Time was when the movie villain was stuck in second fiddle. Their primary role: to devise over-elaborate – and ultimately unsuccessful – ways to kill the hero. But then, somewhere along the line, the bad guys won. Last Christmas, Vader fanboy Kylo Ren erased memories of the Star Wars prequels’ drippy Anakin Skywalker by topping the franchise’s most-beloved character. The cackling nemesis has been given full celebration in the likes of Despicable Me, Megamind and Hotel Transylvania. And now comes Suicide Squad, DC’s party-pack of supervillains – including a certain Clown Prince of Crime – given Dirty Dozen-style licence to run amok with Bohemian Rhapsody cranked up to 11.

Yet this funfair of badass nonetheless conceals a crisis in the villain community. With so much evil on the market, true evil – proper unmitigated darkness – has never been harder to find. The line between hero and villain is now a hair’s breadth: Bond and Bourne are tormented or morally compromised, and Superman, under Zack Snyder’s tutelage, commits murder; meanwhile Despicable Me meanie Felonius Gru, not content with adopting three cute orphans, has in real life unleashed the Minions on a planet’s worth of besotted children – surely the most grotesque interpretation of world domination imaginable. Perhaps this blurring of the lines is why, with Iron Man and co spending half their time fighting each other, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has such a patchy record in the malefactor department. To quote someone who knows, we now live in the era of the semi-evil, the quasi-evil, the margarine of evil.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Despicable who? Felonius Gru and minions. Photograph: Sportsphoto/Allstar

The success of Mike Myers’ Bond nemesis parody Dr Evil meant time was up for the old-style baddie. “I can’t tolerate the two-dimensional kind of villain,” says veteran screenwriter Linda Woolverton. “When I think of the kind of villain I don’t ever want to write, it’s the Jafar type [from Aladdin] – the moustache-twirling, no-reason-for-being-mean villain.” This is the modus operandi of the horned enchantress Maleficent from Disney’s 1959 Sleeping Beauty, upon whom Woolverton performed a revisionist overhaul for Angelina Jolie in 2014. The job was, she says, “a tough nut to crack”, but her rationale for Maleficent’s baby-cursing wickedness was intriguing: that the dark fairy had her wings cut off by the future king Stefan, a metaphor for rape. “I think we can’t systematically glorify evil. It’s not good for the world,” says Woolverton. “I try to show why villains are the way they are.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Blame the parents: Adam Driver as Kylo Ren in Star Wars: Episode VII – The Force Awakens. Photograph: Allstar/Disney/Lucasfilm

The danger is that this humanising impulse – every newly foregrounded baddie afforded the same kind of origin story as his do-gooding opponent – robs villains of their satanic majesty. No one wants to hear, as in Spectre, that all Blofeld’s sterling pain-authoring for 007 has just been because he’s jealous of his long-lost adopted sibling. There was a similar chin-strokey air of the therapist’s couch in JJ Abrams’ recent over-explanation that Kylo Ren had gone off the rails because of absent parenting on the part of Mr Solo and Mrs Organa; something far more neatly conveyed by Adam Driver’s petulant lightsaber tantrums. Heath Ledger’s Joker was so effective partly because he rejected ingratiating backstory: in The Dark Knight, he tells two totally different stories about the origins of his facial scars.

Woolverton is adamant, though, that nuanced context produces villains who more convincingly lie on our own moral spectrum: “You can depict a villain who has a choice. We all have bad things happen to us – it’s how we deal with them that creates who we are, heroes or villains.” One added benefit from bringing things closer to the audience is an end to villains designated by dodgy, expedient notions of otherness: blatant racism such as London Has Fallen’s Arab terrorist stereotypes is rare now. When the writers of Iron Man 3 chose the Fu Manchu-derived Mandarin as its big bad, they dodged a bullet by cleverly making the character a smoke-and-mirrors illusion (he’s actually a Croydon-based actor decoying for the real threat).

