How To Write A Terrifying Villain — The Boys

homelander is the most terrifying villain i've ever seen every time he's on screen in the boys the tension is unbearable and the audience can't help but dread what he'll do next there is something really special going on under the hood of homelanders character that gives him a major edge over characters like joker and darth vader and today we'll be exploring what that is as well as tackling the question of how do you actually write a terrifying villain well firstly i like to think there are two kinds of hero villain conflict one where the power levels are pretty close and the other with the power levels are vastly different take for example when captain america fights bucky in the winter soldier in this fight they're very similarly skilled and yes there's a compelling struggle as to who'll win but it's when there is a true power imbalance when darth vader ignites his lightsaber and stares down the terrified rebels when homelander confronts oh well pretty much any other character in the boys or when omniman fights invincible or in a less combat-oriented kind of conflict when hans lander the german colonel stares down the powerless french farmer generally these kinds of confrontations have way more suspense than the former hanslander is a considerably more terrifying villain than the winter soldier in their respective scenes because the relative power difference is so much greater but when we have iron man and captain america duking it out we're on the edge of our seats asking who will win this fight but when homelander is furious a character we care about we don't ask who's gonna win the fight the power differential is so insane that we know there won't even be a fight we instead ask what will the villain choose to do knowing that what they choose to do is exactly what is going to happen when you have a villain just as powerful as your hero that can work great for your story and don't get me wrong it can be quite scary what's going to happen but when you have a villain be quite a bit more powerful now things are getting scary we're genuinely fearful the villain will win such as iron man fighting thanos but it's when the villain is ridiculously more powerful than the hero that is when they become truly terrifying as the idea that the villain will get everything they want that the main characters may die it feels more than just credible but probable and again don't perceive power to be too literal here yes it can be in the terms of having laser eyes or being a super soldier but it can also take any other form of power perhaps a boss who can fire their employee and ruin their life you could even pull this off in a toxic relationship where the manipulative character has complete control over the others finances giving them total power over them one thing's for sure though if your villain has less power than your hero you're going to have a very hard time making them a scary one there's a reason why you almost never see stories do this because how can we fear what the villain will do when the hero can stop them with total ease but then again one punch man does exist so uh even if you do go against this rule you still can tell a great story but while a power differential really does grease the wheels in terms of making them terrifying it's not everything it's only one piece of a larger picture i mean when you see homelander in a scene with literally anyone else we feel dread around what he'll do but then you compare that to thanos someone who's also ridiculously powerful and there are quite a few scenes where he isn't really that scary for example when he chats with gamora about his plans in infinity war both of these heroes are arguably the most powerful person in their respective universes but why is that scene just not very suspenseful when homelanders routinely are in the boys clearly power isn't everything here and i reckon what's missing is that thanos is not like joker or vader or homelander his personality is what matters here not just because he loves gamora but because he isn't the sort to kill someone without a strong reason for someone who's seeking to kill trillions of people he will only do evil in the name of what he perceives to be the greater good only if he deems it absolutely necessary you could go up to thanos and punch him straight in the face if you wanted if your death does nothing to help him achieve his end goals he can actually be relied upon most of the time to spare you thanos despite his incredible power level is not as inherently scary as other villains we know and love because he needs to have his motivations be properly set up in each scene otherwise we won't be terrified by him but compare that gamora seen to the others where he confronts star-lord or doctor strange and now suddenly those scenes are filled with suspense thanos is now incredibly terrifying because he's hitting all the criteria the power differential is huge and crucially these guys are in the way of his end goal so he's got his motivation to do harm established which introduces the prospect that something terrible will probably happen to our characters villains like these can go down incredibly well but even if your villain is powerful and has the motivation to inflict harm that's still barely scratching the surface of what makes a villain a scary one and i want to recommend something to you guys because this week i've been reading bird by bird by anne lambert and i've gotten a lot out of it it's a lot like a stephen king's on writing less so craft more so the best ways you can conduct yourself and be the best writer you can be it's one of the best-selling writing craft books of all time for a reason and personally i listen to the incredibly well-performed audiobook and