In Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the Gentlemen commit horrific murders in complete silence.
If your big bad doesn’t feel threatening, your story will lose its power. Unfortunately, making an intimidating antagonist isn’t as simple as replicating Dracula or Darth Vader and putting them in the path of the main character. But with a little thought, you can make any villain scary. Get started with these guidelines.
Convey Why Your Villain Is Threatening
Many storytellers think that cloaking their villain in shadow and showing them make evil plans in their big, dark castle is enough to demonstrate how dangerous they are. But giving them the semblance of a typical villain won’t make them feel threatening.
To establish a character as a threat, the audience needs to know the devastation they’ve caused. Do the youths of the village disappear from their beds at night, only to reappear as the undead servants of the local necromancer? Did all the surrounding cities fall under the tyranny of BioGen Corporation, leaving the last free settlement without allies? Did the little orphan push their own parents into the sea? Communicate what your villain has done that’s so dangerous and terrible.
Use eerie details to enhance the threat or build up to it. Tales might say that the necromancer looks like a woman with no face, wearing a wedding gown. Corporate spies report that the CEO of BioGen was at a big gala and a factory inspection at the same time. Every day the little orphan stares into the well, completely motionless, for several hours.
Avoid Theatrics
Don’t give your villain any characteristic that resembles an antagonist in a children’s cartoon. For instance:
- Evil cackling
- Swooshy cape
- Playing with a knife, gun, or other weapon
- Pointlessly threatening or killing minions
- Eating kittens or puppies
- Calling others stupid or weak
If you embrace overdone stereotypes, your villain will come off as cheesy and comical. Any chance you had at making them threatening will be destroyed.
To be effective, your villain needs some originality. Audiences quickly become desensitized to common monsters such as vampires, werewolves, and zombies. If you’re using a well-known monster for your antagonist, they should buck some trends and set some of their own.
Keep Them Mysterious
What we imagine is scarier than what we know. The better your audience understands the villain, the less threatening that villain will feel to them. Unless you want a sympathetic villain like Carrie, don’t narrate any scenes from their viewpoint. Viewing them from the outside will make them seem more hostile and dangerous.
If your villain doesn’t use conversation as their means of enacting violence, don’t let them speak more than they need to. Hearing the villain speak demystifies them. If your hero meets the faceless necromancer in the woods and has a long conversation, that will reduce the sense of threat. However, if the hero just sees her disappear into the fog or hears only “soon, love…” that can build the tension.
The less exposure your audience has to the villain, the more menacing you can make them feel. Consider hiding the full details of their appearance until your climax, when the hero finally has to face them.
Make Them Competent
Your villain should be smart and effective, able to outmaneuver almost any opponent. Otherwise, the terrified villagers or threatened settlement would have already found a way to get rid of them. Your antagonist shouldn’t be so eager for bloodshed that they sabotage themselves. Don’t let them murder their best servants or fall for an obvious trap with tempting bait.
To maintain their potency, you’ll need to let them do real damage during the story. If they’re a killer, let them kill some heroes. If they want to take control of the settlement, have them do that shortly before the climax, then make your hero turn it all around.
If you let them lose a fight, their effectiveness as a threat will be reduced. Keeping them on the winning side can be tricky because you can’t let them kill your main character. If you have a longer story or series, give them a goal that requires your hero to stay alive for a while or at least doesn’t require their death. Avoid excuses about how your villain wants to discredit the hero or watch them suffer; it’ll just show your audience how foolish they are.
Your villain should be so effective that your heroes feel helpless against them. If the necromancer enthralls anyone who sees her, or BioGen Corp knows every secret the heroes have hidden, they’ll be harder to defeat.
Slowly Escalate the Threat Level
Threat requires novelty. It doesn’t take long for audiences to become desensitized to antagonists, especially if they aren’t killing significant characters. That’s why you need a ramp of escalating threat for your heroes.
Start small. At the beginning of your story, the weakest minion your villain has should feel truly threatening. If you don’t have minions, use the big bad, but make them remote at first. Your hero might watch out the window as their brother disappears into the woods one night, never to return. Only later would they discover the villain is responsible, when they start catching fleeting glimpses of them in the trees outside their window.
