Screenwriting and the problem of evil
One of the joys of screenwriting is putting childhood terrors into words. The screenplay I’m currently writing has monsters. Not werewolves and vampires (as my last three have had), but otherworldly forces of darkness and destruction.
In this case, the heroes’ goals are relatively straightforward, but the antagonists’ agenda is — by dint of their nature — extraordinarily bleak.
So what’s challenging for this script has been writing against a backdrop of indifferent oblivion. Nihilism is not a crowd-pleaser.
Bad isn’t that bad
In most movies, the villain isn’t really “evil” — he’s just at cross-purposes with the hero. Darth Vader does not perceive himself to be doing wrong. The queen in Aliens is protecting her brood. The shark in Jaws is, well, a shark.1
The villains/monsters of most films can be found to have one or more of the following motivations:
- Self-preservation
- Propagation
- Protection of an important asset
- Hunger/Greed
- Revenge
I’ve ranked these on a scale from “least evil” to “closest to evil.”
A monster acting in its own defense might be terrifying, but it’s morally understandable. A spurned lover on a killing spree steps closer to the big E, but it’s still relatable to normal human emotions. We’ve all lashed out irrationally, though to less fatal degrees.
A sixth motivation is something I’ll call bloodlust/sociopathy. The villain’s actions serve no direct need; bloodlust is its own motivation. Slasher films often fall back on this. Jason Voorhees wants to kill you just because.
As an audience, it’s unsettling. It feels genuinely Evil.
Slasher films usually have one bad guy. What happens when the whole world is similarly bloodthirsty?
Some movies dip their toes into this big pool of bleakness. Zombie class situations, for one. Even if you survive this one moment, do you really want to live in a world overrun by the living dead?
And then there are robots. One could argue the machines of both the Terminator and Matrix franchises are acting out of self-preservation in terms of why they come after the hero. But their greater agenda for enslaving humankind is kind of murky, even if we make good batteries.
They seem intent on wiping us out just because, the treads of their war machines crushing our blackened skulls.
Making oblivion cinematic
The villains I’m writing fall somewhere in between zombies and robots: more sentient than the shambling dead, but less purposeful than Skynet. The challenge has been figuring out how to articulate What They Want in a way that makes sense in a popcorn movie.
If I were writing a junior-year philosophy paper, I’d be able to fold in some Nietzsche and Sartre quotes and call it a day. But that won’t play at 24 frames per second. It needs to be satisfying without external support. So I’m left to look for parallels in other successful movies.
- What do Satanic cultists hope to achieve?
- Why does Hannibal Lecter eat people?
- If Sauron won, what would Middle Earth become?
In looking for my answer, I’m trying to be careful not to explain away the darkness. Or to humanize it. There’s something compelling about evil with the indifference of an earthquake or a tidal wave.
The closest I’ve come is an ant’s perspective of eight-year-old boys, smashing and destroying without apparent motivation or qualm. Scale that up, and it feels like a movie. But not an easy one to write.
- Never forget, every villain is a hero. ↩
Articles
April 8th, 2010 at 3:38 pm
I always appreciated the characterization of Mr. Shadow from Fifth Element. Menacing but distant, with the real human-level evil (sociopathy, in that case) being carried out by a different entity, Mr. Zerg.
Perhaps if you displace it in a similar way, you will retain the indifferent evil without losing the immediate menace.
April 8th, 2010 at 3:39 pm
Make that “Zorg.” Damn Starcraft.
April 8th, 2010 at 3:42 pm
Oohhh this is my favorite post in awhile.
That stuff is what makes movies like Funny Games and The Strangers so unnerving to me. Way scarier than Alien or The Descent or whatever. I think it’s also what makes guys like Kurtz in Apocalypse Now so interesting.
It makes me think of social contract theory. We assume some level of humanity in others, and also most people agree mostly or partly to a social contract. Even bad guys do! People and things that exist outside of that contract and don’t have any humanity are completely unrelatable and frightening because we can’t possibly ‘figure them out’ or reason with them.
April 8th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Well, of course they did a great job with something along these lines in The Dark Knight.
The Joker has no (real) backstory, no earthly desires, no maniacal revenge streak, not even any kind of coherent worldview. He’s motivated, essentially, by two things: genuine curiosity about what will happen when all of society’s supports are ripped out; and a desire to expose the worst parts of everyone he meets. He doesn’t have a good reason for wanting these things (at least, not one that we know of), but he’s fanatically devoted to achieving them.
I also thought the Dementors in the Harry Potter series made interesting villains, since they had the ostensibly good purpose of guarding dangerous evildoers — the only catch was that they had no “off” switch, and would thus subject anyone they encountered to the same kind of torment.
April 8th, 2010 at 3:47 pm
Stephen King came to a similar conclusion with his latest novel, Under the Dome. Long, but a great read filled with both Evil in the sense you’re trying to find and — even more terrifying — the destructive people who thought they were the Heroes. Or at least convinced themselves that they were.
April 8th, 2010 at 3:55 pm
Your latter three queries all seem to crave the same thing:
Power (over others).
