Villains in Our Mind: A Psychological Approach to Literary and Filmic Villainy (2025)

A Structure of Antipathy: Constructing the Villain in Narrative Film

Projections: The Journal for Movies and Mind, 2018

Many narrative films feature villains, major characters that audiences are meant to condemn. This article investigates the cognitive-affective underpinnings of audience antipathy in order to shed light on how filmic villainy is constructed. To that end, the article introduces an analytical framework at the intersection of cognitive film theory and moral psychology. The framework analyzes villainy into three categories: guilty intentionality, consequential action, and causal responsibility.

Reading Over to the Dark Side: The Complexity of the Male Villain in Film and Literature (2011)

Villains are often perceived as 'cool' these days, and they have held a certain fascination and grip over the audience for quite a while. This is puzzling, considering that more often than not, media texts present us with complex moral issues; how is it possible, then, that villainous characters are often presented and understood as being more interesting than the hero? The fascination with evil and the villain, not simply reduced to a certain narrative function, has been widely underrepresented in academia. This project first establishes a general framework of character studies and the concept of evil through which villains are defined. On the basis of seven character studies (Michael Corleone, Heathcliff, Hannibal Lecter, Darth Vader, Lestat, Joker, and Teatime), I then propose three villain categories through which popular villains can be analysed focusing on adaptation studies: the emerging villain, the core villain, and the philosophical villain.

Staring into Darkness: An Analytical Framework for Villains in Literary and Adaptation Studies (2014)

In current academic discourse, many scholars focus on villains on a case-to-case basis without taking into great consideration the general underlying dynamics common to the character type. This paper presents a condensed version of two previous projects (see Schäfer 2011; Schäfer 2012), proposing an analytical framework for villain studies based on nine character studies by employing narratological tools for conventional character analysis and general approaches to evil in media, and further introducing the concept of ‘complexity’ in terms of speculative interactions with the audience inspired by reader-response theory. This leads to the articulation of four broad ‘villain categories’ through which many villains and their popularity can be better understood: the emerging villain, the core villain, the philosophical/critical villain, and the repellent villain.

A Structure of Antipathy

Projections, 2019

Many narrative films feature villains, major characters that audiences are meant to condemn. This article investigates the cognitive-affective underpinnings of audience antipathy in order to shed light on how filmic villainy is constructed. To that end, the article introduces an analytical framework at the intersection of cognitive film theory and moral psychology. The framework analyzes villainy into three categories: guilty intentionality, consequential action, and causal responsibility.

Do dark personalities prefer dark characters? A personality psychological approach to positive engagement with fictional villainy

Poetics, 2021

Paradoxically, villainous characters in film, literature, and video games can be very popular. Previous research in the traditions of cognitive media theory and affective disposition theory has assumed that villainous characters can inspire positive engagement only when audiences discount the villains' immorality by focusing on positive traits or mitigating circumstances. Challenging this assumption, we argue that audiences with a conventionally immoral personality profile may come to engage positively with villainous characters because they share the villains' immoral outlook to some significant degree. We find robust support for this hypothesis in a North American sample (n = 1805) by comparing respondents' survey scores on the "dark triad" of personality traits (narcissism, Machiavellianism, psychopathy) with their professed degrees of villain identification, fascination, empathy, and enjoyment. We reject a competing hypothesis that such positive forms of engagement with villainous characters will be best predicted by respondents' agentic values, such as autonomy and competence. Our results support a need to consider personality as a basic determinant of character preferences.

Who can resist a villain? Morality, Machiavellianism, imaginative resistance and liking for dark fictional characters

Poetics, 2018

The purpose of this research was to explore the association between preferences for dark fictional characters, such as villains or morally ambiguous protagonists, and individual differences in related variables, particularly Machiavellianism and imaginative resistance (a reluctance to imaginatively engage with immoral fictions). Past research suggests that liking for morally ambiguous and evil fictional characters is a function of identification and moral disengagement (e.g., Janicke & Raney, 2017; Sanders & Tsay-Vogel, 2016), but does less to address why some people are more likely to successfully morally disengage and identify with such dark characters. Here, in a series of three studies, we found a robust association between liking for dark characters, self-reported imaginative resistance, moral purity concerns, and Machiavellianism. Such results suggest a need to include these constructs in models of fictional engagement.

TITLE: "A PSYCHO, A SORCERER, A SEDUCER OR A HEROIC DEVIL?: A COMPARATIVE AND AMBIGUOUS REPRESENTATION OF MALE AND FEMALE VILLAINS IN SELECTED FILMS AND LITERATURE"

"A Psycho, A Sorcerer, A Seducer or a Heroic Devil?: A Comparative and Ambiguous Representation of Male and Female Villains in Selected Films and Literature" In this paper, there are discussions about the representation of male and female villains in some selected literature and films. These included talking about male villains with superpower and wicked male characters with great and intellectual power or brain. The paper discusses about evil female characters of various levels. This helped sorting out the differences, problems or binaries regarding representation tactics or the process of characterization. By this, it was feasible to point out normalizing male dominance regarding gender representation in films. It contained discussion if male evil characters are more likable than women evil characters and if the representation is biased and contains discrimination. A typical narrative has a theme of good and evil, the hero and the villain. But in recent years through modern literature, the villains have got more recognition and have become more popular as rounded characters. Villains in today’s stories are better constructed than before and allowed more depth. This analysis brings out the aspects of both male and female stereotypical representation. The discussion also looks at how the notion of Gender Performativity, can be related with the formation of male and female evil characterization.

Evil Origins: A Darwinian Genealogy of the Popcultural Villain

This article argues that the sciences of mind can inform analyses of narrative characters, including their motives, appearances, and other traits. In particular, it explores the popcultural villain through the lenses of evolutionary and social psychology. Evolutionary psychology supplies a basic blueprint for impactful villains: they are selfish, exploitative, and sadistic. They contravene the prosocial ethos of society. Social psychology embeds this blueprint in the interactions of characters by offering mechanisms through which cruel behavior may be realized. The main mechanisms behind moral disengagement are empathic deficits, pseudospeciation, and Baumeister’s notion of a ‘myth of pure evil’: an attributive stance whereby humans consider injurious actions the products of evil essences in others. Finally, disgust may contribute to a character’s perceived evil nature through dehumanization, likely compounded by a cognitive conflation of disgust toward potential contaminants and moral disgust toward social transgressions. Following the theoretical discussion, the article offers 5 predictions as to the universal makeup of popcultural villains. All predictions are complemented with illustrative vignettes on popcultural villains that embody the principles proposed.

'All's Fair in Love and War': On the 'problem of personality' and its significance for the way we respond morally to fictions

Seduced by Mere Looks: The Effects of Aesthetics on Audience Identification with the Villain