Where Have All the Villains Gone?

Don't Say Goodnight to the Bad Guy

I miss bad guys who are truly bad.

Not in real life, of course. There will never be a shortage of utterly despicable, evil people. We’ve got plenty of them right now—in politics, big business, law enforcement, and retail management positions. The situation is so dire that our nation’s democracy is at stake, a new axis of evil is forming, and the globe is facing the very real threat of complete environmental disaster. But I’m not talking about reality’s villains here. I’m talking about antagonists in entertainment.

Something happened to villains in recent years—something insidious, unnecessary, and utterly stupid. Our fictional bad guys have gotten soft, and sadly, they’re only getting softer. Where once we had baddies with an unlimited capacity for evil—Max Cady in Cape Fear, the torture cult in Martyrs, and the ruthless thugs who drive Charles Bronson to murder in the Death Wish series—the villains of modern day are tethered by our society’s obsession with making sure no one’s feelings ever get hurt. Apparently, it’s not enough for fictional heroes and other characters to rightfully not be racist, sexist, or homophobic, but our bad guys must be socially conscious and free of prejudices now too. 

Let me give you some examples of what I mean.

In the 2016 horror thriller Don’t Breathe, Norman Nordstrom chains women up in his basement and forces them to have his babies. But the film makes a point of the character using a turkey baster to inseminate his captives, because as he proudly states: “I am not a rapist.” This from a man who is imprisoning women and forcing them to bear children by shoving a sperm-loaded kitchen utensil into their lady bits. 

In an episode of the TV series Chucky—a spin-off of the Child’s Play slasher film series—the evil doll mentions that his child (first introduced in Seed of Chucky) is queer/gender fluid. When someone asks if he’s okay with that, an insulted Chucky says, “Yes, I’m not a monster.” This from a serial killer who often targets children.

Even Red Skull, the despotic villain from Captain America comics, was toned down for the 21^st century movies. In the comics, he goes on rants about inferior races that should be wiped out. It’s kind of his whole motivation. But in the movies, he doesn’t promote racial genocide or even utter a single racist remark, even though he’s literally a fucking Nazi!

I’m not saying these positive messages are wrong; I’m saying they’re coming from a weird source. Fictional villains can blow up the Earth, but God forbid they fat shame someone. That would be wrong. Bad guys can eat human flesh, but they can’t sexually assault anyone, because that’s grossly inappropriate. A masked maniac can spend a decade hacking up teenagers, but they draw the line at hurting kids (I always wondered what the age cutoff is for killers like Jason Voorhees. Twelve? Thirteen? And for Christ’s sake why?).

Now, I’m not saying villains should always be overly racist like they’re in a Tarantino film (I swear, it’s like he gets an extra grand every time he uses the N-word). That’s overkill. Nor should all villains be rapists and child murderers and homophobes. But it shouldn’t be forbidden. Antagonists can have completely black hearts. Because while plenty of characters should be morally gray, those tend to be antiheroes, not true villains.

And too many antagonists have a sob story behind them these days! Look at what they did to The Joker. He went from a psychotic mass murderer in Batman (1989) to a wimpy, sympathetic mental patient in Joker (2019). Which movie was more fun? Which movie gave fans The Joker we all know and love and want to see? Jack Nicholson’s Joker disfigured and murdered his girlfriend and then tried to force himself on Vicki Vale. Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker would never be allowed to do such things. Too many villains don’t make you hate and fear them anymore. Instead they make you feel sorry for them. While it’s good to show the human side of your villains, it’s banal and uninspired to make every villain pitiable.

Some people are just plain evil. They’re motivated by greed, power, lust, and the sadistic pleasure they get from hurting others (you know, like your boss and your ex). Why can’t we see more just plain evil people in movies and TV shows?

What’s worse is this woke baddie theme has now wormed its way into novels, which ought to be bastions of free thought and expression, artistic sanctuaries unhampered by sociopolitical sensitivities. Books should be a “safe space” against the pressure entertainers receive both from sanctimonious leftists who are always offended and evangelical right-wingers who think everything must be God-fearing and kid-friendly. Authors aren’t as censored as filmmakers (or at least, they shouldn’t be) because there aren’t as many chefs in the kitchen when writing a book as there are when making a movie or TV series. So why are so many authors—including those in the field of extreme horror, which is supposed to push boundaries—kowtowing to these forms of censorship when creating their villains?

There’s a simple answer to that—fear.

Our sick culture is lousy with crybabies who have the arrogance to believe they should never have to see or hear or feel anything they don’t like, and they’ve weaponized the internet to attack creators they decide have gone too far. This isn’t to say that artists shouldn’t be held accountable when they say or do awful things, but if the art they create isn’t the source of the problem, then why is it being attacked? Yes, cancel culture has helped take down some truly awful human beings like Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, but it has also shut down small presses and ruined writers’ careers—often over simple jokes or a controversial storyline. Modern writers are so afraid of offending social critics that they’re even softening their male heroes to make them less tough, horny, and masculine (just look at poor James Bond, who has been completely stripped of everything that made him the ultimate male fantasy). This brand of creative suppression is deplorable enough, but now creators are watering down their villains too, all because no writer wants to face backlash from the whiners on both sides of our bitter culture wars.

What makes this so troubling is that by suppressing the representation of evil people in fiction, creators are made incapable of using their art to expose society’s ills and provide commentary on real evils. Not all entertainment has to be thought-provoking or make statements, but writers should be able to drive home points about things like hate crimes, child abuse, and other big problems by having villains who reflect the evils of the everyday world.

Let me give you a more personal example.