Satanist incantations are frequently explicit about it. Eating one’s enemy is old skool power grabbing. And Sauron wanted nothing else.
Booga booga!
April 8th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
Is it overly simplistic to think that the one thing that every bad guy has in common (i.e. what defines them as being the bad guy) is that they do not value human life and will kill and/or destroy anyone or anything that gets in the way of what they want? Isn’t that what truly makes them the bad guy, not just that what they want is at odds with what the protagonist wants?
April 8th, 2010 at 4:17 pm
Great discussion on evil here. I like what the commenters have added so far too. I have to admit, I’ve never written a story where Evil played a huge role — just bad people, or good people doing bad things — but it’s really interesting to think about.
“Never forget, every villain is a hero.”
Oh, haha, “mos def” true in my current WIP. As a writer, this sort of endears me to the villain. The other characters mostly just pity him. (Well, until he gets violent…)
April 8th, 2010 at 4:22 pm
All time favorite ambiguous villain motivation: “I’m really disturbingly motivated to complete my collection of arbitrarily selected skulls from other planets.” -Predator
April 8th, 2010 at 4:25 pm
The asteroids motivation is not self preservation.
I’d watch Never Ending Story. – THE NOTHING is an awesome yet purely motivated cloud of nihilism. It manifests in several ways including minions and our own nature (the same way THE EVIL did in 5th Element, only VISCERAL) – Pure evil always has a time clock. In Never Ending Story the world was becoming smaller… in 5th Element it was counting down to impact.
April 8th, 2010 at 4:36 pm
Well I’d make the argument that we don’t need to understand why the monsters are evil — just that they are.
A villain with no understandable motivation for the evil they bring is scary as can be — and we may subconsciously ascribe the motives that terrify us most. As a child I was never wondering why the alien in my closet wanted to hurt me (or the rattlesnake under my bed or anything else my over-worked brain conjured up). They just wanted to.
But for me, the scariest thing as been understanding true evil and fearing that I may be capable of it so I’d include a scene where the monsters acted on a biological imperative of humans (be it protecting/feeding the young, etc).
April 8th, 2010 at 4:37 pm
Evil needs a strong motivational malice. It can be overt or subtle, but without it, all it really is, is different. and while scary, different isn’t evil.
You’ve given yourself a challenge there, John, to create a mass of world crushing monsters that care deeply about something, but not enough to begin thinking about what they are doing actually affects anything else.
do they procreate? and if so, can they be called Evil?
April 8th, 2010 at 4:49 pm
OH! And you should definitely listen to Charles Manson’s parole hearings… he has a motivation surprisingly like THE NOTHING… only REVERSE. – Too many people believed in him. – He’s very, “I’m here, because you people made me the most famous serial killer of all time. I’m not sure why you people chose me… I never so much as picked up a knife.”
April 8th, 2010 at 4:50 pm
The boredom, the curiosity and the desire of pleasure. It is something that we see all days. A decent married man has a affair with a stranger woman. He thinks that does not damage… if the wife does not know it. Probably the following step is the murder.
The married man is like the child who kills ants: the boredom, the curiosity and the desire of pleasure.
April 8th, 2010 at 5:39 pm
Sounds very lovecraftian.
I was talking with some friends recently about the “evilness” of children – how things like tantrums and playful destruction they wreak only seems innocent only because the child is harmless.
I love the ants’ perspective analogy.
April 8th, 2010 at 5:39 pm
Hey John — nice post.
I also thought about King’s latest book, which is essentially the “alien boys burning ants” evil.
A moment in the book the Exorcist that didn’t make the movie was the priest overhearing the demons in Regan’s body debating how long they can stay in her and what happens when she dies. They say being in her is better than “the void”. To me, if there’s something those demons are scared of, then that’s really flipping scary!
And then the third reference I think of when coming to the idea of evil is Romeo Dallaire’s Shake Hands with the Devil. The evil of Rwanda, the mass murder of 800,000 people over the course of 10 weeks, the motivation, the banality, the horror, everything that surrounds that, culminating in Dallaire sitting across from the generals who organized the genocide and trying to negotiate peace. Like looking into the face of the devil, he said. Totally. That is darkness. And trying to distill out the why and the motivation, in many ways, diffuses the evil. It just is.
So maybe the actions of your antag should be opaque, because if they are truly inconceivable by us, then maybe they are truly evil, and to explain the actions just might diffuse some of the power.
j
April 8th, 2010 at 5:46 pm
In my opinion, you can only define “evil” by showing how it impacts the “good” ones, and by showing how they have to struggle against it. Evil just is. It doesn’t need a motivation. What’s draining when writing is having to access the experience of evil inside us over a period of weeks or months.
April 8th, 2010 at 5:53 pm
All human motivations can be boiled down to a desire to achieve pleasure or avoid pain. At some basic level, this is something we should all be able to agree with. Even seemingly altruistic actions are pursued in order to agree with an internal moral structure.
