Creepy Dolls

All right. So I'm talking about creepy dolls. Yep, dolls really freak me out. And like all things, stuff that is creepy is often times inexplicable. There is a certain inexplicable quality about creepy dolls. But here are a few elements of dolls that make them scary at times.

When the Familiar is Unfamiliar:
There's nothing more comforting to us when we're children than our favorite playthings. And often, playthings come to us in the form of dolls. Most of the women and girls I know played with dolls. Heck, my wife still has some of her old dolls from back when she was a kid. When these very familiar and comforting object are suddenly made unfamiliar, it's very upsetting to our psyche.

It's the same reason why creepy little kids also provide us with a scare. Which brings me to an interesting point - if you make your doll or kid too unfamiliar, it's not scary anymore. The zipper on the monster's rubber suit begins to show. That's why Chucky has never been very scary for me. He looks too unlike a doll. (By the way, did you know there was a Chucky fansite? Crazy.)

The All-Knowing Quality of Dolls:
There's something like a doll's eyes that really creepy us out. First of all, a doll's eyes are unblinking. They are always watching. And there's something almost knowing about them. There's also the fact that on a creepy, porcelain doll, most of their eyes lack any sort of emotion. So there's the lack of humanity or soul that makes us uneasy. There's also the fact that eyes are supposedly the windows to the soul. Yet, a doll has not soul so their eyes are a window to nothing. All of that combines to make for some really creepy elements.

Did That Thing Just Move?
A friend of mine used to own a pair of Thai dancing dolls that were kept up in his parent's closet. He hated opening his parent's closet because whenever he did, he could swear that he saw those dolls freeze back into position from whatever it was doing. Obviously, this is because of the dolls' fluid dancing poses, which is designed to make them look like they are in motion.

But still....

Most dolls are naturally designed to look like they are animated, lifelike, or vibrant. For example, think of a typical Barbie doll with its big smile, wide eyes, and uplifted hands. Those are all designed to make Barbie look like she's doing something. After all, who wants to play with a doll that has it's eyes blank, it's hands down by it's side, with a blank expression on its face. But the problem is...that dolls aren't animated. So the very thing that makes dolls look friendly to us can look disturbing if it's the right context. The idea that something that has no life could suddenly get up and have a life of its own is pretty freaky.

Cool Sites
Creepy Dolls: A blog with tons and tons of creepy dolls on it.

New Age Dolls:A site for collecting creepy dolls.

Susan Custom Creepy Dolls: Yes, another site for your own custom creepy doll.

Giant Photo Set: Big set on Flickr on creepy dolls.

The Art of the Scare

The Basic Scare
The basic scare is one of my most favorite things in the world. I love to inflict it on people and have it inflicted on me.

The best part is this - being scary is kind of like being able to tell a good joke. Maybe you aren't the best at it, but if you know just a few good jokes, with some practice, you can get good at telling them.

And anyone can do it. When I teach Middle School, one of my units that I teach every year is on ghost stories. And every year, at least one student will absolutely chill every kid in the classroom with a great ghost story. But I already said that. I talked about the twist and how that can scare anyone.

Now let's talk about how to do it.

Showing the scare right away is like giving away the punchline at the very beginning of a joke. It ruins the scare. Just like any punchline, you want to save that scare for the very end. That's where the art of horror comes in. If you wait for too long to release the scare, then your story become a bit boring and the audience frustrated. If you release the scare too early, then the audience hasn't had enough build up, and your scare is ineffectual.

Usually, a great horror story begins with a subtle change to the familiar environment. On the screen, the music cues and we start to get that uneasy feeling. At this point, a horror movie will usually slow down the action, which makes us lean forwards in the seat. What's going to happen? What's coming up next?

A great horror story requires the same thing. For example, we might talk about how John and Sarah are good friends, how they get in their car, how they go to their favorite picnic spot, how everything is going well. Then...we slow everything down. We pause for moment and explain how the lake by the picnic sight doesn't look quite right to Sarah. How it's changed somehow.

When Sarah turns to John and says that she think she can see a face just under the surface of the lake, we need to make sure our audience is cued in. And we draw them in by slowing down the pace, and then stretching things out in such a way that the audience is hypnotized. Just like we are hypnotized in the The Shining by the sound of the Big Wheel rolling around and around on that hotel floor, our own story need to entrance the audience.

