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Vigo the Carpathian (full name: "Prince Vigo von Homburg Deutschendorf"), played by Wilhelm von Homburg, appears in Ghostbusters II as the main antagonist.
Known as a powerful magician, genius, lunatic, and genocidal madman, Vigo was a sadistic, power-hungry 16th/17th Century tyrant of Carpathia. Self-described as the "Scourge of Carpathia" and "the Sorrow of Moldavia," Vigo's unfortunate subjects gave him other titles: Vigo the Cruel, Vigo the Torturer, Vigo the Despised and Vigo the Unholy, indicate that he was obviously despotic as other notorious tyrants in history like Attila and Genghis Khan.
Peter Venkman (Bill Murray)—upon hearing all these unflattering titles—cynically commented, "Wasn't he also 'Vigo the Butch?'" Born in 1505, Vigo was an expert in sorcery and black magic, enabling him with an unnaturally long-life span. It came to an equally unnatural end when in the year 1610, he was "poisoned, stabbed, shot, hung, stretched, disemboweled, drawn and quartered." In spite of all that, as Ray Stantz (Dan Aykroyd) notes about Vigo, "just before his head died, his last words were, 'Death is but a Door; Time is but a Window... I'll be back!'" Vigo was based on Vlad the Impaler (the inspiration for Dracula by Bram Stoker), and in part on Grigori Rasputin, who also survived several attempts on his life.
In addition to the dark arts, Vigo was also skilled in painting. And it was a combination of the two that provided him with the means to remain within the mortal realm after death. Vigo's spirit possesses and remains within his life-size self-portrait, which inevitably arrives at the restoration department of the fictitious Manhattan Museum of Art in 1989 (the setting for the Ghostbusters II).
In Ghostbusters terminology from West End Games' role-playing game, Vigo would be a Class 4 Full-Torso Apparition, as he was human in appearance and identified easily. However as the events of Ghostbusters II progressed, Vigo drew strength from the negatively-charged rivers of psychomagnotheric "mood" slime (revealed later in Ghostbusters: The Video Game produced by the Gozarian cultists under Ivo Shandor) flowing beneath Manhattan. In doing so, his potency increased to the comparable levels of a Class 7 entity. With his newfound power, Vigo manipulates art gallery curator Dr. Janosz Poha (Peter MacNicol) into finding a child (Dana Barrett's son Oscar) whose body he can permanently inhabit. His plan is foiled by the Ghostbusters' use of positive mood slime, disrupting his attempts to possess Oscar. After briefly possessing Ray Stantz, Vigo is again trapped within his painting.
In Ghostbusters: The Video Game, the portrait of Vigo is stored in the Ghostbusters' firehouse as one of the cursed artifacts they collect and filed. Though unable to again being a threat without access to Shandor's psychomagnotheric slime to draw strength from, Vigo can only taunt anybody who approaches him. He also makes cryptic predictions based on real-world history, as the game's release post-dates the time period of the game by nearly two decades, along with outcomes of the game's future events.
Vigo's full name is a combination of the stage name of Norbert Grupe (aka Wilhelm von Homburg), who played Vigo, and William and Henry Deutschendorf, the twins that played the baby Oscar. The menacing voice of Vigo was provided by Max von Sydow.