To mix things up storytellers need to either, a) turn those motivations on their head (i.e., “what I derive pleasure from is causing others pain”) or, b) to completely divorce our antagonists from what we–as human–understand as motivational (i.e., “I choose to dismember this hot blonde co-ed because it serves no purpose other than to dismember a hot blonde co-ed”).
It presents a problem in that it makes these things that embody our greatest fears incomprehensible, but then maybe that’s the point. Can the audience get on board? Maybe not. But find a way to make the inhuman motivation satisfying, and I would go see it.
Is this the very definition of circular logic…?
April 8th, 2010 at 5:57 pm
Michael Moorcock writes about competing otherworldly forces of Law and Chaos. Law wants reality neat, ordered, regimented. Unopposed, they would make a frozen, stagnant universe. Chaos wants to be wild and act without rules – sweep all the little toy soldiers out of their lines just for the glee of it, and, unchecked, would sweep everything to rubble. It’s about abandon, undiscipline, freedom. The fight is Ratched v McMurphy, and Hollywood never has trouble relating to the McMurphys.
April 8th, 2010 at 6:52 pm
HP Lovecraft
His stories are about menaces that threaten mankind. Menaces that affect our minds, drive us insane, and make us do ‘evil’ things. The nature of the old ones is incommensurable with ours.
But going insane is not a bad thing to the old ones. It means we are becoming like them, just crazy enough to perceive another order of existence and become part of their psychic food chain.
So my feeling is that the menace and its evil effect are two different aspects in HP Lovecraft’s work.
Fathomless Evil
A person with a fathomless evil aspect: Someone who subjects someone else to an incredibly painful and degrading death, not for pleasure, but for the sake of learning something about how people die, something that would be unfathomable unless you were another murderer on a similar quest.
An example is the antagonist in the original Vanishing, Spoorless.
April 8th, 2010 at 7:37 pm
Hannibal Lecter -Lektor sounded cooler- eats people because that’s his nature. I couldn’t care less why he does what he does; he is an interesting character -and how so- because he is extremely intelligent, has a strong will and is very resourceful. In The Silence of the Lambs he isn’t The Bad Guy, although he is a bad guy, but he helps Clarise -who is good- and at the end of the film he’s on his way to eat the psychiatrist from prison -who is bad-, so the film does everything in its hand to make the most loveable and charismatic cannibalistic serial killer possible, which is actually cheating, IMO.
Sauron’s goal seems to be absolute power as an end, not as a mean to an end. McKee says in Story that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”. By the way, John, have you had a chance to take a look to McKee’s book? I remember his assistant/secretary/something answered one of your posts offering to send you a copy. I’d like to hear -well, read- your impressions on it.
Satanic cultists want to achieve the same thing Christians do: a better afterlife; they just have a different understanding of the word better.
I find that unless evilness is part of the antagonist’s nature -the Joker is insane, zombies are, well, zombies- that bad guys are best kept off-screen as much as possible, showing the effects of their evil deeds instead. The more time the bad guy appears on-screen the more solid his motivation needs to be -otherwise he’d be a cartoon- and the more chances that people in the audience start to consider things from his perspective, and maybe start questioning the motivation of the protagonist to fight this poor fellow. Dead people? That’s bad. A killer? That’s bad, but let’s hear the guy, maybe he had some reason to do it. I’d say that, unless you want to make the audience question what’s good and what’s bad and why people -or things- can do bad things, just show them dead people and keep the killer out of sight as much as possible — unless he is evil by nature.
April 8th, 2010 at 7:45 pm
To bang on the Lovecraft drum some more:
The universe is a big, cold, and incredibly dangerous place. Once you leave a narrow patch of space on one tiny little marble in an obscure corner of an obsucre galaxy, the universe is completely inimical to life. Every step mankind has ever taken, every breath, is a fight against that fundamental nature of the universe. The universe doesn’t seem evil because it’s so hostile to life, but because it is simply indifferent.
Loveraft’s universe took that idea and ran with it. In order to survive in this vast and harsh wilderness of our universe, mankind has built numerous coping mechanisms, religion and science are perhaps the two most successful. But these mechanisms only work because they deny the fundamental Truth that the universe is so hostile to us.
The process of learning the Truth of the universe leads characters in Lovecraft stories to begin acting in concert with the True nature of things. When they do, they start bucking commonly accepted social norms (those little tics and nuances that we all engage in to convince each other of our importance in the grand scheme of things), and soon after they are labelled as crazy or dangerous. Dangerous they may be, but their insanity is to accept the Truth of things and act accordingly – which only looks crazy to those of us who are still pretending.
In the Lovecraft universe nothing is really Evil. It’s just so impossibly alien that Evil the only way to describe and rationalize it. And to keep us safe in our womb of ignorance.
I don’t believe this stuff, mind you, but it does make for some bleak stories.
April 8th, 2010 at 8:11 pm
That is something that I love about the movie “Falling Down”. Michael Douglas doesn’t realize he’s the bad guy until the end of the movie and it hits him.
April 8th, 2010 at 10:31 pm
One of my pet peeves:
When villains act more evil than strictly necessary, for no apparent reason other than that they’re the villain.