Also, we need to make sure that the audience is kept interested. Slowing down the pace isn't just good enough. You have to start giving away little pieces of information. One at a time. Going back to that lake where John and Sarah are sitting...what if Sarah can start to see more and more faces just under the surface of the water? What if she starts to see something moving just beneath its mirrored veneer? John, wanting to take his upset girlfriend home, starts to escort her back to the car...but there's something in the woods. It's standing in between them and the car. They can't make it out, whatever it is. One thing is for sure, though. It's dripping wet. They can hear the sound of water dribbling on the dry leaves.

So even though the pace is slowed, we start to fill in the gaps with the audience. When we finally reveal the scare, that's the tricky part. The actual scare itself should carry some kind of revelation. It should shed some new light on the story, so that when all of the details are added together, it makes sense in a very morbid sort of way. Just like...a punchline to a joke.

So what if John starts to explain to Sarah that she doesn't need to be afraid? That the faces in the water are all just former girlfriends? And that he's taken every one of them to this very spot? And now? They all just want Sarah to join them. In fact, says John, if you listen hard enough, you might be able to hear them calling.



All for now....

More Cheap Tricks for Scary Things

Okay, surely you didn't think it was just little girls, doors, and animals, right? There's alot more to that list. In addition to the previous three, let me add a few more:

Dolls: There is something just downright chilling about a little doll. In, in fact, the more life-like the doll, the scarier it tends to be. Think about it. Which is scarier, a porcelain doll with a pale face, whose eyes open and close? Or a cabbage patch kid?

Sometimes, a life-like doll isn't what scares us but a doll with something a bit odd about it. The monkey with symbols what was forever immortalized by the book Skeleton Crew looks like a monkey...except for that weird grin. If a doll isn't going to look life-like, then there needs to be just one thing wrong about it.

One person said this a while ago, and I have to agree...there is something all to "knowing" about a doll's eyes. They seem to look for forever, with a hidden wisdom about a world which we do not know.

Masks: Going along with our doll theme, masks tend to scare us as well. Think about some of the great horror movies of all time: Halloween, Friday the 13th, Scream...all of these films feature an antagonist with a distinctive mask. Heck, even V for Vendetta's protagonist is given a creepy vibe with a perpetually smiling Guy Fawkes mask.

Masks tend to unnerve us because they take away our ability to see someone's expression. We don't know what the person is really saying or doing, making the masked person mysterious. Even frightening.

Things in the Distance: Let's think about it. When something is up close, you can see it. You can take it in. You can understand it. However, what makes all those bigfoot pictures with that furry man in the distance scary is the fact that we are looking at something that could be. We're not sure if what we saw is right.

Think about this. Let's say you woke up to hear the sound of laughing. You look out of your window to see that something is on a far hill, watching you. It's look at your house. And you could swear it's looking into your window. In the distance, you can only see a thing silhouette. That's freaky, right? Because you can't see it. You can't reach it. And it's threatening you, even from that far place.

Old Places: The haunted house is always old, right? It's always falling apart. The boards are always splintering. The cobwebs are always in the corner.

Why? What is it about Old Places that really pushes our buttons? Old places have a history. And many times that history is hidden from us. It makes us wonder, making our imaginations run wild. Or worse, the history is revealed. We learn that a terrible crime was committed in the Old Place, and this stirs our imagination even more.

S'all for now.

Discussing Horror

All right, here's where I start up a series of posts returning to the discussion of horror writing in general.

First, some cheap tricks I've come up with.

Whenever I've written games, run games, created supplements, or written adventures, I've found that certain elements tend to be alot more scary than others. Here are some things I've found interesting to use:

Children and Old People: I can't tell you why, but little kids and old folks really scare the crap out of folks. Let's look at The Shining, for example. That movie features both little children and folk folks and makes them really creepy. The little girl ghost is a cliche nowadays, but it often still works if done right. Also, there's the "little kid who is wise beyond his years" motif, which we see in The Ring, or The Sixth Sense.

The key to making little kids or older people scary is to add a bit of twist to them. Both children and the elderly are normally a comforting sight, so to see them in a darker context is unsettling.