Then you can level up your hero enough to fight off the weak minion or withstand the villain’s call through the woods. This allows your hero to win some conflicts without making your villain feel ineffective. Consider including setbacks. Your hero might wrest an important item from a common mook, only to have it stolen back by a more powerful servant.
If you want a heart-pounding climax, don’t let your hero become so badass that they think they can challenge the villain. They should still feel helpless. They’ll face the villain because they have no other choice.
Don’t forget to leave a believable way for your heroes to defeat the villain – even if they don’t. If you want a tragic ending, it will provide some dramatic irony. Perhaps your heroes played right into the villain’s hands. If you want a happy ending, your heroes need to win through their own ingenuity. Let them piece together the dark origins or true nature of your villain and then use that knowledge to defeat them.
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Fantastic article. Every writer should print this and hang it near their keyboard
I completely agree. Wonderful article.
Quick question about the last part of this: “Don’t let the hero become so badass they think they can take on the villain.” Can this be utilised in a way where the hero becomes badass because of a string of successes, whatever they may be, and think they can take on the villain, they do, and they’re still not good enough to win? Could that add to the suspense and show the villain is truly competant, rather than making the hero feel OP?
Absolutely. What you’re actually doing in that case is dealing out karmic punishment to the hero for being overconfident/prideful. I think my phrasing was a little off in that sentence, what you generally don’t want is for the audience to think the hero will have no problem picking off the villain, because then there’s no tension. With a string of successes, that could be an issue. Generally instead the hero would get some training or learn a new combo and think they can just mop up the villain with no effort. The audience in this case would know the hero is being overconfident, so there would be lots of tension because they will be expecting that karmic punishment. The twist might be better if the audience thinks the hero will succeed, but you’d have to be really careful with that so they aren’t snoring by the time they get to the fight.
Hi, Chris. I would like to ask you this
Is it really important for a villain to be threatening in order to be a good character and be memorable? If so, then explain to me why
I’m not Chris, but here’s why it’s important: because it makes the hero look heroic. The villain needs to be threatening, powerful, and competent, so that, in the end, winning against them is an achievement. The more threatening the villain, the bigger the hero who goes up against them.
I totally agree with you. Having a menacing villain gives enough strength to the conflict of the story to make the reader or spectator interested in the work.
I would like to give you this YouTube links to tell me your points about if you consider if a character named Kakine Teitoku has every aspect that a villain needs to be threatening or not, explaining to me why. It doesn’t matter if you haven’t seen the series of these clips, just tell me your point of view.
https://youtu.be/XPbrv4Fr73Y
https://youtu.be/bkzlhPDGcQc
Though I understand the last point about a heart-pounding climax and think the general idea has merit, there are problems with it which would make me recommend against doing it unless someone knows what they’re doing very well. I’ve seen it done *really* badly, on more than one occasion.
The first problem is that if the hero faces the villain because they have no other choice, it takes away from the hero’s agency. Now, this doesn’t preclude the hero from having agency in other ways, but the winning battle coming about by the hero’s successful action, as opposed to just their successful reaction, emphasizes their heroic decision as opposed to the villain’s screwup.
The second problem is that you risk lowering the tension if the hero doesn’t seem to have any chance to win. If the hero sees the upcoming fight as hopeless, then the audience should have no reason to believe, based on the information they have, that the hero has a chance. However, if the audience doesn’t expect you to just let the villain get the easy win the hero is expecting, then they’ll be waiting for the sudden twist that allows the hero to win.
Essentially, if the audience sees no way forward for the hero, then they’ll expect you to make one, and if they’re expecting you to make one, then they’ll be less invested in what happens before then. This is more of a problem near the end of a story, because the stakes are too high for the hero to simply lose with no caveats.
Following that, the third problem, and probably the biggest, is that you risk having to solve the ending with a contrivance, depriving the ending of the impact it should have. When an avenue of victory suddenly pops up where there was none before, and it could not have reasonably been expected, then it’s likely to seem that the hero won by dumb luck, or the villain screwed up an easy win. Even with some prior setup, you risk having the battle decided by some unrelated thing the hero did halfway through the story, rather than what they did at the climax.
That’s not to say that these things always happen. A skilled writer can manage to pull this off in spite of these potential pitfalls. I’ve just seen this done badly so many times, however, that I’d say that good examples are the exception rather than the norm.
