what we long to do, we want to break the rules. That’s the appeal of horror films in general. Especially when they’re on the edge. We go in there and we want a thrill. We want to get out of normal society. But as you get older, and become more responsible it becomes less fun.”
Creating Fictional Villains
“I think the key to any villain in fiction is to make him human. He may do evil things, but he’s still a human being and he reacts to the world in a very human way, although with a complete lack of impulse control. My character of Vincent, in Whisper in the Dark, for example, feels that he has been wronged. That after he has worked so hard to make a name for himself, creating his “art,” some impostor has come along and stolen his thunder by, more or less, taking credit for his work. At least that’s the way Vincent sees it. He sees the impostor as a plagiarist—and a bad one at that. So he’s very human in his reaction, although he goes about getting revenge for this insult in ways that most of us wouldn’t think of. Or maybe we’d think of, but wouldn’t act on.”—Robert Gregory Browne is an AMPAS Nicholl Award–winning screenwriter and the author of Down Among the Dead Men (St. Martin’s, 2010).
It’s interesting to note, however, that very few people ever regard themselves as evil. Wiretaps of conversations between members of organized crime families bear this out. You rarely get statements like, “Hey, let’s go out and do some evil stuff.” Though that would really make court cases a lot easier.
However, in myth and storytelling there are plenty of villains who delight in simply being evil. That’s a club that has Satan as its chairman emeritus and includes Baba Yaga, quite a few dragons, the occasional ogre and troll, vampires, child-eating forest hags, and others. When it comes to child-eating hags there’s no moral gray area, and heroic slayage is both acceptable and encouraged.
However, these days it’s all about the gray area. Even a monster like Hannibal Lecter—a mass-murdering cannibal who was voted the second greatest villain of all time (after Darth Vader1)—was a character people actually liked. In Thomas Harris’s chilling novel, Silence of the Lambs and Jonathan Demme’s nail-biter of a film, Lecter was charming, likable, even admirable in certain ways. We rooted for him to escape from his captivity, and the warden was made to look like the villain. The character’s charisma blinded us to the bare facts that the warden was justified in maintaining the harshest security standards because the prisoner was an incredibly dangerous monster. But gray areas are at the heart of modern storytelling.
True Evil
“All of my films have tackled ‘good vs. evil’ to some extent. The most obvious is probably Pink Eye. There is a masked killer who is a victim to government testing—so the killer is not the true evil, the government is. They drug this man to the point of insanity; he escapes an asylum and kidnaps my character. I am just a nice girl trying to keep my family together and I end up tied to a bed…I won’t give away the whole story because there are some twists in there. All real good vs. evil stories are morally convoluted because nothing is ever truly black or white.”—Melissa Bacelar is an actress, model, producer, and animal activist.
New York Times bestselling author Rachel Caine shared her view on crafting these “gray area” characters: “I can’t really warm up to characters who are just one thing or another. Black or white. Real people don’t fall into those categories, and for me, the characters I create have to be realistic, if not real. My characters make mistakes. Bad choices. Sometimes, they compromise their ideals for short-term gains. I have a hard time making stock heroes or stock villains without mussing them up a little bit—most of my villains have redeeming qualities, and most of my heroes have less admirable ones. It just makes them more interesting to me.”
A lot of modern horror and fantasy fiction explores those gray areas of evil and villainy, and that makes for some fascinating reading. It also allows the writers to throw some curves at the reader. Few things are more boring than a completely predictable villain. When it’s hard to make a clear distinction as to whether someone (or something) is a villain, it infuses the encounter with paranoia, tension, and real scares.
Monsters as Social Commentary
“Zombies in storytelling are all about social commentary, not about evil. They are the perfect vehicle for allegory. To the writer, zombies can represent anything they want them to, but nothing works better than tapping into what a society is afraid of at any given point in history. A zombie trying to destroy a family barricaded away in a farmhouse could represent the decline of marriage or the destruction of the housing market. A band of the undead overrunning a city, with the way our country is now, may represent the terrorists that have been working to destroy our freedom. The zombie oozes no sexuality, like the vampire. There are no undertones there. It is not meant to seduce you, but just flat-out ruin everything you value. For a writer delving into zombies, they leave a lot of room for commenting on society and tuning into the frequency of what scares us as a collective group.”—James Melzer is the author of Escape: A Zombie Chronicles Novel (Simon & Schuster, 2010).
MINDLESS EVIL
Monster stories of all kinds, from mythological tales of hydras and sea serpents to folktales about werewolves to modern tales of zombies, often present all threats as evil. That’s not always accurate and it isn’t fair. Evil is measured by intent not by the degree of harm done. It can’t be judged according to body count because a fighter pilot in war who sinks a ship may be responsible for the deaths of hundreds of enemy soldiers, but that’s the nature of war. Dracula only killed a handful of people in Bram Stoker’s novel and yet we can all agree that he’s evil.
The challenge in determining whether something is evil or merely dangerous crops up a lot when talking about monsters. The Creature from the Black Lagoon (Universal, 1954) is an animal and a natural predator. Are we right in calling such a creature “evil” because it kills humans? It isn’t breaking any set of laws that apply to its species. No more so than a scorpion or a snake. The mistake is to equate “dangerous” with “evil.”
Zombies are another good example. In George A. Romero’s classic 1968 film, The Night of the Living Dead, the zombies kill over and over again without remorse. By the second film in the series, Dawn of the Dead, zombies had killed nearly every man, woman, and child on the planet. They are certainly threatening, relentless, and unnatural. So…does that make them evil?
Almost certainly not. Zombies, according to the Romero model, are unthinking. They are dead bodies that have been reanimated. They walk; they can use very simple tools (we see them picking up bricks or pieces of wood); they can problem-solve in a limited way (the zombie who attacks Barbara in the graveyard picks up a brick to try to smash the window after he has been unable to open the door using the handle). They can even pursue. And yet Romero—and other writers in the genre like novelists Max Brooks (World War Z), Joe McKinney (Dead City, 2006), and Robert Kirkman’s ongoing comic book The Walking Dead—have clearly established that there is no personality, no emotions, no higher consciousness of any kind.
Billy Tackett, Dead White & Blue
“When I painted Zombie Sam I thought I’d piss some folks off. That didn’t happen. The broad range of people that have become Dead White & Blue fans continues to amaze me. My Zombie Sam image is embraced equally by both the political left and right! I’ve sold shirts to both anti-war protestors and to soldiers voluntarily heading off to Iraq. Everyone seems to be able to put their own spin on him and personally I love it!”
—Billy Tackett is an illustrator and creator of the popular Dead White & Blue series of images where he zombifies iconic American images.
“Zombie stories are like a photograph in