Animals: Is it any suprise that one of Stephen King's better works was Pet Cemetery? Animals normally represent nature and the natural cycle. When we watch animals in the wild or even in our home, we percieve nature's way. However, put a little twist on it, and we get the disturbing feeling of nature tilted on its head, which alarms our sense of order in the world.

In Pet Cemetery, King writes about how Gage's pet cat is brought back to life...but it's not quite right. It has lost the grace and agility that cats normally possess. To see a cat without the traits we normally associate with them distrubs us and our world view.

Doorways and Windows: Both doorways and windows symbolically represent many things to us. For one, they represent possibility. What lies beyond an open door? A new world? The next day? But this can also be scary for us because it represents the unknown to an extent.

But doors and windows are also a danger. If you drove up to your house and saw your front door wide open, what would you think? How would you feel? So, doors and windows also represent some kind of weak point in our psychic defenses. When you think there's someone walking around your house outside, what do you do? You make sure the damn door and window is locked, that's what.

Is it such a surprise that so many superstitions have to do with doors and windows? Hang a horseshoe over your door for good luck. In the Chinese tradition, it's bad luck to hang a mirror in front of your front door. And Hindus often bless the portal of a door to give a house good luck. Doors and windows are the passages in and out of our lives and our security.

More later....

Wrapping Up

So this concludes my series on writing for Witch Hunter. From here on out, for a while, I'll be going back to the subject of horror and exploring that.

Watching your baby walk for the first time is pretty darn exciting - and, of course, I'm talking about our role-playing game.

You know, it's one thing to write material for a game system.

It's a whole other ball game to watch people play that system. And then it's yet another to actually sit at a table with folks you don't know and be a player. Let someone else run you through a game.

Because if you're GMing and your running your own game, you know generally how it's supposed to go. But what about the guy or gal who just picks your book up off the shelf?

So, it's pretty neat to be there and experience it with people. To see that, hey, this group project that you've been working on for two years...it all worked out. The game works. And people enjoy it.

It was totally awesome to sit down at a table at Gen Con and play Witch Hunter. To sit back and have someone else tell me what was going on. To be directed in an adventure where I didn't know what was going to happen or how. To see if the themes, concepts, and spirit of the game that we set up was really going to fly.

The biggest compliment we ever go was when I ran it at Gen Con, and I noticed two guys across from me having a blast. I also noticed that they definitely knew their history. Everything from their character names to their mindset fit just right.

So during a break, I asked them how they knew so much history - it turns out that these two guys were both professors. One was a professor of History the other a professor of English. And they were both loving the game. The fact that college professors gave our little historical horror game the thumbs up felt pretty darn cool.

All for now.

Designing Iconic Monsters

One of the first things we decided about the Adversaries Book in Witch Hunter was that if the whole thing was just a big list of monsters, it really wouldn't stand out too much. Especially amongst the numerous other monster-type books in the market.

One Adversaries book that I always loved was the d20 Modern Menace Manual, for the d20 Modern system. The reason I loved that source book was because the designers could have really just phoned it in and created a Big Book of Monsters.

Well, they didn't do that. The Menace Manual has some monsters, but it also has bad-guy organizations, neutral organizations, and whole parties of antagonists complete with backgrounds and personalities.

That, too me, was a far more dynamic book that would get much more use from a GM rather than just a box full o' threats. Basically, the Witch Hunter Adversaries Book would feature not just creatures, but stuff about the actual World of Witch Hunter. By presenting rival organizations, we would be helping GMs start up their campaigns. When a whole organization is detailed for you, it should help the GM create a campaign by featuring a group that could be the main villains for an entire story arc, whereas a single monster is usually only good for an encounter or two. Occasionally, you might get a creature that will serve as a spring board for a campaign, but that's rare.

We also decided that Witch Hunter monsters would be broad categories with lots of different kinds of monsters underneath each category. For example, a vampire might be a savage beast with glowing eyes and massive fangs. Or, it might be something that looks exactly like a human, can walk under the light of day, but just needs to drink some blood from time to time.

This way, a vampire is not just a vampire. A werewolf is not just a werewolf. The GM would always be able to keep his or her game fresh and new with the different versions of the creatures at hand. That was something also decided from the very beginning.

Adding the Twists
When I started making the monsters for the Core Rulebook, I was pretty aware that what I was doing was pretty big. The design of the monsters would set much of the tone for the campaign. For example, if they were all tentacle-y and Cthulhu-like, that would definitely set a certain tone for the world. If the monsters were more "classic" then that would set a different tone as well.