if you want to do so too you can actually do that for free thanks to audible the sponsor of today's video what i love so much about audible is how without it i wouldn't be able to read i'm having less and less time on my hands these days between the closer look and writing all my novels behind the scenes so like having audible it's it's unbelievably useful because now i get to read when i just otherwise couldn't as i listened while going to the gym playing games cooking dinner and generally doing all the boring stuff i was gonna do anyway and if you click my link in the description or text closer look to 500 500 you'll get a free credit good for any audiobook you like on their site and bird by bird is a fantastic one for you to get if you're a writer so please if you want to join me in using audible do click my link in the description or text closer look to 500 500 but back to it if you want to create a villain who's reliably terrifying like homelander well all they have to do is be on screen and that's enough to get the audience racked with anxiety another great thing is to give them a history of evil all too often you'll have a villain who may tick off all of the previous things like having power and having a good motivation but even then they're not too terrifying because they've never really done anything terribly evil before a lot of kids cartoons have this problem where it's um a villain may be incredibly powerful and will have a great motivation to do something evil but it's incredibly hard to be terrified by them because they've never actually done anything like terribly bad but then you compare that to say uh the silence of the lambs where we see a hannibal lecter and yes the performance is terrifying and it's a very well written script but what makes hannibal so much more terrifying is the knowledge of the despicable repugnant things he's done of put him into this high security prison when a villain has a history a context of doing horribly evil things it gives them a certain credibility which makes the audience more inclined to believe that they may do something truly horrible to our characters uh homelander again takes all of these off with flying colours he's made all the more terrifying by the context around him by the despicable things he's done like killing a gunman who's already surrendered to him by allowing a whole plane full of people to die by burning the brains out of the woman he supposedly loved and god i'm going to have to be uh so careful when i edit this aren't i to make sure i'm not demonetized by all the gore but there we go that's point three on the list give them a history of evil and yes we're doing a list now apparently and again point one is to give them power and point two is to give them a credible motivation for committing evil but here's what i believe to be the most effective way by far to make any villains scary in fact i think it's so important a thing to get right the entire rest of this video will be nothing but breaking this fourth point down and that is to surround your villain with uncertainty whether is a great deal around the villain that is unknown it's when we don't understand a villain or at the very least can't predict what they'll do next it's when you as a writer ensure that uncertainty is around them in whatever form that may come that is when any villain is at their most terrifying to your audience like one thing's for sure homelander has this quality in spades he is endlessly surprising us and this the fact his character is so good at just shocking and surprising the audience again and again is a major part maybe even the most important part as to why he's so scary uh of case and point when he meets that blind superhero when everyone is all smiles it's all going great this guy is meeting his hero homelander he's smiling back like oh this is actually quite a nice moment that is until suddenly what happens if uh i don't know if i do this and it got a reaction out of everyone like it works great because if we had i don't know like a tarantino-esque build-up of tension where he's making his hatred for the disabled known and he's he's acting all sinister and saying ominous things we would have seen it coming and not doing that going for the shock over suspense approach reinforces the idea that homelander is truly unpredictable like he's capable of murdering anyone at a moment's notice with no apparent reason it'll make perfect sense after as to why he did it in this case we realize that he hates ordinary heroes enough anyway as they're all weaker than him but this guy is just an insult in homelanders eyes he's disabled after all and how can someone as pathetic as him dare claim to be a hero and aspire to join the seven no less he should have known his place that's what was going through homelanders mind because his mere existence triggered homelanders narcissism in all the wrong ways but interestingly we learned this motivation after the act not before and because of that as well as because of the many other moments like this how he murders so many people at the drop of a hat they reinforce the idea that he could kill anyone he's with on screen which again plays back into point three because we're acutely aware of the degree of evil of which he is capable but we've seen no end of scenes where homelander basically just sits someone down and there's a threat that oh he might hurt them he just might kill them and terror is derived from that but what i feel is a scene that's way more interesting to look at here and what reveals something fascinating about writing terrifying characters is the one at the end of season two where he confronts a swat team inside his home and despite the fact this scene ticks off every prior point you know the power differential is