I was thinking about villains today, not just antagonists, but actual evildoers. There are lots of villains in Oneiromancer. I decided I liked the idea of seedy underground a little later in the story, and included a bunch of side characters that tend to stay at the fringes. I think it adds a lot to the atmosphere when there’s a bunch of generally ominous folks doing their dastardly thing off-page. Naturally there’s also a main villain who’s constantly at odds with the main character. I was trying to come up with some ways to give my antagonist a little more staying power since I felt he made a strong first impression, but fell off a little as the story went on. While thinking about this, I decided to draw inspiration from some other memorable bad guys and compile that inspiration here, because everybody loves a good villain, right?
We’ve got to start off with a bang!
Vader has got to be the most recognizable villain ever. The voice, mask, the suit, the cape, he’s got everything that makes a villain a villain. We still know thanks to Luke that everyone’s favorite genocidal cyborg still has some good in him. I think that’s important for a compelling villain, just a touch of goodness to make you wonder if a regular person could possibly become so evil. I made sure to incorporate a couple hints about my own villain into the story in a few different ways. Hopefully not too subtle. Not sure if I’ll ever truly redeem him in the end though …
So Vader is obviously one of the most memorable for his intimidating aura, but what about a villain that isn’t as physical? It’s hard to think of powerful villains without listing the most brutish of them first and foremost. In fact, there are a lot of villains that are just muscles with a plan. Going beyond the Terminators and the Banes of the world though, one villain that sticks out to me as particularly evil is Hans Landa from Tarantino’s ‘Inglourious Basterds.’
Landa is an SS Colonel infamous for his ability to hunt down Jews in hiding in occupied France. He’s a charming monster, completely ruthless, even bloodthirsty in his racism against the Jews, yet at times he’s also shown as polite, and dare I say, even a little compassionate in his ability to understand others. Of course he’d never use this empathy for anything but personal gain, but it’s the same innate quality that a good person might use to help someone. This is crucial to his character. Knowing he’s more than capable of polite, charming, empathetic conversation makes it so much more appalling when he kills people without blinking an eye.
Half of what makes him so chilling is the writing, but the other half is the incredible performance of both Cristoph Waltz and everybody else in the scene. Whenever he comes around, Landa is treated with the respect and fear you might give to a venomous snake. No sudden movements. This is the key I took from Landa’s character, that people in fiction are often twice as scary when everybody around them acts like they are. They have to follow through with their evil intent for it to matter though, and Hans Landa was not one one to make false promises. In his case that’s confirmed right away in the opening scene. I like to look for dichotomies in fiction, so how about a villain that takes their time in establishing just how bad they are? Someone we know is the bad guy right away, but not how evil they really are? This is more rare in my experience because it’s just so much easier to make a villain, well, villainous right at the start. Funny enough, an example that comes to mind is another German named Hans.
We know he’s bad the second he shows up at Nakatomi plaza and has his men take out the guards, but Hans himself doesn’t seem to get his hands dirty … that is, until he counts to three. He seems like a thief too afraid to do the dirty work at first, with his contemptible snooty attitude and false congeniality, but after he decides things have to be done the hard way he proves how serious he really is.
Later on this comes back around when Harry Ellis, this guy:
tries to make a deal with Gruber. John tells him not to mess around with this guy, that Gruber is serious, right before Ellis makes the unfortunate mistake of telling John that Gruber is going to kill him if John doesn’t stop what he’s doing. Of course, Gruber can’t just let that go. Once a promise is made, even if someone else made it for him, he has to follow though to be taken seriously. I make sure my most serious villains never promise anything they don’t follow through on, no matter how gruesome.
On the literary side of things, I think it’s a little harder to come by truly evil villains. Novels are so good at delving into the particularities of character that often times someone who starts out as a villain can end up as a more misunderstood figure. That said, there are still some great villains of the written word. Voldemort is a good example of a villain who’s influence on the world is as impactful as his depicted actions, something that’s harder to capture in movies than books. Sauron of course predates Voldemort and probably takes the top spot according to most ‘Lord of the Rings’ fans. They’re closer to a depiction of true evil than the other villains so far who all at least have a human side. You can’t have a polite conversation with Voldemort or Sauron. This kind of evil is less relatable, but can be that much more terrifying for its alien nature.
One of the most deeply unnerving and inhuman villains ever thought up comes from a sci-fi short story called ‘I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream’ by Harlan Ellison. The villain in the story is AM, an artificial intelligence who wiped out humanity long ago, and now keeps the narrator of the story, Ted, and his small group of friends in an underground bunker as the last people on Earth. AM’s hatred of humanity runs so deep that it kept Ted and his friends around to torture them as punishment for all of humankind’s sins, pushing them around like rats in a maze as they search for canned food and a safe place to hide. It’s easily the bleakest world I’ve ever read. The story ends when AM catches Ted and turns him into a giant ball of meat and nerve endings so it can poke and prod him forever. Hence the title of the story. That kind of evil is so far from human that it evokes a sort of awe at how something like that could possibly exist. The very premise goes beyond what a regular person would even consider. The most interesting lesson I took about villainy came from I Have No Mouth, and that’s the knowledge that if you can come up with something so shockingly evil that it pushes the very definition of villainy, then your bad guy is no doubt going to be memorable. I think the most shocking part of AM is that its motivation is beyond comprehension, but when faced with it anyways, you sort of start to see where it’s coming from. A character’s ability to drag the reader kicking and screaming into the unthinkable is something I hope I was able to capture.
That’s about it for my favorite villains, but what are some of your greatest inspiring baddies? Let me know in the comments who makes you quake in your boots!
Thank you for reading,
Benjamin Hawley