Where are all the villains?

When you were younger, who was the fictional villain that had you hiding behind the sofa? The Daleks from Doctor Who? The child-catcher from Chitty-Chitty-Bang- Bang? Or, if you’re like my husband, the giant called Flesh-lump-eater from the BFG?

I recall being terrified as my mum and dad read to me from Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets of the serpent sneaking through the pipes, whispering ‘blood’ and ‘death’.

Back then, writers knew how to make an enemy bad – really bad. We didn’t waver in our fear of them, didn’t question our hatred of them, and were overjoyed at their eventual comeuppance.

Sadly, the same thing can’t be said of most villains today. Occasionally, we’re given one that reminds us of the Voldemorts and White Witches of old – Marvel does a fairly good job here – but generally bad guys don’t seem as ‘bad’ as they used to be. We’re prevented from hating them, as we’re encouraged to pity them instead. They’re not ‘evil’, they’re just ‘misunderstood’.

We can’t loathe the tyrannical King Magnifico in Disney’s latest animated movie, Wish, for example, because we’re shown his traumatic backstory. According to The Guardian, there’s no convincing antagonist in either Barbie or Oppenheimer – ‘Ken is more ‘Dr Evil’ than evil.’ And even Doctor Who, which has historically produced our most villainous villains, has recently provided only ‘abstract threats’, such as a weaponised wasteland, accidentally enlarged spiders and aliens who – it turned out – had abandoned their murderous ways long ago.

You could argue this isn’t so much a reflection on our culture as it is a few movie directors making a few bad decisions. But there have been at least two remakes recently, where, in order to be fit for 2024, the evil had to go.

Firstly, orcs. While they were vicious brutes in the original Lord of the Rings films, the recent Amazon Prime series Rings of Power depicts them as victimised creatures who are just trying to get their land back.

Secondly, Regina George. In the original 2004 film Mean Girls, the antagonist is brutal: two-faced, scheming, belittling. But the worst that the 2024 Regina George ever does is snap at her friend. ‘Regina was a mean girl with a lowercase m, but wasn’t capital M “Mean” like in the original’, one blogger writes.

It seems that no matter the genre, depicting ‘evil’ isn’t the done thing anymore.

Why is this? It may well be an inevitable consequence of living in a culture that no longer believes in an objective ‘right’ and ‘wrong’. As we’ve embraced relativistic morality (embodied perfectly by the Gen Z mantra: ‘you do you’), is it hard for us to label anything as purely ‘evil’ anymore? Are movie writers who’ve been steeped in this culture even sure what a wholly ‘evil’ villain or presence might look like?

Justin Brierley touches on this in The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God. Talking about the shift into our postmodern age, he says: ‘We no longer held to outmoded concepts like “good” and “evil”. Morality was relative … even Hollywood resists the once-familiar tropes of good vs evil of fairy stories.’

But this new, soft ‘evil’ doesn’t actually work. The bad reviews and dismal box-office figures show us this. Our frustration as we walk out of the cinema shows us this.

We want an evil we can root against, that we can see destroyed. Perhaps this is because, despite our theoretical moral relativism, we are seeing absolute darkness in the world around us – war crimes, racism, rape. Social media has brought these things closer than ever before. Objective evil is present and needs to be defeated in our reality, so we want to see this in our stories, too.

As Christians, we can learn from Hollywood’s mistakes here.

In our sermons, talks and presentations of the gospel story – are we, too, softening evil and hesitating to point at objective wrong? When we preach about ‘the human problem’, do we lean away from mentioning sin, the devil and evil?

And is a result of this that we aren’t hearing about a heroic, self-sacrificial God who loves justice, and is mighty to save?

The weak villains of modern TV show us how dissatisfying moral relativism really is. Perhaps the growing frustration with these villains is a sign that we may be on the cusp of moral absolutes being attractive again?

Perhaps our story, about a wholly good God who abhors evil and gave everything to defeat it, is one the world is now ready to hear?