I first watched the Exorcist when I was about 9, I don’t know whether it was the projectile green vomit or badly done makeup, but I wasn’t impressed. If I’d watched it for the first time now, it might be a little different. I was skeptical about everything back then. These days I’m only skeptical about some things because I know there really are things that go bump in the night. Scary movies, books or stories, have a bigger effect on me now—yes, I leave lights on, scan rooms and ceilings and ensure there’s a hockey stick within reaching distance!

I’m my own worst enemy and can never please myself. I started this series because I wasn’t happy with my villain or the villains in popular culture, guess what, I’m still not. So I started investigating what makes a really scary bad guy. This post aims to identify what sets apart your Lemony Snicket from your Michael Myers (Halloween).

I’ve already talked through 6 Simple Steps to Superbad Villains and morals, motives and positive traits for your villains. These things still stand and are really key to creating a truly scary villain. A while back I asked you who your favorite villains were and you listed loads, and some particularly scary ones too:

Lee Harvey Oswald, Vergil from DmC: Devil May Cry, Bellatrix Lestrange, Professor Umbridge, Annie Wilkes, Norman Bates from Psych, Cruella de Vil, Queen Jadis, the Witch from the Chronicles of Narnia, Sauron from Lord of the Rings, Child Snatcher from Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, Professor Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes, Nurse Ratched, Jack Torrance (The Shining).

But what is it that makes them really scary? Lots of the stories these characters come from were made into films, and I think there is something we can learn from that. Here are the six things I’ve learned about creating really scary villains:

6 Terror Tactics For Really Scary Villains: Setting, Setting, Setting

One thing I failed to consider when thinking about my villain was what else other than the character themselves contributed to making them super scary. Films have the ability to add music: the creaking of a door, the vibrato on a particularly high note as the character pushes open a door into a darkly lit corridor… oh wait a minute, we writers can do that shit too!

Take the photo right. It’s dark anyway. Put yourself in there, and you’re immediately drawn to the rusted machinery that still looks like it works. It’s positioned just close enough to the light, you know it’s important, it can be used, but it’s obscure enough you don’t quite know what it’s used for… What’s worse than knowing something is awful, but not knowing why? If there was a small splatter of blood slowly dripping down the chair, and another spot on the machine it would just finish the setting off. It tells you the blood is fresh, that someone is wounded, but not dead because there’s not enough blood. It also tells you the machine is involved—and this room is a torture room.

I said ‘splatter’ on purpose because too much blood, and you remove the anticipation, tension, and mystery. Giving a hint of horror, a tiny clue to the atrocities that await you without slamming it in your reader’s face like a knife laid in a whopping pool of blood does so much more for building terror in readers (and your character).

What else can you do to your setting? Think about Pathetic Fallacy (a kind of personification of the weather/nature).

Really Scary Villains: 2 and 3—Credibility & Believability

Credibility leads to believability. Credibility is the quality of being trusted and believed in. Having credible villains means we will believe in whatever scary ‘thing’ it is they are doing. But how do you create credibility?

Use core value: Even though they are a villain they will still have core values— even if that means they are warped and evil. Sticking to core values also means you will be consistent which builds character. It also means your villain has a reason to fight—they will defend their values to the death just as much as your hero will—it just happens that they are opposing each other.

Integrity: Although integrity is about doing the right things for the right reasons if your villain has core values even if they seem illogical—and he fights for them—then he has integrity. A villain fighting with integrity and thinking they what they are doing is right, and for the right reasons is scary. Especially if what they are doing is horrific like a mass genocide or whatever. They will be able to give reasoned, logical explanations for why they are doing what they are doing, and reason and logic mean that occasionally you will believe what they are doing is right too!

Authenticity: Your villain needs to do exactly what they say they are going to do. Especially if that means torturing your main character or killing off a couple of major minor, or minor minor characters. Without following through on their convictions, they become weak and flaky.

Expertise: Having an intelligent villain with expertise in a particular area means they know more than you do and especially more than your main character—this makes them unbeatable—but i’ll cover this later. It also means they can think of new cruel and unusual ways to defeat your protagonist.

There is one more aspect to this, believability can come from playing on fears. I always think some of the things that are the scariest, are those that are the closest to reality, the ones that could almost be true. Take Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. When the film was new, and the child catcher first appeared, it was so close to reality in that there are child kidnappers that it made it scarier. Using concepts that could be true, or things that are just plain wrong, like torturing or hurting children (amongst other topics) brings a frightening element to stories, especially if the Villain can make reasoned arguments as to why they are right.

