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DANIEL DAY-LEWIS His portrayal of misanthropic oilman Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood makes him a leading contender to win Best Actor at this year's Oscars

PHOTOGRAPH BY JUSTIN STEPHENS

Chigurh seems to offer his victims (and, by extension, us) a choice; his deceptively cavalier challenge to call heads or tails on a coin toss reduces life to chance. Choose wrong, and you lose in the biggest way imaginable. Bardem says of his character, ''I am your horrible fate because you called for it.''

Brrrrr — it's even creepier when he puts it that way, isn't it? Chigurh and Plainview have literary origins, but very different cinematic fathers. Directors Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's 2005 novel is faithful-up-to-a-point in presenting a villain who on the page is barely described physically, while Paul Thomas Anderson used Upton Sinclair's 1927 novel Oil! as a mere jumping-off point for what is ultimately the writer-director's own highly idiosyncratic take on capitalism and religion.

Certainly, it's easier to guess at the source of Plainview's behavior: an admirable American rags-to-riches ambition, stunted and gnarled by his desire for power and control. ''I look at people and I see nothing worth liking'' is the telling line here. With an attitude like that, what are a few smeared bodies along the road to success (and perdition)? Day-Lewis, who declined to be interviewed for this story, has said he views Plainview's tale as ''an entirely honest examination of a life [with] an outrageous trajectory.'' Anderson, however, has always looked at Blood ''as a horror film.'' Really? ''What I mean by that is that we were telling a story that was only going to be a downward spiral,'' he says. ''You don't have to make any apologies along the way. You go to see a horror film to see bad things happen.''

Anderson gazes over at what the Coen brothers have done and sees a similarity to his own work: ''No Country is a horror movie to me. It's sort of a horror Western.'' Ethan Coen agrees: ''In some respects, [McCarthy's] novel is a horror story about getting old and how you contend with the world.'' Indeed, after seeing these often overpowering films, many of us are left feeling like Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Bell in No Country, who sits a bit stunned in a Texas diner and cannot for the gosh-darned life of him figure out why such evil is set loose upon this modern world. Yet the bristlingly smart producer Scott Rudin, who worked on both movies, sees differences: ''No Country is tapping into a feeling that our lives are fragile...and a lot of the country is responding to that. But I think There Will Be Blood has a whole different kind of relevance, which has to do with the relationship between [the power of] oil and religion.''

NEXT PAGE: How Hannibal Lecter changed Oscar's appreciation of bad guy roles

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