Off the top of my head, the worst example I’ve seen was from the game Dragalia Lost. Given the bad guys move a lot of their troops away from the capital, the heroes decide to launch an assault on it – which is good for showing agency. However, the main villain both possesses the body of the MC’s sister (whom he’s unwilling to harm), and can toss around the MC’s most powerful dragon allies like ragdolls.
Naturally, there’s no solution to either of those problems when the heroes confront the villain. The MC ends up offering his own body to the villain to save his sister almost immediately, despite that being a key condition to the story’s bad timeline. This gets solved by having another antagonist show up without warning, absorbing the main villain during the body swap process before leaving.
The problem there was that, by not writing in any path to victory for the heroes there, the writers were forced to use a contrivance that robbed the showdown of any meaningful tension and satisfaction. Even worse, it made the MC look extremely selfish and foolish, causing huge backlash. Of course, many games aren’t known for their stellar writing, so that was low-hanging fruit, but I think it’s a good example of what I’m referring to.
I think using a game as an example here comes with some problems, because a game has to give the player a certain amount of freedom of decision. Not 100% – most games can’t even do it, because you can’t prepare for every kind of decision a player might make -, but at least something in the range of 50%. You have to have at least two choices present somewhere (unless the game is a kinetic novel which has no choices at all). With that, many people who write games fall into the trap of having a ‘preferred path’ through them which means that they will only award that ending and others might seem contrieved.
The hero having no other choice often translates to ‘if you don’t want to walk away from everything for good, you have to do something’ and not ‘no matter what you want, you have to do it.’ Such high-stakes endings usually give the hero the choice to give up or go all in. The hero is a hero because they decide to go all in. (Except in rare cases like the Russian Nightwatch novel where the main character really walks away from it, lending their strength to nobody, showing the two sides they’re about equal in power.)
The hero always has a chance or believes they have one – a small one, maybe, but we know how it is with those 1000 to 1 chances… The villain having more at their disposal is the right way to do it, so there is a chance the hero may fail and it at least looks that the hero could conceivably fail. If there’s no chance that may happen, it’s boring.
To avoid the contrievance (or Deux Ex Machina) ending, you need to prepare for the win early. If the hero gets a new weapon, make a point of it when they get it or show it causes the villain to grow careful earlier. If the hero gets unexpected allies, make them interact with those allies in a manner that generates good karma (there’s a lot of articles about that on this site). Introduce the hero’s means of winning or at least hint at them. Foreshadowing is everything.
I’ve seen and read a lot of stories which did that very well – even (or, perhaps, especially) among pulp stories which often need to pull that off again and again. For some, it becomes formulaic and looks forced after a while, but others manage to keep it fresh.
“Vinnie De Soth, Jobbing Occultist”, for instance, does it excellently. The book seems to contain a series of short stories, but they all lead up to the final confrontation which shows us how much he has learned, how many allies he’s made, and how much he has grown in the meantime.
The story of the game in question is linear and detached from most of the gameplay in this case, as is typical of many mobile games, and the actual gameplay of the relevant section doesn’t involve the villain. Neither do you face this villain in game in any of the previous story sections which establish his threat. It’s a case of pure story and gameplay segregation.
My point was that if the hero feels completely helpless in an upcoming fight, and they’re only facing the villain because they have nothing to lose, then people will be waiting for the twist, rather than being focused on the hero’s efforts to win. I think we agree that the hero should believe they have a chance, even if it’s a small one – it shouldn’t feel like the hero (and, by extension, the audience) is holding out for a miracle. If the hero had a chance, but fails in doing whatever he was aiming to do, but then gets help at a pivotal moment, there will still be tension the whole time. The sudden turn of the tide will create a better high when the audience hasn’t been counting on it the whole time.
As for foreshadowing and good karma – those are good means of introducing those twists, in general. They can be done badly in some cases, however; namely when, as I mentioned, the resulting twist makes the results of the final confrontation seem detached from decisions made during it. Because I might not be explaining it properly, I’ll elaborate with some examples of what I mean.
Scenario 1: The hero and his allies get ambushed and surrounded by an overwhelmingly strong enemy force during their battle. However, they receive drop pod reinforcements from a faction owning a ship which they saved from the villain at some point. The reinforcements create the space the hero needs to face the villain.