Really Scary Villains: 4 and 5 Transparency, Clarity, and Secrets

Saying transparency, clarity and secrets sounds like a contradiction. But it’s not. A villain needs to be transparent over their goals and be able to articulate them—verbally or otherwise—with absolute clarity. There is nothing scarier than a villain who is absolutely crystal clear on the consequences of crossing them or, how they are going to exact their revenge on you. But this doesn’t have to just come from spoken words. It might be done through body language or prior actions. Either way, you need to make your reader know the shit is about to hit the fan – even if you just allude to it. Villains need secrets. They need deadly, evil, twisted secrets. To keep the villain credible, the reader and/or the protagonist need to know the villain has secrets, but not what they are. And of course, these secrets need to foil the heroes plans.

Really Scary Villains: 6. Make them Unbeatable

Everyone loves an underdog. Sometimes your hero needs to be the underdog. Really scary villains appear completely unbeatable. They are too intelligent, too many steps ahead with more resources at their disposal than the protagonist. Cut all the heroes options off, pull away all the resources they need. Make life look completely hopeless, and your villain will look even scarier.

***

If you liked this post, why not get even more awesome tips in the book 13 Steps To Evil – How to Craft Superbad Villains

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Click this link and just click the logo of your device or regular bookshop and it will take you to the right page.

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Amazon Book Blurb:

Your hero is not the most important character in your book. Your villain is.
 
Are you fed up of drowning in two-dimensional villains? Frustrated with creating clichés? And failing to get your reader to root for your villain?
  
In 13 Steps to Evil, you’ll discover: 
 
+ How to develop a villain’s mindset
+ A step-by-step guide to creating your villain from the ground up
+ Why getting to the core of a villain’s personality is essential to make them credible
+ What pitfalls and clichés to avoid as well as the tropes your story needs
  
Finally, there is a comprehensive writing guide to help you create superbad villains. Whether you’re just starting out or are a seasoned writer, this book will help power up your bad guy and give them that extra edge.

These lessons will help you master and control your villainous minions, navigate and gain the perfect balance of good and evil, as well as strengthening your villain to give your story the tension and punch it needs.
 
If you like dark humor, learning through examples and want to create the best villains you can, then you’ll love Sacha Black’s guide to crafting superbad villains. Read 13 Steps to Evil today and start creating kick-ass villains.

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I’ve been thinking about my own antagonists/villains in my WIP, and what I can do to develop them and make them more hateable because they’re loveable.

Your villain needs a redeeming quality or positive trait. 

Even Voldemort has positive traits. As Tom Riddle, he is charming and handsome, and as Voldemort, he is patient and intelligent. This, although you never really like him, at least makes you feel sorry for the mess Tom ended up in. Hence you empathize with Voldemort. It gives depth to his character and draws you into his story. Isn’t that the point of stories? To be drawn in and empathize with the characters? I like nothing better than that feeling of finishing a novel or a series and feeling bereft like I just lost a friend. To me, that is the mark of a good writer, and personally, I think empathizing with villains is one of the key elements needed to do that. Make the reader feel for your villain. Make their craziness, their insane ideas and philosophies seem plausible just for a minute. Momentarily make the reader care about the villain, before slapping them back to reality with a chunky slab of crazy villain.

But How?

In developing my villains, I use six simple sets of questions/principles to create what I think is an authentic baddy. These aren’t meant to be comprehensive solutions to the best bad guy you can create, but a starter for ten on basic elements you need.

1. History

No doubt you created a rich and full personal history for your protagonist and probably for most of your supporting characters too. But did you do the same for your villain? It’s important to know how they got that way, rather than just having an evil character for the sake of it. So I’ve started to ask myself lots of questions:

• Why are they a villain?
• Did something happen to them?
• What was their childhood like?
• What was their relationship with their parents like?
• Did they ever have a boyfriend or girlfriend?
• What’s the best thing that ever happened to them?
• What’s the worst thing that ever happened to them?

And loads more, have you got any key questions you ask your villains, I would love to add them to my list…?

A lot of these questions will lead you to the answers and information for some of the points below, like where they get their morals or reasons/motives from.

2. Positive Traits = Realism

There’s nothing worse than a flat villain. A villain who is evil for the sake of it. No one is evil for the sake of it, and no one is just plain evil. That’s an exaggeration you can only get away with in very young children’s books, and even Disney films the villains have at least one positive redeeming quality. You need to make sure you give your bad guy at least one positive trait. It gives balance to all their negative ones, and with balance comes realism and believability. It makes them human, relatable. After all, humans aren’t all good or all bad, so your villains shouldn’t be either.