April 9th, 2010 at 5:23 am
In the script you’re working on, has it always been this dismal, or does it become that way during the story? Because if it’s been dismal for a long time, it would be interesting to ask how different the character’s perspective on their world would be from our perspective on ours.
Like, the third-generation of hobbits after Sauron took over Middle Earth might accept the scarier aspects of their existence as “just part of life” unless there was someone/something that gave them a perspective on what it was like before.
April 9th, 2010 at 5:51 am
Where does “he’s a dick” place in the motivation scale? A sub-motivation of Hunger/Greed or Bloodlust/Sociopathy? This would apply to mostly comedic villains, but “evil” nonetheless, I suppose.
April 9th, 2010 at 5:59 am
Lecter and the 8 year old have the same motivation — boredom. They would be stoners if it weren’t for their sociopathic disregard for life.
Satanic cultists are the blind faithful — they, like zombies, are not independent enough to have motivation. The real question in those movies, is what is satan’s motivation?
Sauron’s motivation is ostensibly power, but I always felt he wasn’t such a good bad guy because he didn’t seem to have much characterization.
Zombies and robots aren’t that different. They’re both just following internal orders. The robots tend to have purpose, but neither seem to have motivation. So I don’t think you’re looking at a motivation problem. They should just be doing whatever their base instincts tell them to do.
April 9th, 2010 at 7:00 am
The question of why your force is evil should depend more or less on why your hero is good, emotionally and thematically. If every hero is a villain, I think your answer is right there.
A comic I’m working on has the hero(es) slowly accepting that they are the only ones who can stop an evil character. The evil character himself has accepted, already, his monster role. He BELIEVES evil is the answer to living life, as we believe doing good is. (It’s better to think of it in Eastern philosophical terms than Western ones).
It works for me, but for others, it might be different. If your hero is destined to succeed, your villain needs to be motivated by something anathema to that destiny. If your protagonist needs to survive a world cataclysmic event, the antagonist (beyond the event) needs a reason why that hero shouldn’t survive – or why he should survive over him.
Jordan – one of the main issues I had with Pan’s Labyrinth (among a number of others).
April 9th, 2010 at 9:09 am
I’m not a genius on the subject more of just a big fan, I love evil characters. Yes, most have the basic alternative motives, and even with greed being some what of an annoying one at times, as it can be played up/out in boring ways, you can still manage to create an interesting villian. But to me the best villian, is the sociopath, the no purpose, why does your villian need cause, I know for some human sentiment needed so the audience can some how connect to him, but I see it as, he’s evil why need to connect with him, make them hate him, make them hate that they love him. I loved hannibal lecter because evil like that is what draws us in, since we as rational human beings wouldn’t actually do such acts, to see them acted out sparks that dark piece in us that never gets any light, except for those 2 hours while staring into the eyes of Anthony Hopkins.
April 9th, 2010 at 9:20 am
I think the other examples you cited are easier to write because we humans can somewhat relate. Not that we support evil but we think “well he killed us but at least he did it to protect his brethren.”
We always try to find meaning in the things we don’t understand, just to make it easier for us to deal with it. (Cue an atheist’s explanation of God.)
Evil who’s motivation we don’t understand is hard and I have nothing to add here. Maybe the guy in “No Country For Old Men” but then again maybe I just didn’t get that movie. :-)
Anyways, please please link to this post once the movie in question gets out!!
April 9th, 2010 at 9:28 am
Based on your own analogy I’d fine-tune it to “mentally retarded eight-year-old boys, torturing ants.” You’re dealing with otherworldly entities. Anything you compare their behavior to is based on human references. Not that kids with developmental disabilities aren’t human, but their brains and actions may be more difficult to understand to the average popcorn eater. It may sound like the opposite of what you’re trying to achieve. But with paranormal threats I find primal or utterly inscrutable motivations to work the best. There’s something deeply disturbing about being attacked by an entity whose impetus you don’t understand, because it strips away the option to reason with it and to predict its next move. A wild lion is pretty scary. A wild crazy lion is downright terrifying. Why are they attacking us?! They want our water. Yawn. Why are they attacking us?! Because we’re here. Holy shit!!
The only other motivation I can think of other than a restarted kid with a bag of ice cubes is the “new home” incentive. It kind of falls into the primal motivation category. The monsters have to leave their world so they come to ours. The only movie reference that pops into my head is ID4 which captured that kind of mood of “why, what do they want from us” quite well. The characters in ID4 really don’t understand the aliens’ way of thinking. They hold up signs saying “please take me.” BOOM! Later we get a glimpse at what drives the invaders when the president talks to the scientist who at that point is psychically controlled by the captured alien: “what you want from us?” “Your world” (something to that effect). I doubt most people caught that – or cared about it at this point in the story. But the writers knew. And they also knew how to tap into that feeling of dread when you’re up against something a lot more powerful than and completely alien to you. The need to find a new home is basic enough for us to understand, but broad enough not to humanize the “evil” monsters to the point where they no longer feel evil.
