Authors: 5 Ways to Build Villains That Are Real Monsters
There’s nothing worse than a bad villain.
I’m not talking about villains we “love to hate”—pure evil, effective, terrifying. I’m talking about stock bad guys. Flat, forgettable foils. Paint-by-numbers psychopaths with daddy issues and a sneer, and a scar that’s only skin deep.
Stories don’t survive that kind of antagonist. And that’s a problem. Because villains make the story. The hero might get the spotlight, but it’s the villain who decides how deep the shadows go.
A hero with no one to challenge them is just… some guy.
If you want your book to stick with readers long after they’ve finished it, don’t just build a stock antagonist. Build someone that readers can’t stop thinking about. Here are five principles to help you do so.
1. Logic Is Scarier Than Evil
The best villains don’t think they’re villains. They think they’re right.
Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men doesn’t think he’s a murderer; he’s an agent of fate. John Doe in Se7en doesn’t think he’s a killer; he thinks he’s teaching a moral lesson. Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War doesn’t think he’s the villain; he’s the hero saving the universe from itself.
Villains who cackle and twirl their mustaches belong in cartoons. In serious storytelling, the most terrifying antagonist is the one who believes they’re the hero of the story. Because in their mind, they are. Even better: If they’re built right, the reader might think so, too.
The DNA of a good antagonist includes more than just the bad stuff they do. To really give them depth, you need to know them to the core. Not just who they are, but who they think they are.
Before you write their crimes, write their code. What line won’t they cross? What line will they gleefully obliterate? What justification do they whisper to themselves at night? How do they frame themselves so that they are perfectly justified … it’s the rest of the world that is wrong?
If you want your reader to feel unease instead of boredom when your villain walks on the page, give them a point of view that almost makes sense. You do that by sharing the villain’s logic. Get us in their heads, even if it’s an uncomfortable place to be. Once we can identify with them, once we can see their point, that’s when you’ve got us.
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2. Make Their Violence Mean Something
Give us their why. Even if it’s not explicitly spelled out, we should get enough contextual clues and hints to be able to piece it together. The Joker, in The Dark Knight, is a truly terrifying villain, and it’s clear that he’s gone through something that’s motivated him to go on a spree of murder, mayhem and chaos in Gotham City.
We never learn what really happened to him. But we do get hints in the things he says to Batman and others.
“Introduce a little anarchy, upset the established order, and everything becomes chaos.” And later, “I’m an agent of chaos.” But that’s tempered with, “I’m not a monster. I’m just ahead of the curve.”
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3. Cardboard Doesn’t Bleed
But your bad guys should.
All the best heroes are defined more by the weaknesses and limitations they overcome than by their daring feats or their amazing strength and abilities. The same is true for villains. The bad guy is going to feel a lot more real to us, and connect better with us, if we see their flaws.
Don’t be afraid to give your antagonist a weakness. A vice. A regret. A private ritual they perform when no one’s watching. The killer who prays before he acts. The hacker who visits her sister’s grave every Friday. The cartel boss who rescues stray dogs.
These aren’t excuses for their evil. They’re human details—underlying motives for why they’re doing all these terrible things. Flaws make them human. And human villains are always scarier than abstract evil. Because humans are all around us, all the time. We’re human. Which means that “there but for the grace of God go we.”
The dirty secret about really good villains is that we can see ourselves in them.
4. Let Them Breathe
If your villain spends the whole book hiding in the shadows, readers won’t fear them—they’ll forget them. So get them on the page. Let them talk. Let them breathe.
Some of the best villain scenes aren’t violent; they’re calm. Controlled. Confident. Think of Hannibal Lecter’s first interview with Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs. He’s behind bars. He’s polite. And you can’t take your eyes off him.
Let your villain make eye contact. Let them smile. Let them be charming. Because when someone that charming does something horrific, it lands twice as hard.
5. Make Your Villain Dangerous to the Protagonist, Not Just the World
Give them history. Give them tension. Give them something personal to fight over—even if they don’t know they’re fighting yet.
When a villain threatens “the city,” the stakes are abstract. When they threaten the protagonist’s partner, sister, parent or child, the threat is visceral.
You make the cut even deeper when the villain and the hero are already entwined somehow. A former mentor, an ex-spouse, an estranged brother. Make the stakes personal for the protagonist and the story feels personal to the reader.
Betrayal is the sharpest edge there is, and cuts deeper than evil just for the sake of being evil.
Final Thoughts: Let Them Leave a Scar
When the story ends, your reader might forget the exact plot beats. They’ll probably have no clue where Act Two started, or remember which chapter had the twist.
But they won’t forget the villain who made them squirm. The one who made them question what they would’ve done in the same position. The one who, just for a second, felt too familiar, and too real.
That’s the kind of antagonist that lives in the reader’s mind long after the book is closed.
The kind they love to fear.