Less is More When It Comes to Villains

I’m coming around to the idea that the best way to kill a compelling villain isn’t bullets, fire, or magic—it’s giving them too much backstory.

I was chatting the other day with a film producer about movie villains of the 1980s and 90s, Darth Vader and Hannibal Lecter in particular. How Vader was the icon of childhood nightmares, a black-hooded techno-reaper with a terrifying wheeze—and then the prequel trilogy revealed that, under his skull-like mask, he was nothing more than a whiny, petulant teenager. The big guy’s aura was deep-sixed forever.

(I’ve heard a younger generation has an affinity for those prequel movies, which says something disturbing about modern taste; when they were released twenty-odd years ago, everyone walked out of the theater with a pained and vaguely sickened expression, as if George Lucas had personally hosed them down with a fine manure-mist. Anyway.) 

It’s a similar deal with Lecter. It’s easy to forget that he plays a relatively minor role in both “Red Dragon” and “Silence of the Lambs,” with his origins mostly mysterious. “Nothing happened to me,” he says at one point, when asked about his pathology. “I happened.” Then his creator, Thomas Harris, decided to negate that statement in the next book, “Hannibal,” which gave everyone’s favorite cannibalistic psychologist a teary-eyed origin story, complete with a dead sister and war-related trauma; maybe he was a more well-rounded figure now, but he was also boring, less a force of nature than just another freak working out his issues.

I’ve always bought the theory that, following the blockbuster success of “Silence of the Lambs,” Harris grew tired of Lecter, and used “Hannibal” as a way of deliberately undermining what he’d built. That’s his privilege as the author, although some of us would have appreciated a few more books with the character in his original, largely unknowable form.

In a similar vein, I’ve been watching the “Cape Fear” series on Apple TV, which is much better than I originally feared, thanks in large part to Javier Bardem’s take on gritty psychopath Max Cady. But the series’ very nature is also its undoing—because it needs to fill 10+ hours of episodes, it keeps adding layer after layer and twist after twist to Bardem’s Cady. He was a restaurateur before going to prison! And also a womanizer! Who might have killed his mother and wife! After about four hours of this, I began to long vaguely for the simplicity of Cady as portrayed by Robert Mitchum and Robert de Niro, respectively, in the 1962 and 1991 versions: psycho killer, lots of tattoos, anger issues.

When it comes to villainy, maybe the fewer details, the better; fear always exists in the unknowable, the void your brain tries and fails to fill in. The Judge at the center of Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian” is an enigma, even if he never stops talking about the universe or death or the nature of war. The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Night” taunts everyone around him with multiple origin stories, all equally plausible—and all equally meaningless.

The possible lesson here, one I’m trying to follow myself in my next book: If you’re trying to construct the perfect antagonist, resist the urge to make them nuanced, to give them a history; maybe opt for as little as possible. You’ll tingle your reader’s lizard brain.

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Nick Kolakowski is the author of several crime novels, including “Where the Bones Lie”, “Payback is Forever”, „Maxine Unleashes Doomsday“ and „Boise Longpig Hunting Club“ as well as the Love & Bullets trilogy of novellas. His work has been nominated for the Anthony and Derringer awards, and his short story “Scorpions” appeared in The Best Mystery and Suspense 2024. His short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, including Mystery Weekly, Shotgun Honey, Rock and a Hard Place Press, and more.

Just out: RIGHTEOUS TRASH, the third book in what is called the Boise Noir Trilogy. Rock and a Hard Place Press did a masterful job on the cover (as they did with the reissued editions of the first two books in the trilogy, BOISE LONGPIG HUNTING CLUB and RATTLESNAKE RODEO).

RIGHTEOUS TRASH follows Jake, an Iraq War veteran and former bounty hunter, and his gun-running sister Frankie as they try to dig themselves out of a big financial hole the only way they know how—by doing something incredibly insane and possibly deadly. »This time around, the action isn’t restricted to Idaho; there’s also a sequence set in New Orleans that’s a.) based on a real-life incident, if you can believe it, and b.) one of the funnier things I’ve written. The book’s centerpiece is also the craziest robbery I could think of—I had a lot of fun orchestrating that bit of chaos.«

His „Payback is Forever“ (Shotgun Honey 2022) is inspired clearly by the novels of Richard Stark. Our review here (in German). – See also his Hell of a Mess. A Love & Bullets Hookup.