April 9th, 2010 at 9:57 am
Correction: I just skimmed over the script for ID4 to see what the exact exchange was between the president and the alien. Turns out they were in fact after the water, not seeking a new home. Makes you realize that not only is it important to motivate “evil”, the timing when to reveal the motivation is crucial as well. Too early and you run the risk of demystifying the threat, too late and it feels like an afterthought. Anyway, my pre-rant point was that in looking for references to motivate evil one should look for concepts that apply to our human understanding without humanizing the monsters. That’s why I’d make those boys with the BIC lighters hovering over the ant hill escapees from a nearby mental asylum.
April 9th, 2010 at 10:19 am
If you want to read a plausible treatment of the “what would Middle Earth be like if Sauron won” scenario, I recommend the Hero of Ages trilogy, by Brandon Sanderson.
April 9th, 2010 at 10:21 am
The monsters’ motivations: “For the lulz.”
No, seriously, the answer to everything is some sense of enjoyment, so I have to assume that your vague dark creature… things… are doing whatever it is they are doing because they enjoy it.
By the way, when I read the title of this post, I thought it was going to be about religion.
April 9th, 2010 at 10:59 am
Nelson says: “McKee says in Story that “absolute power corrupts absolutely”.”
Please don’t give Robert McKee the claim on that quote. The quote is over a hundred years old and has been attributed to an English Baron, John Acton, in 1887. Interestingly, the second part of the quote is rarely repeated, which is “Great men are almost always bad men.”, which relates somewhat to John’s post.
April 9th, 2010 at 11:02 am
Also, an excellent quote that sums all this up:
“Choose your enemies carefully, for you will become like them.”
– Forrest Church
April 9th, 2010 at 11:03 am
Generally speaking, to me, true evil would be a person who is of complete sane/sound mind and is not incapable of feeling empathy or compassion or morals (i.e. a sociopath/psychopath) but just purposely (or somewhere innate in their psyche, but again, not due to any dysfunction or illness) loves or enjoys the suffering and misfortune, deliberate or otherwise, of others.
To me, “evil” gets tossed around way too much on individuals with mental illness or have only done something out of revenge, jealousy, defense of some sort etc.. There is a difference between someone who has perpetrated evil acts and someone who is actually full-blown evil.
Needless to say though, if “evil” is only a matter of perception or opinion than it does indeed only exist within the mind’s eye and is entirely dependent on the person’s particular views on the subject. Outside of that, there is then no such thing. I don’t, however, believe that someone who is evil personally has to believe that what they are doing is the right thing — in fact, to me a truly evil person would totally believe what they are doing is wrong, corrupt or hurting others and is all the more joyful and upbeat because of it.
April 9th, 2010 at 11:09 am
Side Note: It’s funny to me how when someone is viewed as “evil” or has done something particularly cruel or savage that the general public pronounces them and/or their acts as “inhumane.” In my little ol’ opinion, if the entire recorded history of our species has taught us anything is that violence and other kinds of physical or mental abuse is an all-too-human trait or thing to do.
Perhaps we just need a better phrase for that or need to get over ourselves in thinking that “humane” should mean all that is positive or nurturing about us. That’s a very one-sided and black and white viewpoint.
April 9th, 2010 at 11:11 am
Evil does not need a cause. Evil is a choice.
April 9th, 2010 at 1:28 pm
One thing I really liked about the Borg when they first appeared on Star Trek: The Next Generation was that – as much as I enjoyed the effort to give Klingons, Romulans, Cardassians, et al actual cultures and societies beyond “rawr smash!” – here at last was an alien race with which you could not reason. There could be no negotiation, no compromise, no seeing it from their point of view. They were completely alien and impenetrable, and, hence, one of the scariest Star Trek villains ever. (I realize that later, especially in the Hugh episodes, we did come to understand the Borg more, but I’m just talking about the first few appearances).
Or the first Alien film – before Aliens and the Alien Queen – what does the alien want? NOTHING except to kill everyone, apparently. Why? Oh, he just ate your head while you were trying to figure it out.
April 9th, 2010 at 1:40 pm
@Patrick:
The Borg are a good example of what I was trying to convey. Modeling non-human types after animal species (in this case ants/ bees) is not new but still smart. However I don’t agree on your Alien comment, having hatched on the spaceship, the creature was protecting its territory.
April 9th, 2010 at 2:04 pm
@Johnny:
And that’s another point in favor of inscrutable motives – lots of cool debate, both among your characters and among readers/viewers – about just what’s really going on.
I should clarify this only works if the monster’s actions don’t just come off as random, or as plot devices, but seem to be following some kind of logic. Except it’s alien logic. Everything it’s doing makes perfect sense to the monster, but not to us.
(The comparison for the aliens in ID4 was “like locusts, stripping the planet and moving on.” So in that case, it wasn’t inscrutable, just useless – there’s still nothing to negotiate, no compromise, not even a way you can surrender.)
April 9th, 2010 at 2:14 pm
@Patrick
Locusts feed on crop. Primal motivation: survival. Useless? I thinks not.