insane uh he has this history and context of doing evil he's got a great motivation to inflict harm there's very little suspense in this scene it had very little terror but by all means though this is a fun scene like it's perfectly entertaining but compared to his other scenes it's just not very scary and yes a part of the reason why is obviously that we just don't care about these characters right they're basically red shirts who we don't care if they die but i reckon the main reason why is because this scene failed to tick off point four on the terrifying villain checklist because the outcome of the scene is entirely predictable like he's already been riled up because he was lured away from his house with a sonic noise and when he comes back he finds his son missing and a swat team in his stead and when homelander just calmly closes the door like we know everyone in the room is already dead like there's no question about it and the fact we know that robs the scene of the terror and suspense it could have otherwise had and i know this is a really odd comparison to make but when you have an illness right you've got some persistent symptom that's just never going away knowing precisely what the cause is is infinitely easier to deal with mentally than having absolutely no clue like even if the diagnosis is rather grim because it's the not knowing it's when you have no clue what's going on or what's about to happen that is the most terrifying thing in the universe the fear of the unknown in this scene it wasn't terribly scary because every last thing was known it was totally predictable that they'd all die a fact the writers seemed to know full well as they skipped showing the fight entirely and just cut to him walking out later smeared in blood but in order to go deeper here on why uncertainty is such a terrifying thing and why you should always ask how you can inject more of it into any given scene of yours is how suspense and terror go hand in hand so often that you might as well think of them as the same thing if we had to define it in a practical term suspense is fundamentally a question the question of will x terrible thing happen or will it not and skimp out on including this at your story's peril because when you boil it down this question is at the heart of all great stories will they save private ryan will woody and buzz make their way back to andy's house will the characters survive jurassic park and so on it's the probability of us getting a bad answer to those questions changing over the course of any given scene or story that is the increasing or decreasing level of suspense and correspondingly terror for all intents and purposes the shifting probability of getting a bad answer to the core question is the rising action of any given story or at least that's the way i perceive it but here's the thing if suspense is all about uncertainty and if your villain can always be relied upon to act with malice suddenly your villain is no longer that terrifying like they're not suspenseful anymore because now the audience can predict everything they ever do and because suspense is so tightly linked with terror in a sort of way a predictable villain is rarely a terrifying one for exactly this reason but how do you make your villains unpredictable like what are some practical ways you can inject uncertainty into their makeup well there are so many different ways i couldn't even dream of listing them all here a proven and great approach is to derive it from whether or not the villain knows key information which would prove disastrous should they turn out to know it the main question of whether or not they know this certain thing can be fuel for great suspense a case in point pretty much all of hanslander's scenes in inglorious bastards do exactly this or you could derive it from whether or not they'll kill someone after they've triggered homelanders narcissism you can even derive uncertainty from whether or not a coin toss will turn out to be heads or tails provided you've set up what's at stake before the coin is flipped another method you can take is to give them a hair trigger where they do depraved things even when given only the lightest motivation while this is a potentially great approach a god knows homelander is like this don't take it too far for example if you have a villain who kills his underlings every time they ever make even a minor mistake that gets all quite fast and is honestly pretty cliche did you guys know that in return of the jedi there was a scene where darth vader strangles yet another imperial officer but lucas deleted it because he recognized that vader strangling his underlings as routinely as one brushes one's own teeth was getting pretty boring to watch like even homelander routinely spares ashley because yes she's annoyed him many times so much so he'd definitely kill her if she was anyone else but she's just too useful for him to kill off i'm just saying having your villain killing their underlings doesn't make them terrifying it makes them just look like a woefully incompetent employer so uh probably don't do it too often but this is a possible approach for you to take establish very clearly that if they're given a reason for malevolence and no matter how slight no matter how tiny someone disrespecting them someone simply saying the word no to them they have the capacity to act upon that with the utmost prejudice doing so will mean they're less like thanos and more like homelander where all they have to do is merely exist in the scene and suddenly everyone's walking on eggshells trying desperately to not piss them off and the moment someone says something even slightly poorly worded homelander just gives them a dead stare and the tension ratchets way up for it this being said i