Right away, I took Sean Molley's advice and tried to stay away from Cthulhu-type concepts with the Core Monsters. Call of Cthulhu is a great game, but it's its own thing. We weren't there to offer something like CoC. We were there to showcase something new and different.

So, the challenge was to try to put a new and fresh take on things like the vampire, werewolf, etc. That was hard, because those guys have been done to death. What I did was to go all the way back to the beginning - to look up the original myths and legends that spawned these creatures.

For werewolves, I made different types. Some werewolves were men who donned skins and became that animal, tying into Celtic and Native American legends. Some werewolves were the "classic" werewolves that most people know. And then I made up my own kind of werewolf that could infect people with its own personality, not just its lycanthropy.

With the wendigo, it was easy, because there were so many different versions of the wendigo in Native American lore anyways. Some wendigo were big, furry beasts with white fur. But others were creatures like looked like skeletons, or creatures made of ice.

Most of the Core Monsters turned out this way, with me trying to give them at least three different takes. At the same time, I didn't want each monster to be so different that it was unrecognizable. That was the real challenge. To make these iconic monsters something different - yet familiar at the same time.

As for the Baykok, when I found those creatures I thought they were pretty terrifying as they were. Skeletal beings that ran through the air firing invisible arrows. That's just awesome on its own. However, I wanted to kick it up just a notch, so I made the Baykok have deer skulls instead of regular human skulls for heads. In any case, the result was fantastic, because Pat Loboyko really came through on that one. He took the vision I had and made it far cooler and creepier than I had ever imagined.

Creating Monsters for the First TIme

So, Henry Lopez gave me the assignment to create monsters for the Witch Hunter game...

...but he didn't just turn me loose and say, "Have at it!" There were some very specific guidelines. And that was a good thing.

One of the very first sacred cows that Henry developed for Witch Hunter was the idea of the Laws of the Universe. And that was that every monster might have a power, but with it came a price. His key example was that a vampire might be able to be immortal but at the cost of having to drink blood.

He envisioned monsters having powers like "a Chinese restaurant menu", where you could pick something from Column A and then something from Column B. That gave me the structure that I needed to create the list of Powers and Weaknesses.

I decided pretty early on on the division of powers that all monsters would have. Corpus Powers, which would be of the body. Movement Powers, which would affect their mode of moving around. Etc. But for each kind of power chosen, the GM would have to also pick a corresponding weakness. So Body Powers would come with a weakness of the body as well. Something that helped a monster move faster would also mean that it had certain restrictions on movement, like not being able to cross a threshold without an invitation.

Then, after playing around with the powers for just a bit, I started to work up a series of monsters for the Adversaries Book. I remember very distinctly when I first began on that monster list. It was Gen Con of 2006. It was late, very late, and I sat out in front of the Ram, drank a beer, and made up my list. By the way, the monster book is scheduled to come out in 2008. So that should give you some perspective on the time and effort it takes between the creative process and putting it out for publication. I was very fortunate, I must say, because many folks in the RPG business don't get the luxury of that much time.

(Whenever I write, I always pre-write with a pen and legal pad. This is very important, and I'm deathly superstitious about this.)

Many of the monsters on my original list did not make the final cut. They were either inappropriate for the setting, didn't fit our powers/weakness paradigm, or just plain sucked.

The monster list really started to come together when I started doing research on the superstitions and creatures of the time period.

But back to the Core Book...
Meanwhile, I still had come up with the core monsters that were going to go into the regular Witch Hunter Core Book. All that brainstorming and pre-writing that I did was perfectly fine and dandy, but that was for a monster book that was pretty far in the future. So, I set aside my monster list and just worked on some of the core monsters of the Witch Hunter book.

Henry said that he wanted some more familiar monsters for the Core Book, because we had a new game system and a new setting. Having brand-new, unfamiliar monsters would make the whole thing harder to grasp. So I made up some typical criitters - Vampires, Werewolves, Revenants, Wendigo, etc. However, I also put in some new creatures like the Baykok.

More on that Baykok and new twists on old monsters later.

Creating Your Own Game System

Why Creating Your Own Game is Hard:
I think many people out there flirt around at least one time with coming up with your own homebrew system. I'm definitely guilty of this bug, and attempted it many times from middle school until right now.