April 9th, 2010 at 2:17 pm
@Johnny
Useless to the characters, I mean. There’s nothing you can offer someone who wants to eat your whole planet anyway, and pretty much can, to get them to go away.
April 9th, 2010 at 2:43 pm
The motives for villains are just as diverse as those of heroes. Some of them are quite sympathetic and could even be considered admirable, just taken to an extreme. If a villain is meant to terrify, however, often this effect is made stronger when the writer leaves his/her/its motives partially obscured (unlike the hero, whose motives must always be known to the audience).
One of the best examples of this is the infamous Iago. We know of his jealousy and of his disgust for Othello’s race, but it doesn’t seem like enough to fully explain his horrendous actions. This only serves to make him all the more terrifying, and an extremely effective villain. Anton Chigurh from No Country for Old Men, who I think somebody mentioned above, also reveals only brief glimpses of his psyche. We get the sense that he sees fate or some other power as the true arbiter of his actions, but get no clarification. Really, it’s better without the clarification.
April 9th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
Hannibal Lector is an interesting example. It’s easy to think that he chooses to eat people out of sadism or arrogance. But it’s actually because he has a mental illness that causes him to eat people. This is clearer in the books – he’s described as biting a piece out of a nurse’s arm in the hospital. Obviously an intelligent man like Lector knows there’s no point to doing this and it doesn’t even make him look cool. But he’s mentally ill, so he does it anyway. He’s just one step beyond people who pull out their own hair and eat it. The closest a movie gets to this is the remake of Red Dragon, where Lector accepts that he is insane and that this is why he could be beaten by an FBI agent who isn’t as smart as him.
April 9th, 2010 at 3:11 pm
@Patrick Sweeney
I agree, one of the best things about the Borg was their utter imperviousness to human appeals, especially coupled with their (near) imperviousness to brute force. I don’t actually think that later on, once we understood their overarching motive (“Perfection”), they lost any of their effectiveness. They were still relentless and nigh unstoppable.
What did weaken the Borg, in my opinion, was the emphasis on the Borg Queen, especially later on. Sure, she was creepy and all, but it was sort of a cop-out giving us a leader to despise on a individual level, when part of the horror of the Borg is their being a faceless mass with no obvious weak points.
April 9th, 2010 at 4:30 pm
Hannibal just had a very, very wicked sense of humour.
April 9th, 2010 at 6:22 pm
The monsters’ motivations: “For the lulz.”
Wow, you just won one internet!! I love this comment over 9,000 times!
:-)
April 9th, 2010 at 6:25 pm
That notion of what Middle Earth would become if Sauron won would make a great fantasy novel if you combined it with the 8-year-old smashing ants notion – after all, what does an 8 year old do but get bored and wander off at the end, leaving the ants to rebuild or survive while they can?
That would be an incredibly compelling setting to write about – a world just absolutely pitched into darkness by an all-encompassing evil, only to be abandoned after the victory is won. Post apocalyptic fantasy. Probably been tried before somewheres, but still.
April 9th, 2010 at 6:37 pm
Actually, locusts also feed on slower locusts in front of them – hence their movement. Just saying. It’s a preservation motivation not obvious at first glance.
April 9th, 2010 at 9:04 pm
Duuude, locusts eat their own?? Now that’s evil.
April 9th, 2010 at 11:31 pm
As has been pointed out in the thread already to some degree, as soon as you give the audience a hook into the enemy that they can relate to and create an interpersonal relationship in their mind, something is lost. Giving us a reason, a justification, for why they do what they do that is creepier than they were without the justification is only harder. Over the years, they made this mistake with Jason, Freddie, and Michael.
Jason was retarded and had a messed up mom and was picked on. Freddie was the child of the rape of a nun by countless psychopaths. Michael’s family was messed up and didn’t see what it had done to him. Okay, so that was largely served up in the remake, but you get the picture.
Once that happens, the only thing you can do to make them scary to any degree is make them a force of nature. Unstoppable, unreasonable, they are just going to keep doing it, even if they themselves know why they do what they do. They are on some level not just accepting that they are messed up and even why, but they are also getting past that to acceptance, and their acceptance is nihilistic and negative. “Who cares? What does it matter? I LIKE doing this! I LOVE IT!!!”
Hannibal is like that. He himself knows exactly what he does and why and he LIKES it. Above and beyond anything he gets out of it due to maladjustment, when you take all that away, he still LIKES it. He’s not embracing his insanity, but the place and state of being it brought him to.
That’s scary. Willful embrace of what they could only have reached by being messed up. No real regret, just cold acceptance. And not in the way of the sad-sack melodramatic type, but with purpose and even some sort of principle they may not understand. And when they run with it… get out of the way and find a rock to hide under, because they’ve become the new age hero. You want them stopped, but you know that they are surviving all challenges, and getting the girl, and then eviscerating her.
April 10th, 2010 at 6:04 am
JB writes “Evil does not need a cause. Evil is a choice.” And this is what we see, often. But as screenwriters, I think we need to keep DRAMA at the heart of everything we create. Drama = conflict, and conflict = conflicting needs.