i can't help but think that hans lander is also a terrifying villain but he doesn't really have a hair trigger does he he's a relatively composed guy who has full self-control yet he's widely acknowledged as one of cinema's most scary antagonists so giving them a volatile personality seems to be an optional yet perfectly tenable way nonetheless to make your villain a terrifying one oh wait uh now i'm remembering eddie redmayne's character in jupiter ascending well they did exactly this and he just screamed all the time and it didn't make him scary it more just made him come across as a uh pathetic man-child double security deployment to destroy any ship that comes near the planet i think a big part of why that villain is such a weak one is because he was so volatile it made him come across as completely incompetent like congratulations you've made him unpredictable and you've done it at the expense of making him so incapable of self-control and being so childishly immature it's hard to not laugh every time he's on screen i create life and i destroy it so be careful with this one while it's true that volatility is a trait that works great in some villains it's not necessary for them to be scary and it even has the potential to backfire horribly if you go too far with it another way writers totally fail at injecting uncertainty into their villains is by making them insane now obviously it's perfectly fine to write mad characters but the problem here arises because the writer may treat their madness as free license for them to do literally anything to act randomly to effectively commit the cardinal sin of characterization that is to have a character who doesn't have a motivation for what they do because being mad on its own is not just a bad motivation it doesn't even classify as a motivation thankfully most writers don't make this mistake though when they're writing in the same villains but i feel it's a common enough mistake that it's worth bringing up here look i hate to break it to those writers and i also hate to break it to eddie redmayne but that isn't the way the human brain works even if someone is clinically insane they will have their own unique pathology and within that pathology they will be consistent and they will have a motivation for all they do like while it's a perfectly fine approach to have a truly volatile villain who needs only like the tiniest of motivations to inflict harm never under any circumstances have it so they don't actually need a motivation and especially never justify nonsensical choices by saying well they're mad therefore i can be as lazy as i like with my writing like that right there is incredibly lazy writing because you're not doing your due diligence i'd say if you're writing an insane character and you don't even know what the condition is they're suffering from or at least the terrible philosophy that drives them you're doing something wrong instead make the effort to establish a framework they think within their pathology and have everything they do make sense within that pathology look at the joker from the dark knight christ i i can't go two videos without mentioning this bloody film can i but he has a very well established nihilism about him with alfred talking about how some men want to watch the world burn and this motivates all he does a then look at no country for old men like that film has an absolutely bone chilling villain and he's a textbook psychopath a purely selfish man who cares only for his personal benefit and by the way like the coen brothers absolutely nailed psychopathy in this film while other writers take the laziest path and have their villain act randomly because and only because well they're mad the coen brothers did their research and they couldn't have done a more perfect job at depicting someone with this condition like everything javier bardem's character says and does in this film is something a true-to-life psychopath might do in the real world he is an unpredictable villain one with a major mental condition yet everything he does makes sense nothing is unmotivated like honestly no country for old men is a great example of another way to introduce uncertainty into a villain because when you nail a mental condition such as this these kinds of characters become terrifying in their own unique way because yes they have their well-defined pathology but the audience doesn't quite grasp exactly how that pathology works which means we never quite know what they'll do next if you don't understand the character that means you can't predict them and that makes them all the more terrifying this advice applies to writing horror too as well as writing great villains because look at aliens in the scene where the marines are creeping through that alien nest it's a terrifying scene because it's using this approach this scene is suspenseful not just because they're you know about to be attacked it's also because we're glimpsing a whole aspect of this monster's life cycle we've never seen before we know exactly what the xenomorph looks like we saw one in the prior movie but nonetheless they're terrifying here because the audience and the characters once thought they understood these monsters but now realize they have no clue what they're up against what is that i don't know the fear of the unknown is the greatest fear of them all and great writers will not just exploit this fear when writing in horror but also in general when writing terrifying villains no matter what genre they're in and if you're writing a monster for a horror story all of these points still apply just as much ensure that somehow there is incredible uncertainty around the monster whether it be us not knowing where the monster is as our heroes navigate the never-ending jungle in predator