Nick Kolakowski, geboren 1980, aufgewachsen in Washington. D.C., hat Geschichte in Chicago studiert. Er schreibt Romane, Kurzgeschichten, Lyrik und Essays, viele davon über Crime Fiction und verwandte Themen. Seine Texte erscheinen u. a. in der Washington Post, in Shotgun Honey, North American Review, The Evergreen Review, Rust & Months. Kolakowski lebt in New York City. Eine Besprechung des von Parker inspirierten „Payback is Forever“ in unseren Bloody Chops.

Bei Suhrkamp auf Deutsch: Love & Bullets.
His essays with us. 

His website nickkolakowski.com

His column „Smoking Gun“ with us: 
‘Salem’s Lot’ and the Horror of a Stephen King Adaptation
(27) „Rebel Ridge“: Calmly Burn the Whole Thing Down
‘Monsieur Spade’ and the Faustian Bargain
John Woo is Remaking ‘The Killer.’ But Why?
The Newest ‘Ripley’ Series is Stunning and Flawed
‘Sugar’: Not the Neo-Noir Revival We Need
(3) Moral Redemption in Noir: Is It Possible?
(4) What Makes Jack Reacher Tick?
(5) ‘True Detective: Night Country’ Tries to Make the Familiar into Something New
(6) Is David Fincher’s ‘The Killer’ a Comedy? 
(7) Rewatching ‘Drive’: Gosling as Noir’s Apex Predator
(8) Elmore Leonard  – City Primeval
(9) Cormac McCarthy Used Crime Fiction’s Tropes to Make Masterpieces
(10) Parker: Donald Westlake’s One Amazing Trick
(11) Cosby, Winslow, Pruitt: Three Heavy-Hitting Thillers for Summer
(12) Weed-Based Crime Thrillers are Going Up in Smoke
(13) ‘The Last of Us’: Crime in the Post-Apocalypse 
(14) What Made “Glass Onion” and “Knives Out” So Popular?
(15) Jordan Harper’s One-Two Punch of Crime Fiction Deserves a Wide Audience
(16) ‘True Detective’ Season 2: Was It Better Than We All Thought?
(17) From ‘Touch of Evil’ to ‘True Detective,’ Long Shots are Crime Films’ Secret Weapon
(18) Michael Mann, again: What Michael Mann Teaches Us About Enduring Crime Fiction
(19) „Heat 2“ – How Do You Craft a Sequel to a Masterpiece?
(20) 4 Ways Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood” Novel Stands Out From the Film.
(21) On „Heat“: Manhunter Takes Down Thief: How Michael Mann’s Early Career Led to ‘Heat’
(22) The Most Honest Nihilism – on „The Way of the Gun“
(23) No, Time to Die – The latest James Bond movie digs into the fatalism at the iconic spy’s core.
(24) Cormac McCarthy’s Overlooked Masterpiece? – „The Councelor“
(25) „Nightmare Alley“ – How Guillermo del Toro’s Film Alters a Masterpiece Noir Novel
(26) David Cronenberg – The Carnal Crime of “A History of Violence” and “Eastern Promises”
(27) With Parker, Donald E. Westlake Pulled Off Crime Fiction’s Most Spectacular Magic Trick
(28) Guy Ritchie’s Return to Crime Films is Worth Watching
(29) Alex Garland’s ‘Civil War’: Hint of Things to Come?
(30) David Lynch and the Beautiful Weirdness
(31) ‘Where the Bones Lie’ and the Engine of California Noir
(32) “Den of Thieves 2”: Stealing from the Best
(33) White Lotus and the Gentle Art of Hating Your Protagonists
(34) Neal Stephenson
(35) Where is Storytelling Going?
(36) ‚She Rides Shotgun‘ and the Making of Legends
(37) Jack Bauer, ‘24’ and the Great Memory-Hole
(38) How “Play Dirty” Did Richard Stark’s Parker Dirty
(39) ‘The Lowdown,’ Jim Thompson and the Ghosts of Noir
(40) “The Rip”: An Atypical Director Delivers a Typical Crime Thriller
(41) ‚Cape Fear‘ and Pop Cultural Eternal Return
(42) 3 x »Man on Fire«
(43) ‚The Black Dahlia‘ and Our Responsibility to the Past
(44) Jordan Harper’s New Novel Really Is “A Violent Masterpiece”