However, actually going through with creating your own system and making it functional so that it works? Wow. As much work as you think it might be? It's more work than even that.

Creating your own game system is an incredibly difficult venture. For one, no matter what, you're going to hit a wall of tedium. Eventually, you will have to write out the descriptions for every single skill that is in your game. You will have to write out every single feat in the game. You will have to write out every single spell.

It's just not at cool as you would have imagined. Basically, if you look at most role-playing games, their text is made up of large lists. Heck, most of the D&D Player's Guide is a list of spells and their effects. Now, let's say that you do get through this titanic wall of tedium. Now you have to go and playtest your game.

Playtesting is Trying:
When others playtest your game, the flaws in the system will be immediately apparent. They haven't been apparent to you, because you're probably too close to the system to see where the loopholes are. However, other people will immediately see the dynamics of your game that you did not.

When we sat down to playtest Witch Hunter, our playtesters continually and constantly found flaws in the system. The game was too slow. Or too confusing. Or damage didn't work right. It was too deadly. Too easy. The list went on. Every time we changed a rule to make the system work, it opened up another problem, which again caused the whole system to fail.

That was what was so difficult about creating our own game system. Any flaw that was found in the game usually caused the whole structure to collapse in on itself.
And, really, that shouldn't be surprising, because any game system works on a holistic level. For example, in D&D, the rule of Attacks of Opportunity affect a wide variety of other elements in the game.

One of the most contested issues in our game system was how Defense was going to work. How does someone defend against an incoming attack? We literally went through 5 different methods of generating Defense before coming to our current solution.

And it's not just combat that we had to worry about. We had to concern ourselves with how social challenges would work. How monsters would be constructed. How monsters would be built. How monster powers would work.

In the end, the final game system that we arrived at was very different from the original design. 3 game stats were dropped entirely. Damage was completely redone. And the way weapons worked was redone.

At the end of the entire process, which took 2 years, we were even debating at the last minute if people should be rolling 10-sided dice and looking for 7's or higher...or if a success would be 6's or higher. So even as we were putting on the finishing touches, debates raged on about even the most fundamental aspects of the game.

Now, that being said, I've been very pleased at how the game has turned out. There are broken parts to the game (not problem, all games have that), but nothing in the game breaks the system apart, which was our main concern.

That's all for now. Next time, I'll actually talk about making the monsters of Witch Hunter.

How Witch Hunter Got Started

So, in Atlanta, a small group of us gathered together to talk about creating a brand new roleplaying game.

The first thing we did was to start with the basic pillars of the world that we were creating. The developers of D&D used the term "sacred cows" and I'm going to use it here, too. We sat around and thought about the sacred cows of our game system and our world.

We knew, for example, that our game was going to have both horror and swashbuckling in it. We knew that our game was going to be set in the Colonial Period of American History. And we knew that it was going to feature an alternate history. Meaning, we would not be sticking to historical events 100%, but instead focused on what we think might have happened if magic were real.

For example, one thing that was discussed early on was that the Aztec Empire was still going to be around, because the Aztecs were going to have repelled the Spanish Invasion of South America. That meant that the Aztec Empire was still around, and that Spain was still a vital force in world politics, because one of the great detractors in Spain's power was the influx of gold into Spain from the New World. When there was so much gold coming in from the New World, the price of gold devalued, and Spain saw a great deal of inflation.

It was these kinds of things that we looked at right off of the bat with Witch Hunter. Other things started to fall into place during the planning session, like the fact that we wanted men and women to be on equal footing in this setting. However, we did decide to keep slavery.

One of the major things we got our minds wrapped around was the the paradigm of the Colonial World. In a typical horror game, people can often easily dismiss the supernatural or the horrific. For example, if the main characters in a horror game see something moving in an old house, often the supporting characters will dismiss what they saw. "Oh, it was just the wind. It's just your mind, playing tricks."

However, in the world of 1689, the paradigm would be totally different. What we discovered was that unlike most horror games, where people are loathe to believe in ghosts and goblins, one of the major tensions of this game was that people were all too ready to leap to the wrong conclusions.

