Ratcheting up the Body Count

Compare the villains in Star Wars A New Hope with the ones in the Phantom Menace.

In the New Hope, the Imperials quickly storm the spaceship, leaving the hallways carpeted with dead rebels, then Vader crushes a man's throat, then his soldiers land, massacre a bunch of jawas and burn Luke's family to death. Then they blow up a planet. This all happens relatively quickly.

In the Phantom menace...no human being dies until the end. All the violence is between incompetent robots and annoying rabbit people. We are assured that 'people are dying' repeatedly, but this is never shown.

So you really have to show something. If your villain is making threats, why not have some of them manifest? If the villain can't make good his threat to kill the hero, he can still kill everyone in the hero's village, leaving their heads on pikes. He can still saw off the kindly old conselor's hands and nail them to his head. He can drown an entire county to make way for his industrial hydro power plant reservoir. Sacrifice some minor characters, or even major ones if you are in a Martin mood.

So long as your villain's motivations are clear, let him be as nasty as you can imagine. Don't have him do evil things just to be evil, which is really common for when people write themselves into a corner and find that their villain is too sympathetic. They should always have a motive. A good villain treats people like things. If they are useful, he uses them. If they are obstacles, he eliminates them.

Sarpedon said:

In the Phantom menace...no human being dies until the end. All the violence is between incompetent robots and annoying rabbit people. We are assured that 'people are dying' repeatedly, but this is never shown.

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Rabbit people? Bunnies? With their little powder-puff tails? Huh. I must have slept through that part and woke up when the froggy-aquatic people were being annoying.



Anyhow, they killed off QuiGon Jinn and Darth Maul in Movie One! That's evil enough for me. Not to mention the super-evil fashion and hair designers in charge of poor Queen Padme. They were stomping all over our aesthetics from minute one! It was a massacre!

Actually, a high body count (especially one that starts off early and involves nothing but deathspians) leaves me empathy-weary and yawning. The scariest villains are all about tensely coiled potential, like Hannibal Lecter, and the most moving deaths are those of people I've come to know, at least a little. Yeah, you can go for generic outrage (menaced kids and dogs!), but specific outrage is stronger.

Pick your corpses and atrocities wisely, in other words, and most importantly, personalize them. To switch movies, don't just show us a bunch of Rohirrim fleeing their burning village. Show us one mother putting her children on their only horse and sending them off without her. Don't just show us the post-battle Fields of the Pelennor. Show us Eomer screaming with grief at the sight of a seemingly slain Eowyn and Pippin finding the gravely wounded Merry. On the villain side, we need more than legions of anonymous orcs. We need visually distinctive and particularly atrocious "featured" orcs, like Lurtz in Fellowship of the Ring and Gothmog in Return of the King.

All of which boils down, for me, to quality of menace rather than raw quantity.

Phaeal said:

Pick your corpses and atrocities wisely, in other words, and most importantly, personalize them.

All of which boils down, for me, to quality of menace rather than raw quantity.

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Agreed. But speaking as someone who studies criminal behavior, it's also about who they target, what they do to them and why. People are more outraged when innocents are killed, when the person can't defend him or herself, and when there's no reason to have targeted them. We look for excuses when we hear that someones been victimized, and when they're aren't any, that's scarier. The most disturbing criminals are the ones who either kill with no feeling about it, and the ones who linger during the kill and postmortem activities. Borrowing from above, Darth Vader feels nothing when he destroys that planet, that's evil.

It's the things that we can't conceive of as human behavior that we call evil. The farther the act is from our definition of "humanity" the more evil the person appears. Lack of remorse and/or empathy are big markers for that sort of individual.

In my WIP I have my villain (offstage but slowly noticeable) disappear several teachers. Soon after, it's discovered that she's planning to sacrifice the MC's small brother and then begins sending dream sendings to the two older girls. Later there is news of a bodies found in a fire and the characters wonder if the villain has killed the teachers. What actually happened to the teachers is really darn evil, but that doesn't get exposed till near the end and it doesn't entirely include a body count.

Giving a glimpse of your villain can be an effective way of showing their evil. The Darth Vader example given below is a good example. In one of my stories, as soon as she appears in person, the villain demonstrates her complete lack of concern of the lives of other living beings, other than how she can control them—or consume them. Sometimes showing how your villain deals with one person can be much more effective than showing how they deal with many people.

Depends on the sort of evil you're going for really; since there's 'justified evil' (the kind with motivation and purpose and there's 'evil for the fun of it'. Of course for the fun of it often has its own roots in some sort of tragic past for the villain, they just rarely put it down to that. Toying with the MC, showing their influence through acts of evil that simultaneously display their power and their cunning. If their motivation was indeed to get to the MC you could include things like letters dropped where they live / work, creepy little presents (here's your boyfriend's finger, I'll be keeping the rest of them, love the villain) etc. Then there's classic manipulation, using their wit for the schemes that we as readers know to be nefarious. Messing with hostages minds and leaving them for the MC to find. There's always killing children if you want to go there; nothing says heartless like dead kids. There's probably a bunch from the evil overlord list that you could re-appropriate to work in the right context too, you just have to think of a clever way of putting a twist on it.