It is the one thing that’s always bugged me about the Star Wars movies. The dark side wants to take over the universe and the problem is…what, exactly? I mean seriously, let those douches run things for a while. I’m not sure what really changes for anyone. What do “they” want, other than power, and if they get that power, what then?
On the other hand, JB’s sentiment seems to nail a truly terrifying film like “Henry, Portrait of a Serial Killer.” I kept watching that movie, waiting for the flashback “here’s why he’s doing it” scene, and it never came, and I got even more terrified. Maybe it was in there but I had my eyes closed. Because evil, sometimes, just exists and scary as hell. And I lived in Chicago at the time, and drove by the places in the movie every day.
For the record, the villains in my script want love.
April 10th, 2010 at 12:34 pm
One of my favorite lines of dialogue ever (but I have a lot of those) comes from an episode of Millennium. Profiler Frank Black has been called in to an upscale gated community where a serial killer is preying on teenagers. He goes to a community meeting where the parents are, naturally, frantic.
PARENTS Why is he doing this to us? What does he want from us?
FRANK BLACK He doesn’t want anything. He’s insane.
(Now, those of you who saw that episode will point out that it turns out later that Frank is lying here – the killer does have a goal, and Frank is trying to provoke him by pretending he’s not “getting the message.” Nonetheless, still a chilling line.)
April 10th, 2010 at 7:19 pm
Satanic cultists hope to prove they are right. Hannibal Lecter eats people because it makes him feel good. If Sauron won, middle earth would be a fascist state.
All these examples are evil because if these villains are successful the protagonist will lose control of life and probably die. That’s terrifying.
A character that is more sentient than a zombie and less purposeful than Skynet would be an idiot warmonger that thinks he/she needs to kill to survive. The example you give of the eight year old killing an ant describes an irreverent lust to show power. The child knows what he’s doing is wrong.
Lenny in Of Mice and Men comes to mind as an evil that might be scarier. He gets into trouble thinking he is protecting himself. He can’t help himself and that’s why we both love him and at the same time accept that he needs to die.
I don’t think you want to kill the child that kills ants. But a Lenny, or a thousand Lenny’s, wanting to destroy a gentle civilization because it scares him would be necessary to kill. And the killing would be a scary endeavor, Lenny is not without his defenses nor is he without intent, he likes soft things.
April 10th, 2010 at 10:53 pm
Hunger/Greed should be separated and greed should be ahead of revenge on the evil scale.
In answer to how to make relatable an evil force that is somewhere between zombie and robot I would offer religion.
April 10th, 2010 at 11:33 pm
John could you clarify “hunger/greed”
Greed could be a drug dealer selling to kids. A spouse killing for insurance money. etc.
Could you clarify hunger?
April 11th, 2010 at 4:09 pm
Hi John, I recommend you read, “People Of The Lie” by M. Scott Peck, M.D.
The book, written by a psychiatrist, outlines case studies of people who are believed to be evil. This is scarier stuff than any King or Barker novel and more unnerving because it’s an unemotional, intelligent and sober look at this topic.
R.
April 12th, 2010 at 11:41 am
Adding to my first comments at the very top, this also worked for LOTR and Star Wars (i.e., displacing the immediate menace onto a “servant” of the driving evil force to provide immediate conflict attached to an actual face).
The idea of a sociopathic entity following the commands of a vast, unknowable evil is doubling up, in a good, satisfyingly evil way I think.
In all these examples, there’s also an element of chase and time.
So, it seems the formula for proper vast evil is:
April 12th, 2010 at 1:23 pm
Just an FYI, your five goals for villains can be applied to heroes as well.
April 12th, 2010 at 2:20 pm
Small thought – one of Steven Moffat’s regular tropes, particularly in most of his episodes for Doctor Who, is that his big bad believes itself to be doing the right thing – and it kinda sorta is, but in a way that threatens the hero & all he stands for (the nanogenes in the Empty Child, the girl in the Library, the Government of Starship UK, etc., etc.)
April 12th, 2010 at 3:19 pm
I’ve been interested in characters like Doc Holiday in Tombstone. He’s upset for “being born.” Never asked for life, just thrown into an evil world and has to deal with it. He’s miserable, and self-destructive. So he’s definitely not thinking twice about inflicting his pain on others, maybe in hopes of “convincing” them about his worldview. I could envision an extreme version of this for something on a larger scale.
It could also be thought of as someone who wanted something very badly, maybe rightfully deserved it even, but because of circumstances such as they are, was denied. This = pain and torment. Then someone comes along, and without any effort or just by dumb luck, gets handed exactly what the first individual sought. This could be thought of as a form of injustice.
So these are probably sources for revenge. But it doesn’t have to be the kind of revenge that is targeted. When someone is in deep pain or has deep-rooted resentment, they will lash out at everyone and everything.
April 12th, 2010 at 5:20 pm
“just because” is indeed a very unsettling form of evil. in my opinion, the greatest evil of all, though, is the actual worship of death and destruction as an end to itself. that is sort of a revolutionary, puritanical evil, and when it sprouts up in real life — think fascism and communism — it is enormously dangerous and produces people capable of doing amazingly vicious, savage things.
