But, as the book and film series developed, it grew to include the criminal masterminds of the Gestapo, the Mafia and Smersh (among others) to create a diabolical - but, crucially, apolitical - empire of evil.
Here Curtiz the master creates a diabolical murder yarn.
Forbidding church gates partly conceal an area at the back of the stage where cast members whisper, intone and shout out, creating a diabolical soundscape by Dan Moses Schreier that works in perfect tandem with John Tavener's music.
According to Butler's post, he created this seemingly diabolical tool to expose the severe lack of security on the web.
Meet 69-year-old Chen San-yuan, a Taiwanese grandpa who's rigged his bike with multiple smartphones, creating himself a diabolical Pokémon-nabbing machine.
With "S," our idea was not to create, you know, a kind of diabolical sudoku.
The poop shelf is a diabolical invention created, I believe, by the Stasi as a method to break down the mental resilience of the populace.
Knowing that Superman is the prime obstacle to his diabolical plot for world dominion, Lex acquires a trove of Kryptonite in order to create a weapon that will kill Superman and he seeks to stoke public and official enmity toward Superman so that the actual attack on the archetypal superhero will be undertaken by others.
Traffic jams on the George Washington Bridge were just one example of the governor's diabolical creativity: Recently, I created an app called Petting Zoo.
Suffice to say at this point that the duality of violently expressionistic narrative and rationally constructed abstraction mirrors the relationship in the movies between coolly diabolical science and the demonic life it creates.