My novel, The Thirteenth Koyote, is a horror western about werewolves. Part of the story takes place before the American Civil War, and one of the villains lives on a plantation where he brutalizes black slaves. Logically, nobody should have a problem with this, because not only did I make the cruelties historically accurate to show the nightmare slaves went through during that time, but also because he’s the goddamn bad guy. As such, his actions are presented as vile and contemptible, not something to be revered. But one reviewer—a white woman—took offense to me being a white writer using the N-word in a book. That’s right—my murderous, slave-beating werewolf calls his slaves the N-word a couple of times. Shocking! Apparently, even a slave-whipping monster in the 1800s should be woke enough to call black people African-Americans when he’s forcing them into crates.

Look, I’m fine with people criticizing my work, but knocking off a star just because a white writer lets his villain use racist language is a clear form of censorship. By this woman’s logic, To Kill a Mockingbird should get a star knocked off, despite being the greatest literary lesson on not judging a person by the color of their skin. According to her, a Pulitzer prize-winning novel that earned the author the Presidential Medal of Freedom deserves to be penalized because Harper Lee was white and had bad characters use the N-word in a book about racism.

If Lee or I had kowtowed to people like this, we would be doing black people a disservice by making those dark times seem less terrible than they really were. That’s why I did not remove the racist themes and language from my westerns when they went into their second printings. Keep your star, lady.

We are supposed to learn from history’s mistakes, and in our fictional villains, we are supposed to learn what not to be. They should be allowed to be wrong in every sense. We shouldn’t have to like all our villains the way we do Darth Vadar or Beetlejuice. And if they’re all relatable and sympathetic, doesn’t that send the message that if you’ve ever been slighted, you’re justified in destroying those you perceive to have wronged you? We need straight-up, heartless villains in our entertainment. I’m talking about dastardly antagonists who rape teenagers and toss babies into the fireplace and torture innocent people just because they love someone of the same sex. We need them because villains teach us moral lessons just as much as heroes do. They are warnings to not let the darkness inside all of us to take over.

So with this in mind, I implore all you writers out there to not second guess your antagonists. Sure, you can have villains who have a change of heart. Even the worst bad guys can find redemption. And you can have all the morally gray, Catwoman type of villains you wish. But don’t shy away from controversial topics just because you’re intimidated by some Twitter mob. Refuse to be bullied by ethnocentric nitwits. Make a stand and create that pedophilic, gay-bashing, mosque-burning, serial rapist, neo-Nazi. Make them as heinous as you see fit. That’s what I did when writing Full Brutal and And the Devil Cried. Never cave to the fragile sensibilities of those whom Nat Hentoff called “professional offendees”, no matter what side of the political divide they’re on. There are too many morons out there who think anything a character does reflects the opinions and morals of the author, and as a result, too many authors self-edit and apologize when they shouldn’t. Don’t let the same people who say “silence is violence” silence you. Someone else’s ideology shouldn’t dictate your thoughts and limit your expression. Writers must never let myopic strangers pressure them into weakening their artistic vision. Once you start pandering, you’ll never be able to stop. The bastards won’t let you, because now they expect it from you. As Mayor Goldie Wilson once told aspiring writer George McFly, “If you let people walk all over you now, they’ll be walking all over you for the rest of your life.” So let your fear go and stand up.

Because book burning, in all its forms, is an abomination.

Censors don’t just hurt art—they hurt everything. These thought police are the true villains. They’re not really looking out for anyone; they just want to force people to do as they say and believe what they believe. They want other groups who do not share their precious mores to conform to their way of thinking, speaking, and behaving, or face dire consequences in the forms of public condemnation, financial ruin, and permanent ostracization.

German poet Heinrich Heine once said that wherever books are burned, people are ultimately burned too—a prophetic sentiment considering his books were set ablaze by the Nazis in the 1930s. The Nazis were some truly fucking bad guys. We expect book burning from them. We expect it from the hatefully religious, the stiff suits, the far-right fundamentalists. But now we see staunch liberals on TikTok burning copies of Chandler Morrison’s Dead Inside and Aron Beauregard’s Playground, all while thinking they’re morally superior in doing so, never realizing that the Nazis thought they were in the right too. So did all the pearl-clutchers who burned copies of Vladmir Nabokov’s Lolita, which is now rightfully considered a literary masterpiece. So did the extreme feminists who burned Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho, which is now beloved by horror fans. Anne Frank: Dairy of a Young Girl, The Things They Carried, Hunger Games, 1984, Fifty Shades of Grey, Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and even Captain Underpants are all books that were banned by insufferable people who thought they were morally superior. But all of them were wrong, and in some cases their wrongness caused serious damage to writers, readers, and free-thinkers.

C. Derick Miller lost his day job all because some Karen bitched to his company about his extreme horror book, Starving Zoe. The cowardly corporate stooges at Six Flags shitcanned the poor guy over something he wrote on his own time. It’s a travesty. If anything should be boycotted here, it’s Six Flags.

Luckily for Aron and Chandler, all the outrage and book burning videos only increased their sales and helped skyrocket them into being two of splatterpunk’s most notable voices. Chandler’s Dead Inside was canceled by its original publisher due to outcry over its content, but when it was picked up by another press it became a massive hit. Aron received hateful threats and was called terrible names for writing Playground, but it won him a Splatterpunk Award and shot to the number #1 spot in horror fiction on Amazon. These authors did not show fear or kowtow to anyone, and their careers thrived because of it.

That’s because most horror readers want to be shocked by, disgusted by, and terrified of their villains. Authors who recognize this—who show gumption and refuse to give up their right to make their own creative choices—will always prosper over those who bend to social pressure and cower away from online bullying.

In writing, there are no bad words, only bad context. In storytelling, there are no taboo subjects, only poor execution.

Let’s not say goodnight to the bad guy.

Instead, let’s write horror.

Until next time, keep reading and writing, and don’t take any shit from anyone.

Your pal,

Kris