Blatant racism, such as London Has Fallen’s Arab terrorist stereotypes, is rare now

But if the days of dagger-toecapped Soviet cartoon lesbians are long gone, and every villain is potentially transmutable into the hero of a story, can evil still serve any dramatic purpose? You might think the villain-as-protagonist might be a better means of exploring our own selfish, destructive impulses. But the examples so far, including Maleficent or Dracula Untold, aren’t coherent enough; or they are a bit of fun for kids, such as Despicable Me; or, as looks likely with Suicide Squad, they throw the kind of breezy antihero shade that has been de rigueur since Clint Eastwood invited people to apologise to his mule in 1964. We don’t get anything truly sinister, like a deep Michael Corleone-style dive into moral corruption. The antagonist slot in most feature films generally produces results as memorable and long-lasting as that of England football manager. The stark power of the fairytale-style villain – a cipher for dark psychological states of mind often surrounding sexuality – has evaporated.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Villain-protagonist: Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of the Lambs. Photograph: Sportsphoto Ltd./Allstar

One nefarious model that still retains a kick is the tempter, or manipulator. Perhaps because, not fully evil, it takes one step in the direction of the new-style villain-protagonist – but it still retains some old-school unknowable menace. Hannibal Lecter, talking his way into Clarice Starling’s head, and the audience’s too, is the vintage example. Not technically the antagonist in The Silence of the Lambs – that is the transgender serial killer Buffalo Bill – Lecter’s allegiance is uncertain. Lord of the Rings’ Gollum, Inglourious Basterds’ Hans Landa and Tom Hiddleston’s Loki (probably Marvel’s most effective villain to date) are recent spins on the same liminal game, deviously aligning themselves with our affections before spitefully whirling away. We’ll see how Jared Leto makes use of similar space as the Joker in Suicide Squad. But get too close up to these tricksters, and their aura crumbles: by the time he was openly romancing Starling and saying, “Okey-dokey,” in Ridley Scott’s Hannibal, Lecter had gone irreversibly camp.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Jared Leto as the Joker in Suicide Squad. Photograph: Moviestore/Rex/Shutterstock

The strange thing about the disappearance of hardline villains is that it doesn’t feel as if there’s any shortage of current real-life inspiration. Osama bin Laden and Mullah Omar may have come right out of the “shifty-looking mastermind” file at central casting, but Isis has gone one step beyond with a brand of extreme brutality that you can’t imagine anyone ever doing a Maleficent-style sympathy-switcheroo on. From Donald Trump downwards, the 21st century seems to be specialising in flush-faced demagogues with an undercurrent of violence. Here is where, as another top screenwriter (who prefers to remain anonymous) suggests, both parties may have watched a few too many Hollywood films: “The western world’s use of otherness in service of the military-industrial complex continues to this day with the creation of bogeymen. But it’s interesting that in their own ways, Isis and Putin have taken that concept and turned it on its head: amplified and projected their own otherness in order to intimidate and terrify the west.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Hidden meaning: the child catcher in Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Photograph: Everett Collection/Rex Features

As Isis well knows and hope, these tactics can unleash unpredictable and atavistic energies. We remain at their mercy until we understand evil more fully. On screen, though, we seem reluctant to push our villains further – perhaps because the modern world has exposed us to too many horrors and we can no longer hide beyond euphemistic fictions. There’s no doubt about the real meaning of Chitty Chitty Bang Bang’s Child Catcher, and, while we’re at it, the Pied Piper should probably be called in for questioning, too. We know too much – but realism and entertainment are still on the loosest of terms. Making, say, the Green Goblin a paedophile is realistically not on Marvel’s to-do list. The right real-world nugget of truth can galvanise a screen villain, though: Woolverton says her student daughter was involved with the Take Back the Night organisation while she was working on Maleficent, and the film’s feminised rape allegory certainly chimes with the revelations about campus sexual violence that have flooded social media since.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Sympathy switcheroo: Angelina Jolie in Maleficent. Photograph: W.Disney/Everett/REX

Are we reluctant because examining evil means delving into ourselves? The most disturbing, most profound recent films on the subject don’t settle for making villains protagonists, or for pantomime skulduggery. They zoom in relentlessly on a void at the centre where only one thing remains: our own culpability, or a fascination with power that amounts to the same. The desolate passing of the years is the only reward for obsession with the elusive killer in David Fincher’s underrated 2007 film Zodiac. Justin Kurzel’s almost unwatchable Snowtown, from 2011, had a biblical sense of how wickedness can root itself in the terrain of vulnerability. Compliance (2012), about a prank caller who persuades employees of a fast-food company to abuse a colleague, is a shrewd parable about how institutions can create cult-like suspensions of moral norms. Perfect popcorn viewing for Heinrich Himmler.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Justin Kurzel’s disturbing film Snowtown. Photograph: PR Company Handout

Compliance also caught the shocking impersonality of the information age – and the sense that evil now hides in plain sight. Internet Public Enemy No 1 is the troll, who wears a familiar face and has the most understandable of motives: being convinced they’re right. There’s the challenge for the cinematic villainy these days: our heart of darkness is reflected there in front of us on a different screen, right while we’re searching for something else.



• Suicide Squad is released on 5 August