In this case, the help resulting from good karma earlier doesn’t invalidate the decisions made during the battle – the hero still has to win it, and is being given more space to do so. It’s also logical that a faction which was attacked by the villain would choose to come in during the final battle.
Scenario 2: The hero saves a baby dragon from poachers early on in the story. At the climax, the hero is facing off with the villain at the peak of Mount Finale. The hero is getting completely smashed in the fight. Just when the hero’s about to die, the dragon’s parents show up to save the hero, crushing the villain and his forces.
In this case, what the hero does essentially doesn’t matter. The hero didn’t win because of anything he did during the battle; he won because some unrelated action he performed much earlier caused dragons to intervene on his behalf. Depending on the story, there might or might not be a reason the dragons knew the best time to intervene.
I hope that helps get across the idea I’m trying to explain.
When it comes to the chance, then the audience (readers, watchers, players) must believe that the hero has a chance. The hero might think they’re sacrificing their own life in this sceneario. That’s a heroic thing to do, so the hero can still go into this scenario willingly – and then survive.
Yes, the hero must go into the confrontation after deciding to do so, not because they have no other choice. The other choice might be ‘run as fast as you can,’ but it must exist.
Your dragon example is actually valid. Good karma can be gained over time. Helping person X in the sixth chapter can result and person X (and, perhaps, their friends) coming to your aid in the climax. The dragon parents showing up in time is just one of the things which happen in writing, because nothing happens without a reason there (or, at any rate, it shouldn’t). Sure, they’d be too early or too late in reality in all likelihood, but that is not the point.
Karma can last a long time, as it were. The Brian Helsing series has a big confrontation in book #10 – Cthulhu, to be precise.
Among those fighting by Brian’s side are:
his part-time nemesis Cassandra (a powerful vampire)
several sea nymphs (including his ex-girlfriend)
his current girlfriend (who is a monster-hunting ninja)
the powerful witch Black Aliss
the last descendant of the first Helsing and his husband (both are athletes)
Bob the vampire (who lives off guiness and works with the order)
several fairies (more powerful than one might think)
an Australian Aboriginal shaman who controls earth and stone
regular members of his team
Cassandra has been around since book #1, the sea nymphs first turn up as enemies in book #2 (Brian gets them to switch from humans to human-made food), Brian meets the oni-hunters in book #4, Black Aliss is his supposed enemy in book #5 (but the order’s been lied to), Hans and Otto (Hans is the last Helsing) are first around in book #6 (and return in #9). Bob is with the vampire circus in book #7 to save his sister, the fairies come into it in book #8, and the shaman introduces Brian to the master of the Dreamtime in book #9 (which enables Brian to find the demons a new home). If you wonder about book #3 – that one’s about werewolves who are under an infection in the Helsing-verse and cannot willingly use their powers. It’s not until book #12 that Brian finds a cure through someone he meets in book #11 – the glenn mother who can split the werewolf from the human and take the wolf with her.
In the end (spoiler here), Brian doesn’t manage to keep Cthulhu asleep, but he manages to send him into Hell (which is now empty, thanks to the demons relocating to the Dreamtime in book #9), which Cthulhu promptly destroys instead of earth – nobody minds that, least of all the demons.
The reason I don’t like scenarios like the dragon example is because, at least to me, they make the final confrontation feel inconsequential. Ultimately, I want the hero to win the day, not a random stroke of good luck the hero ‘deserves’ because of something done with no relation to the battle. If the story’s about saving dragons, that’s one thing. If it feels like the author retroactively threw in a scene to justify a miracle for the hero, that’s another.
If I’m left wondering what the point of anything in the final battle was – why the hero even bothered showing up, why I should have cared about anything they did before dragons show up and destroy everything, why defeating the villain and his army was ultimately as easy as defeating some poachers – I’m going to feel like I wasted my time. I feel that good karma should be meaningful, but it also shouldn’t be a pass for any deus ex machina a few scenes after it’s earned.
I think point #3 here demonstrates my point here well: https://mythcreants.com/blog/five-ways-to-make-sure-your-ending-has-no-payoff/
It feels disappointing when the hero’s actions in the ending are of minimal importance. It’s exacerbated when the hero’s victory is ultimately not tied to anything they did in their efforts to achieve that victory.