April 12th, 2010 at 6:20 pm
Every purpose for the character if he chose to pursue it. Or able to, depending who is controling the characters and how they should relate to eachother. Maybe masterpeace it. And make every evil wrong in the force trying to be good. I dont know. -evil characters are wrong. But nature puts creatures with powers in a natural competing invironments. And characters knows different things. That black mamba dont know who built the forrest. He is just the most evil thing in the universe thil he dies. My contribution. Peace and Marky Mark.
April 12th, 2010 at 9:34 pm
To further Jack M’s point, I think that the five goals, when applied to heroes, are also in order from least good to most good. Jason Bourne isn’t so much as a “good guy” in the first movie (self-preservation) as he is in the second (revenge).
April 13th, 2010 at 1:52 am
I have always thought that there is a motivation which incites people to great romanticism, heroism, creativity and depravity which is rarely mentioned in such discussions:
getting off.
Some people consider this a subset of “getting power,” but I’m inclined to flip it the other way. It’s an abstraction of the primal need to procreate. As humans, our need to procreate becomes secondary to a need for sexual pleasure. Sexual pleasure gets sublimated and twisted around in all kinds of fascinating ways. Maybe this makes me terribly Freudian.
I see it as at the heart of what motivates people to do everything from getting a better job to building monuments. (directly = to please a mate; indirectly= leaving a legacy, a “mark” on the world) A person whose sexual desire is frustrated may act out violently. And the reeeely creepy evil comes when you have someone who gets off on doing harm. The sadist who loves to provoke, just to see what happens. Not just consensual BDSM type stuff, but on genuinely violating others. The “low end” of this is acts like petty theft for the sake of upsetting someone, or flashing. The ultimate extension of it is someone who wants to see the whole world violated, harmed, hurt, killed- paint it all black.
If you’re looking for a motivation that’s not your first five, “getting off” is a pretty powerful one.
April 13th, 2010 at 4:18 am
It might be worthwhile reading the Book of Job, which is more an essay on Satan than the question of suffering.
April 13th, 2010 at 1:58 pm
I think its important to stay away from describing any character as evil. Thats judgement on the character, and if need be, you can save it for the title of the film. it shortens the character’s arc, in actor terms the arc is the super-objective (i am doing these things in order to reach my goal which will move me closer to whatever satisfaction i desire).
But since we are on the subject of evil:
Evil can be, aside from what John has written, forged within numerous tactics from an objective, subjective, or an id, point of view. the ego in an evil character is huge but it is fueled by its superego, where the subconscious is formed from past experiences. The ego, like a host, has to deal with the parasitic ‘pangs’ of what the superego feeds it: this leads to relentless evildoing, unmeasured craziness.
The purpose behind every action is due to a reaction.
Where we find the character, or so called “evil-doer”, within the start of the screenplay maybe from the why (action/ego) perspective – I am killing because i enjoy killing, or the because (reaction/ego-superego) perspective – I am killing these minions because they/or someone close to me did this to me or such-n-such, will either make or break the viewer’s fear factor.
From a artist’s perspective to make the character most full, when creating it, we begin from a zero point of view, canvas that is judgement free. And revealing the argument as to why the character does what they do may soften or harden the viewer’s point of view.
A so-called evil character is far more scary when you do not why it does what it does, because it’s seemingly unexplainable (it’s in their nature), and as humans we want everything explained to us. Misunderstanding is fuel for fear and denial.
April 14th, 2010 at 2:05 pm
I haven’t had time to read more than half of the comments, but I’d like to add my 2 cents.
I believe that what constitutes the kind of evil that chills us to the bone is a total lack of empathy. There’s nothing really wrong with characters trying to get their way (as one commenter noted, most of Evil’s motivations are also the hero’s motivations), and drama obviously comes from the conflict of competing, antithetical goals. But what makes Evil evil is a lack of empathy. This is the common thread between aliens, robots, Borg, Hannibal, Jason, Rwandan generals, 8 year-olds stomping on ants, etc.
Evil is merciless. Why? Because it can’t feel our suffering. It can understand our suffering if it’s an Evil that enjoys cruelty (such as Hannibal) but it is by definition incapable of feeling what its victims feel. Hence the Nazis’ efforts to treat the Jews as vermin or the leaders of the Rwandan genocide referring to the Tutsis as cockroaches. This means that evil is therefore always in the eye of the beholder; if not, everyone who eats meat would be evil.
April 14th, 2010 at 3:05 pm
Roger Ebert had a really good observation about Hannibal Lecter once: that the character’s great, almost shameful secret is that he is in some strange way, a good person. He attempts to do good within the limits of being a sadistic psychopath. Obviously, those are SEVERE limitations, but when you think about it, this notion holds up. At least, in Manhunter and Silence Of The Lambs. He acts as a psychiatrist for Will Graham and Clarice Starling: he ultimately helps them work through their problems and find some kind of peace and stability. He also tries to get them killed, but, that’s the sadistic psycho side.