It depends on how dark you want to go. A lot of us don't *want* to spend time with truly evil people, so we prefer antagonists to outright villains. True evil is often banal, too, so while I find the "villains" of True Stories like Wild Swans horrible, I don't know that they'd make good fictional villains. At least, they wouldn't make good *super*villains, of the sort you secretly kinda root for and find compelling and charismatic.
I have one suggestion though: the main villain of In the Company of Men.
Also, I just watched Snowtown, a hard-to-watch Australian film based on a series of (real) serial killings in the 1990s. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1680114/) It's a compelling portrait of evil, and one of the most realistic things about it is that the villain's motivation is basically very simple: he enjoys power. Anything that demonstrates his power - insulting people, seducing people, torturing and killing people - is fair game.
I bring it up not because the film features torture but because it struck me as an utterly convincing portrait of a non-Hollywoodized psychopath. And because it's seen through the eyes of a bystander, most of the powerplays in the first part of the film are very domestic and ordinary. They're social challenges, and at heart, they're nasty. It's an interesting film but one I'd only recommend if you honestly think you can sit through it.
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yati
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Date: 2012-05-08 03:58 am (UTC)I have one suggestion though: the main villain of In the Company of Men.
Also, I just watched Snowtown, a hard-to-watch Australian film based on a series of (real) serial killings in the 1990s. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1680114/) It's a compelling portrait of evil, and one of the most realistic things about it is that the villain's motivation is basically very simple: he enjoys power. Anything that demonstrates his power - insulting people, seducing people, torturing and killing people - is fair game.
I bring it up not because the film features torture but because it struck me as an utterly convincing portrait of a non-Hollywoodized psychopath. And because it's seen through the eyes of a bystander, most of the powerplays in the first part of the film are very domestic and ordinary. They're social challenges, and at heart, they're nasty. It's an interesting film but one I'd only recommend if you honestly think you can sit through it.