Creating Believable Bad Guys in Fiction
The old-fashioned villain – think of Snidely Whiplash tying poor Polly Purebread to the railroad tracks – wasn’t particularly scary. In fact, the assortment of mad scientists, vampires, werewolves, and comic book bad guys I grew up with were more laughable than frightening. I mean, Bela Lugosi in fake fangs and a cape, grimacing at the camera? Please. And the Creature from the Black Lagoon? Yawn.
Then villains went to the other extreme, and became chainsaw-wielding maniacs who found truly inventive ways to dispose of their victims. Jason, Freddy, Pinhead, Michael Myers, Leatherface… all very scary guys, no question – but it was still pretty hard to take them seriously.
But then along came Jack Torrance (The Shining) and Hannibal Lecter (The Silence of the Lambs), and suddenly, villains became a lot more believable…
… and a lot more scary.
Stephen King is a master at writing about ordinary people, living ordinary lives, who come up against extraordinary evil. The evil – because it’s unexpected, because it happens in the middle of Wal-Mart or McDonald’s or the Tru-Value hardware store – is believable and frightening and real. It could happen anywhere, to anyone.
We believe it.
Nothing is more frightening than reality. We’ve all read about sociopaths like Ted Bundy, or serial killers like Jeffrey Dahmer and David Berkowitz. One of the scarier movies I ever saw was “Bad Influence,” starring Rob Lowe as a smooth-talking serial killer who insinuates himself into James Spader’s life – with horrifying results.
Sociopaths by definition have no sense of right or wrong; they have no remorse. They can be handsome. Charming. Villains like this are frightening precisely because they seem, at first, so… normal. They don’t have scales, or razor-tipped fingers, or a leather face. They look like us. They might even look better than us. They’re persuasive. Convincing. They offer their help, gain our trust, and then they strike when we least expect it.
And that’s how an effective fictional villain should be written. A good villain isn’t one-dimensional or cartoonish; he (or she) is multi-layered, with one or maybe even two redeeming qualities or vulnerabilities. The villain you create wasn’t born bad; something happened along the way to warp him, embitter him, enrage him. Something that possibly even engenders a bit of sympathy in the reader.
Now, with a multifaceted, believable villain like that to overcome, your protagonist faces a real challenge.
And your readers will turn the pages in a frenzy of anxiety to see how it all ends.
The only question is – will your bad guy get his just reward? Or will he live to wreak havoc for another day, in another book?
Only the author knows for sure. MWAH ha ha…
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