So the sighting of a bear in the woods might get inflated into a story about a vicious beast. A case of epilepsy might be interpreted as someone being possessed by evil spirits. The problem for the Player Characters in Witch Hunter, then, is the rampant paranoia and superstition that pervades every aspect of the culture. People actually believe too much. I was particularly thrilled about this aspect of the game, because it was something that I knew wasn't in many horror games out there, if at all.

Well, that's all for now. Next time, I'll talk about the trials and tribulations of coming up with a system.

Developing Witch Hunter: The Invisible World

Here's where I'm going to delve into the roleplaying game that I help to write, which is Witch Hunter.

I can't really claim that this is "my" game, because it isn't. First of all, it was a group effort to produce. Also, if anyone can claim most of the credit, that would be Henry Lopez, who was the lead developer and had the overall vision for the project.

I'd worked for game companies before, but those were for established worlds with established backgrounds. Here, I was given an opportunity to sit down with a development team at the outset and help create an entire gaming world from the ground up. That was tremendously exciting.

With Witch Hunter, we started with pure brainstorming. It literally began with the lead developer (Henry Lopez) saying, "You know, it would be cool if we could have a game like this." It was his idea, his baby. The vast majority of the credit needs to go to him.

Of course, we contributed ideas and tossed concepts back and forth. It was a collaborative effort, but one person, that being Henry, had a leading vision. It’s been my experience that the most successful projects that are both creative and collaborative usually have one person at the helm who has a broad vision. That one person works with everyone else to help their ideas become part of that vision. It’s a group effort, not a dictatorship, but in the end you have to have someone being the “guide” so to speak.

So how did it all begin? Henry had always wanted to do a Solomon Kane type of game, that was set in the American Colonial period that featured both horror and swashbuckling. He got the idea from watching the movie Sleepy Hollow, but was further inspired by the writings of Robert E. Howard and his Solomon Kane universe.

Being gamers we all knew that there wasn't any types of games like this in the industry. We briefly looked at Northern Crown and determined that our game didn't have too much crossover with what was offered there.

Henry proposed his idea to his business partners and the development began. He contacted writers that he knew and had worked for him before - like Sean Molley and Brian Schoner. They, in turn, recommended that I be put on the project, because they knew my authorship from the Living Death Campaign that was run by the RPGA.

What was funny was that no one up at Paradigm knew that I had published material for Ravenloft, which would have actually given me more street cred. Instead, they wanted to hire me based on work that I was doing mostly for fun and assumed would get lost through the years one day. You never know what writing of yours will come up for review! So even if you’re writing fan fic or just putting something out on the web for fun, do a bang up job of it.

Henry contacted everyone, went over his initial ideas, and then we all went to a focus group meeting in Atlanta to hash out the game. We went about setting down the basic precepts in which the game would be founded.

This is where I pause and tell you that a larger company like White Wolf does things a little differently. When it comes time to consider a new line, say for example, Promethean, the developers all send in memo explaining their ideas for the next upcoming product. The proposals are all reviewed and examined, and the next idea is chosen from that pool. I don't know the details of how a proposal is accepted and finalized, but I highly suspect it is by consensus, with their CEO arbitrating the process.

So that you understand, most meetings of game companies are with people sitting around in their T-shirts and jeans. And just about everyone at the table will be friends. There’s no large power-point presentation, or people wearing power-ties. I’m sure the experience would be very similar to many peoples’ here of just sitting on couches, coming up with cool ideas.

Next time, I'll talk about building the game from the ground up.

Villainy, Part II

So, I was talking about villains earlier and what makes good villains. One of the things I mentioned was that magical "X-Factor" that all good villains seem to have.

My wife and I were mulling this over and I think we stumbled onto something: Villains usually have something about them that we can relate to, but taken to an extreme level.

We were talking about some of our favorite villains and mentioned these guys:

Khan from Star Trek II
Darth Vader
Hannibal Lecter
Magneto
Norman Bates

By the way, I was able to find some very awesome sites on these guys. Check 'em out.

Now, each one of these guys definately had an X-Factor, that certain something that made them very memorable...almost likable. For villains like Khan and Magneto, part of you could relate to them. Who wouldn't want revenge for being wronged? In Khan's case, he was left on a planet that turned into a wasteland, and he watched his people die around him. Who wouldn't turn bitter and angry over that? For Magneto, he was put in a friggin' concentration camp. Who wouldn't be full of hate after such an experience?