Maybe they are kind to a sidekick, or a pet – take Voldemort again, he has a pet snake which he loves called Nagini. It’s redeeming quality – to love another thing and gives him depth and authenticity.

3. Emotions

Villains need emotions just as much as heroes and supporting characters do. It gives them validity, authenticity and encourages conflict. Emotions drive the plot and show historical wounds. Emotions mean weaknesses, which mean blind spots. Blind spots mean a hero can exploit his weaknesses and beat them.

4. Morals or Reasons

“I want to destroy the world….”

“Ok, why?”

“Because I do….”

Sounds pathetic right? You need to give your villain a reason to want to destroy the world. Not just because ‘they do,’ no one will accept ‘because I do’ as a valid reason and it will make your villains seem false, flat and unbelievable.

But better than reasons, are morals. Giving your villain morals makes them truly insane. If they have morals they not only think what they are doing is right, but they think it’s just and for the better good of everyone else. It also makes it harder for the protagonist to destroy the villain if they aren’t all evil. I spoke about Dexter and his anti-hero ways, and the fact that his morals are what make him and his TV series. The same principle can be applied to villains but in reverse. I guess like an anti-villain.

If you have ever been drawn into a villain’s master plan and momentarily agreed with them, let me know in the comments. I have, the last time it happened was with Virgil, in the final book of the Disturbed Girl’s Guide to Curing Boredom Trilogy, its one of ‘those’ books, one that made my most inspiration books ever list. Virgil sucked me into his evil virus-releasing world-destroying plan, with a well argued and to be honest, quite logical plan for destroying most of the population! But of course, I came to my senses.

5. Motive = Conflict

This is part and parcel of morals and reasons. But is the most important aspect of your villain. It’s the why behind their plans. Without the why you don’t have a good enough villain. The ‘why’ gives you conflict, the fundamental disagreement between villain and protagonist. Conflict gives you plot and believability. You don’t have to have reams and reams of why explanation either. Take Captain Hook he hates Peter Pan because he cut off his hand. Or the evil Queen in Snow White, she’s partly driven by vanity, but that leads her to be envious of Snow’s beauty. 

6. Character Arc

Your protagonists should through change and grow as your story progresses, and so too should your villains, even if it’s just a spiral downwards. If your villain is the same at the beginning as they are at the end, then what was the point of the journey and the battle with the protagonist? They flat lined and I imagine quite a boring villain.

Questions I’ve been asking myself include:

How does the story affect the villain? Do they get more evil and bitter? Or do they see the light and get redeemed? Or maybe I should just kill them off!? How do they feel about what happens to them? What is their goal or objective?

Whatever you choose your villain’s journey to be. They should end the story different to how they started it.

***

If you liked this post, why not get even more awesome writing tips in the book 13 Steps To Evil – How to Craft Superbad Villains. Click this link and just tap the logo of your device or regular bookshop and it will take you to the right page.

You can also get a FREE villains cheatsheet and a villain’s short course by joining my mailing list just click here.

Read Keepers, the first book in my Young Adult fantasy series now. Or to hear more about the release of the sequels as well as get regular CogMail updates you can do so here.

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April brings the start of another series, as I start to look at the villains in my novel, I thought I would share with you the things I learn. But first: Audience Participation Required…

I want to run a poll, to see who your favourite villains are? Comments below. There are no rules your villains could be from literature, TV, Film, Theatre or anywhere else for that matter, and you can have more than one if you like.

The Telegraph has a list of the 50 Best Villains if you need some inspiration.

It’s not something that I have thought about very often. Don’t we usually have a favourite hero? Not a favourite villain. But villains are the characters that linger, that you love to hate, so why haven’t I thought about this before?

I had a little look at the list and picked out my faves from it.

Captain Hook is on there at 40

The Joker from Batman is at 23

Patrick Bateman from American Psycho is at 17

Hannibal Lecter at 14

Lord Voldemort came in at 5

Cruella de Ville came in at 2

Not on the list, but one I had to add is, Ursula

She had to make the list, partly because I have a strange obsession with Octopuses, but also because I loved the Little Mermaid, until I watched it on maternity leave, and realised the absolute horror of the contents, cue a feminist rant on The Abomination That is Disney.

I asked the wife who her favourite villains were and she said the joker, but specifically Heath Ledger’s joker, we both agreed there was something special about the way he played it, neither of us have actually figured out what that ‘special’ was yet, but I’ll come back to you! I find it interesting that most of the villains on the list were male, and that as a result most of the villains on my list are male. But I will write another post about that later. Suggestions on good female villains?

So who else can you add to my list of ultimate villains? I would love a big old list to be able to deconstruct and study, so if you have a moment, please do comment.

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