure enough for these maniacs....

• The Silence of the Lambs (1991). This one's pretty much the masterpiece among “scary-prisoner” scenes; it's been parodied countless times and has likely influenced every scary prisoner sequence since.

As FBI agent Clarice Starling (Jodie Foster) descends into the maximum security wing of the facility that houses serial killer Dr. Hannibal Lecter (Anthony Hopkins), we are prepared for the worst. The lengthy list of safety protocols begins famously with “Do not touch the glass. Do not approach the glass.” (Lecter is too dangerous for a cell with bars.) Tension builds as we realize just how dangerous a prisoner we are about to meet. A photograph of a nurse who got too close to Lecter is shown, but we don't see it — just Clarice's horrified expression. (“The doctors managed to reset her jaw... more or less. Saved one of her eyes. His pulse never got above 85, even when he ate her tongue.”)

The elevator ride is like a descent into hell. The camera drifts past several grimy cells containing increasingly insane prisoners. Finally we reach the last cell, a brightly lit glass box, and here stands Dr. Lecter, calm and still, with neatly combed hair and a welcoming smile.

Somehow, this makes him much more frightening than if we saw him screaming and ripping a mattress apart with his teeth.

• Kung Fu Panda (2008). The various talking animals in this terrific Dreamworks cartoon have gone to extraordinary lengths to keep imprisoned snow leopard Tai Lung (voiced by Ian McShane) under wraps. He's shackled to the floor of an immense prison complex patrolled by hundreds of armed guards and he seems to be the only prisoner in the entire facility. Not only that, but he's locked into a spiky metal carapace that saps his strength and his chains leave him permanently in the “motorcycle” position.

Naturally, he escapes.

• The 10th Kingdom (2000). The evil queen from “Snow White” gets the Hannibal Lecter treatment in this entertaining but largely unknown fantasy miniseries. Fairy tale worlds need penitentiaries too and the Evil Queen (Dianne Wiest) is the most feared resident of the Snow White Memorial Prison, where she is serving a 1,000-year sentence for poisoning royalty. After beguiling a troll into releasing her, she turns the crown prince into a dog and begins her evil plans in earnest. Bwaa ha ha!

• X-Men (2000) and X2: X-Men United (2003). In a reversal of the usual “scary prisoner” setup, we see supervillain Magneto (Ian McKellen) exercise his fearsome abilities before he's locked up in a high-tech prison. Born with the mutant ability to control metal, Magneto causes mass destruction before he is defeated and placed in a futuristic all-plastic cell, in which no metal objects are permitted.

In the second film, a colleague injects one of the prison guards with a liquid suspension of metal, giving Magneto enough ferrous ammunition to kill his captors and escape.

• Kung Fu Hustle (2004). We've already seen some ridiculously invincible kung fu techniques by the time we get to the middle of Kung Fu Hustle, so when the chief bad guy decides to enlist the services of the world's “No. 1 killer,” we're curious. Known only as “The Beast,” the ultimate king of killers had himself committed to an insane asylum years ago when he couldn't find any martial artists strong enough to challenge him. Now he sits in a dank metal cell in the heart of an impenetrable high-security facility awaiting the day when he will once again wreak havoc on an unsuspecting world.

He is, of course, a pudgy, unimpressive-looking middle-aged guy wearing an undershirt and rubber flip-flops. But we know better than to judge by appearances.

• Shaolin Drunkard (1983). Imprisoned Kung Fu Vampires need extra security.

Shun-Yee “Sunny” Yuen plays an extremely dangerous vampire of some sort (named “Monstar” in the subtitles) who begins the film in one of the most creatively designed prisons I've ever seen. His cell is a ring of bars in the middle of a big network of ornately painted dominoes. Yep, dominoes. Any kind of escape attempt will start several rows of domino tiles to fall, setting off alarms and booby traps like a Chinese-themed Rube Goldberg contraption. The guards don't even have to approach the cell to give Monstar his food — they just place the tray on a bunch of dominoes, and it glides right up to him.

One of Monstar's vampiric minions shows up to break his master out of the clink, but to do so he needs to incapacitate a guard with a stream of toxic urine delivered by a monkey puppet (!). Then he accidentally knocks over several dominoes and has to frantically halt their progress before the alarms and booby traps go off. Finally, he flings a vial of fresh blood into Monstar's cell, which restores the fiend's power, at which point the big guy simply smashes his way to freedom through a wall.