However, both Khan and Magneto take their passion or sense of revenge to an extreme level. That's what makes them so intriguing. Part of us identifies with them, but then there's that aspect where we say, "Whoa, okay. You've stepped over the line."

Now, on the other hand, you've got a villains like Darth Vader, who is very intriguing in the original Star Wars trilogy because he's so mysterious. He's the Dark Knight in Black Armor. His voice is menacing. He has this mystical power called the Force, and yet he's Luke Skywalker's father. So he's not just some faceless brute. In this case, Darth Vader's X-Factor is not that we can identify with some aspect of him, but instead because there are so many aspects that we don't know about him. (Again, speaking from the Original Triology standpoint.)

So, what scares us is the known and the unknown. The known aspect of the villain that we can identify within ourselves, and the unknown aspect that we would like to possess. After all, who wouldn't want to be Darth Vader?

There are also characters that possess both the known and the unknown. Hannibal Lecter, for example. Lecter is an almost likeable guy in many of the scenes that he appears in, especially in the film version, done by Anthony Hopkins. He has an almost genteel way about him. He listens to classical music. And then there's that incredible intellect. But there's the cannibalistic side to him as well. The animal savagery that hides behind the chilllingly calm exterior. So Lecter possesses both the familiar and the unfamiliar, making him doubly intriguing.

The same might be said about Norman Bates. We can all relate to people with overbearing parents. After all, who hasn't believed at some point and time that their own parents were overbearing? We can all relate to being awkward or having problems getting along with people. Of course, it's pretty difficult to relate to having your mother living inside of your head, right? That's the mysterious and intriguing part of Norman Bates.

That's all for now.

Villains

So, we're talking about villains, right? Well, at least I am.

For me, the key to making a memorable villain is making one that has several things going for him or her:

The villain has to be credible.
The audience has to believe that he or she would really be doing what they are doing. One of my favorite villains on TV has always been Scorpius from TV's Farscape. Wayne Pygram always made me really believe in that character, no matter what he was doing or saying. Even in his first appearance as Scorpius, where he shows up as a minor character, I really bought into what the character was all about.

If you don't have a credible villain, a character that audiences will believe in to some extent...you might as well pack it up. An example of a non-credible villain is your typical "evil genius." The guy who dresses in black, who speaks with an aristocratic accent, etc.

The villain needs to have clear motives...for you, if not for your audience.
Evil exists. Evil people exist, too. Hitler, Stalin, Ted Bundy, Scott Peterson...these people were pretty bad guys.

None of these people, however, were evil for the sake of being evil. They all had their reasons for doing what they did.

A good villain needs a clear motive, a desire or need that they have to fill. Your audience may never know this motive. That's okay. But you definitely need to know it. Because when your villain has a clear motive, they become a lot more credible. Because clear motives make for believable characters.

This is the hardest thing for me as a writer, because when you design a villain, you are designing someone who has something fundamentally messed up about them. Ted Bundy just isn't a regular guy. He's got all kinds of issues, making his motives very complex. That's why a villain is hard for me to create.

That also what has been plaguing me in this latest work. I'm creating a demon as a villain, for crying out loud! What does a demon want? Why do they want it? Do they have other interests? What do they do in their spare time?

A great villain has an X-Factor.
The most interesting thing about the greatest villains of all time is that there is that certain "je ne sais quoi" about them. The X-Factor.

Why is Darth Vader such an enduring villain? Well, there's his appearance. There's the Dark Side of the force that he seems to control. There's his intimidating voice. Etc, etc. But when it comes down to it...it's the whole package. All of the aspects of Vader come together to make a fairly memorable deal.

The same could be said about Hannibal Lecter. Or the Wicked Queen from Snow White. Or Hal 9000.

I've found that if you can find one sticking point, one unique aspect about your villain, that people will remember him or her for a long time. When I made the Telling Man, for example, I created a villain who stitched various body parts harnessed from people onto his own. He always picked the parts that people were most vain about. So if you liked your hair, he would scalp you, and stitch your hair onto his. If you liked your eyes, he would take them and put them into his own sockets. This wasn't the extent of his villainy, but it created a nice sticking point to really bring him out of the background.

Okay, enough rambling.

How about the ultimate geek-list of villains?

Or AFI's 100 top movie-villains of all time?