or us not knowing the gruesome details of their life cycle like in the alien series or the sheer paranoia of determining who the monster is masquerading as in the thing that right there is how you make truly great horror as an aside i've seen a fair few film critics say that you must never show the monster on screen else it will ruin the audience's fear of them like as an ironclad rule only show partial glimpses of the monster and save the full body shot of them until the climax this i think is frankly bollocks this is terrible advice because it's failing to display a full understanding of the issue as an example look at the thing what many people claim as the most terrifying movie they've ever seen yet we see the monster fully in action fully on screen time and time again throughout that film worked so well because john carpenter understood its uncertainty around the monster that makes them scary not the ability to merely see them with your eyes and that runs contrary to what some people out there would have you believe but to boil the entirety of 0.4 down into a single sentence uncertainty in the villain is invariably terrifying inconsistency however is always to be avoided but on this whole topic of unpredictability there's a really important lesson we can take away from homelander on this one because why is homelander just so much more scary than other villains what specifically makes him so unique well firstly he ticks off every single point we've mentioned so far in the video but there's something a lot more going on under the hood of his character it's not how he's fine with mass murder in gbh because there are so many characters in fiction who are fine with all of that what makes him so much more scary is because he has incredible motivation to not indulge in those things he's a through and through narcissist who cares incredibly about how people perceive him he loves to murder people for it reinforces the idea that he is indeed superior he loves exerting power by harming others because it bolsters his perception that yes he really is the most fabulously perfect living thing on planet earth however he also loves being loved in fact arguably loves that more than he does killing and if he indulges in that first love of his too much it will ruin his public image the one thing he cares about most in the world it's all narcissism but these two sides of his narcissism compete against each other in all the right ways like it's kind of yin yang like these two motivations of his are endlessly battling against one another maximizing his dramatic potential as a character as we truly don't know which side will win out giving him an unpredictable quality that villains like darth vader for example simply don't have it feels kind of inevitable that at some point down the line homelander is going to break bad fully abandoned his efforts to be loved and become a tyrant that everyone fears it's going to happen at some point but i reckon the creators should do everything in their power to stave that off until the very final season of the boys to keep homelander in his current status quo for as long as possible because if the show does go down that path of him trying you know trying to take over the world all of a sudden homelander is now way less suspenseful as a villain because he's now lost these two competing motivations now that isn't to say he'll suddenly become a boring character but it is to say this finely tuned balance of incompatible desires will be completely gone when this happens and instead he'll now have these two highly compatible motivations to kill those he doesn't like and be feared those two would naturally feed into each other making him far more predictable meaning the scenes he's in are a hell of a lot less terrifying for it but that's another important takeaway we can get from homelanders character and it's so important actually it's bleeding out from the main topic of terrifying villains and in how to do good characters in general any given character who has multiple motivations that compete against each other is inherently more dramatic a character than someone who merely has one even if this person is your protagonist if one of their motivations is good and the other evil and the two cannot be fulfilled at the same time the unpredictability that generates means there's gonna be so much more suspense around what they'll do as opposed to someone who merely has one motivation no matter how evil that motivation is but if you want to carry on the conversation don't bother with making a comment because i've got a discord server geared for writers and we talk about you know our characters and we work shop ideas and all as well as all the movies we like anyway i'm on this server every day so if you want to talk about this video ask me questions and frankly just discuss any writing related issue you're dealing with me and my growing community of writers would love to have you on our server and there is a link down below in the description also if you haven't checked out audible already i really do recommend you give their site a go i genuinely use audible daily because it's just so useful to me and you can find a link for that in the description too but anyway thanks for watching keep writing and i'll see you guys next time on the closer look

Channel: The Closer Look

Views: 5,224,289

Keywords: the boys, boys, season 3, season 4, homelander, butcher, fight, scene, video, essay, video essay, the closer look, the closer, closer look, how to, writing, creative writing, villain, antagonist, how to write villains, how to create a villain, how to make a great villain, antony starr, antony, thanos, darth vader, how to write

Id: WC0DRhx6ThI

Length: 29min 30sec (1770 seconds)

Published: Tue Jul 19 2022