According to my Kindle, I am 76% done with Stephen King's The Stand. It is a spectacular read. A terrible, government-produced superflu is accidentally released into the world and 99.999% of everyone dies. Then the survivors find each other. Some are good, some are not. They all have dreams, and they all seem to possess different versions of ESP that either leads them to the Free Zone in Boulder, Colorado or to the new flagship of bad guys in Las Vegas (of course Las Vegas!). And who is in charge of Las Vegas?
The dark man. The Walkin Dude. The hardcase. Randall Flagg.
Randall Flagg is the devil incarnate. He is terrifyingly calm and logical. He offers all kinds of awful salvation, "all you have to do is ask." He is that perfect combination of limitless danger and unflappable calmness. Flagg doesn't get rattled. Flagg doesn't even raise his voice. He smiles and makes funny pop-culture jokes and says the things everyone is thinking but won't say and he doesn't look back.
Why are the calm ones the most terrifying? Consider:
1. Voldemort is scarier when he is NOT yelling.
2. Michael Myers is still the most unsettling horror movie monster because he never hurries. Ever.
3. Every great comic book villain has the qualities of the wise old man (think Magneto here) and lets his/her mindless henchmen do the crazy, emotional dirty work.
4. The Judge in Cormac McCarthy's Blood Meridian dances and plays the fiddle...among other things, but that is him portrayed at his most physically vigorous; everything else occurs off-page or is implied.
5. Randall Flagg inspires fear, he does not exact it.
What is the difference?
I think the spookiest, most resonating villains are the ones who reside firmly within our goosebumps, and they get there not through brute violence or debauchery but through the cool, shivering gamma rays of control. They seem to be okay with the awful around them. They seem to expect it. Or even worse, they seem indifferent to it. No emotional reaction at all. We as an audience seem to connect our own most basic negative emotions to the bad guys: anger, frustration, violence, etc. only we understand these things on a milder level. So when we see it on the page or big screen, we cringe but relate. Not so for the big villains. They are apart from us, and that chills us. They do not connect with our visceral emotions because they do not feel them at all.
And we fear what we don't understand. A simple, but effective equation.
