Joe Hill Talks Writing Memorable Villains

Posted on April 29, 2013

The AV Club interviewed novelist Joe Hill who established himself as a writer long before people found out he's Stephen King's son. In the interview, Joe talks about creating memorable villains: "I think it's great if you can work out some way where the villain can say to himself, 'I'm the good guy in this. I'm doing an important service for the world here."

Hill continues, "And if I can find that hook, if I can find that handle I feel like I've done my job pretty well. And I do feel like I did it best in NOS4A2. I'm very, very, very proud of Horns and Heart-Shaped Box, but if there was one thing I was going to pick at, it's that the monsters are pretty monstrous. It's a little more satisfying if the bad guy is a little bit more emotionally complex, and can say to himself, 'No, I'm the one with the moral high ground here. I had to decapitate that person and eat his face. If I didn't do it, think what terrible things would have happened.'"

Hill says that the more we learn about a villain's backstory, the less scary he becomes. He uses Darth Vader as an example. Hill says Vader was great in the first movies. But then we eventually find out he's a petulant teenager with major issues. We would argue that the problem with the prequel movies was the miscasting of Hayden Christensen as Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader -- not that we learned his backstory.