Humanizing villains a touch can make them that much more enjoyable. For example, Darth Vader, Dark Lord of the Sith, did in fact turn good at the end of the original trilogy. However, he was still bat crazy during the rest of the movies. He choked people on whim, just because they made one mistake. He cut off his own son's hand. He tortured people. He blew up entire planets. He messed with peoples' heads. That small spark of humanity within him in the end is all the more tragic because it was too late - he had lived a life of evil, and only as his life begins to end, does he realize his folly. He cannot go back, he cannot redeem what he has done.
But then we get the new trilogy. Anakin Skywalker is a whiner. He shows dark tendencies early in the trilogy, yes, but his switch to the Dark Side is sudden with very little contemplation. Lucas tries to make it ironic - Oh, he changed to evil for love! - but his transition is forced and almost done as an impulse or afterthought. We then get the jarring transition from a whiny young man in lava who has obviously been listening to too much punk music ("I HATE YOU!" he screams at his father figure. How cliche), to the A New Hope Vader, who chokes his subordinate for the small crime of dissing his "religion," and then goes on to clearing the destruction of an entire planet for his own means, as well as chopping his old mentor (and previous father figure) in half.
The Anakin Skywalker is annoying. He is childish. We wish that someone would discipline the child instead of watching the Jedi Council bumble around (though we cannot blame them. They are trained to keep the peace, not raise children). We don't hate Anakin because of what he's done, or fear him because of his sheer loss of humanity. We want to send him to his room to think about what he's done and not to come out until he's ready to apologize to Obi-Wan for betraying his trust. Some villain.
This is what we get when we try to humanize villains too much. Bram Stoker's classic Dracula was bizarre, disturbing and very horrifying. But most of the vampires in today's literature and media are laughable, especially when they try to make them too human. The teenage vampire who rebels against his parents' wishes ("Why can't you slaughter humanity and hold an undying hatred for the living like the rest of us?") because he falls in love with - who else? - a mortal girl. They run away, like West Side Story, or some kind of undead Romeo and Juliet, except much, much worse. Family feuds and gang fights against werewolves ensue, as our passionate teenagers fight against fate itself and hold each other in tight, semi-erotic, vampiric embraces until wait this is turning into a cheesy Harlequin romance.
The best villains may seem human on the outside, but will certainly not act human. The Joker, of Batman proportions, is one of the best villains devised by man. Heath Ledger's recent superior performance reinforces why he is so sick. He plays with peoples' minds. He's completely psychotic. He relishes in the torture of people. He does not merely kill; he wishes to entirely cripple, corrupt, disturbingly destroy peoples' lives until they are a mere husk of the person they once were. Why blow up people, when instead you can force people to choose to blow up other people to save themselves? He is sick, twisted, an absolute horrific image of humanity that loses every sense of it.
Sauron is another evil character. By the time Lord of the Rings appears, he is a shell of his once former evil glory. But read Tolkien's creation story The Silmarillion, and you see Sauron's demonic brilliance. He orchestrates the downfall of an entire race chosen by gods for their valor, slowly corrupting, planting seeds of doubt until they rebel against the very gods themselves, the very gods who had chosen them for the faithfulness in times past. This results in catastrophic destruction. His delight is to thwart the acts of the Valar, to destroy that which is created, to twist life itself into something abominable. He helps create the orcs, by how? Beating, torturing and destroying the elves in spirit, but not in body, until they become the monstrous creates we loathe and fear in Peter Jackson's cinematic interpretation.
These are the true villains, one who may at one point showed a shred of humanity, but have now completely turned their back on it. They are not held by the same restraints as us, nor the ethical bearings we are used to. And this makes them terrifying. They are unfamiliar, unpredictable, with little limit to their evil imagination. They show no remorse for death, killing or destruction, delight in corruption, torture and pain, and will stop at nothing to spread it.
Certainly, a "good" villain will not always be the writer's point. Shakespeare's character Angelo causes us to revile as he falls from grace as a strict arbiter of the law to one who twists its purposes for his own carnal desires. He once was human, once a man of good and justice, now a fallen, depraved shadow of what he once was. But this is not a villain to be feared, one who strikes terror within us. We commiserate with him, like a broken doll. Not one to be feared, but to be pitied. What we fear most of all in this villain, is not him, but the fact that his hubris, his fall, his unchecked emotions, reside within us, that we may meet his same fate. And this is just as effective of a fear as a fear of that which is entirely inhuman and terrible to behold.
But often, amateur writers inject too much humanity in a villain and he becomes emo, complaining about some traumatic childhood event or other that caused him to become evil. He justifies his actions not with real legitimate reasons, but with silly, fake ones. Anakin refuses to take accountability for his actions, instead whining about how Padme or the death of his mother made him do it. The evil that they do is never their fault, but someone else's. They do not strike fear in any way, nor do they incur pity within us - rather, they irritate us with their babyish tendencies to blame others, as if their evil actions are simply there to attract attention to themselves and their psuedo-pathetic plight. Just as annoying can be the reluctant anti-hero trying to resist an evil past, such as our aforementioned jock/sensitive emo teenage vampire. An alluring hook for a character when done right, no doubt; the problem is, this characterization is so difficult to do right, as the R.A. Salvatore's Drizzt can demonstrate. In some books, he is to be admired as he breaks away from his oppressive, evil culture and strikes out on his own, to be his own individual. But sometimes, he falls into whining, about how he is misunderstood and oh so alone, that no one can understand that depths of his loneliness and pain. He has, unintentionally, made emo fashionable in the high fantasy world.
However, emo sells. There are villains popping up left and right who replace their spark of humanity with whining, and their evilness with just stomach turning senselessness. Gone are the stories of suspense, Hitchcock style, as we watch the embodiment of horror rise up and terrify us. Gone are the stories of the villain who we both abhor and genuinely pity. Rather, replacing are the slasher flicks of dizzying evil, which does not terrify, but merely nauseate. Replacing are the humanized villains who we do not pity, but rather despise for his annoying tirades about what aspect of society has forced him to do this evil act and how he is oh so misunderstood.
Notice the villains who receive the most fear, hate and pity. J.R.R. Tolkien's masterpiece Lord of the Rings so masterfully depicted on the silver screen has a list of villains. The Nazgul, the infamous Ringwraiths, with their piercing inhuman cry, the shades of former kings and their lost glory exchanged for greed, now not even human, who have lost any light that they once possessed, now servants spreading terror and destruction; or the despicable, pathetic Gollum, whom we sympathize for and yet recoil in horror as he chews off Frodo's finger for a diabolical ring; Denethor, steward of Gondor, blinded by hubris, tormented by pride, destroying his family with favoritism, and then finally driven mad by his terror at losing everything he had by his own hand, one to be pitied, and yet reviled for his immense selfishness and ego that nearly caused the destruction of an entire nation let alone his family line; or the aforementioned psychotic Joker of Batman lore, who so terrifies us with his alien inhumanity; the Daniel Plainwell of There Will Be Blood, who through greed and narcissism, descends into madness and murder in a poetically terrifying free fall (as well as a classic YouTube-spoofable line). We revile them, we fear them, we pity them, we hope we never have to meet them.
Ironically, good evil is hard to find nowadays. And stories suffer for it. It's a hard act, writing up a good villain, one who reasonably terrifies, and for good reason rather than appealing to our disgust instead of our primal fears. One who does not fall into the cliches, one who does not indulge in attention-whoring activities, one who does not merely cry out he's misunderstood. A villain's purpose is to draw hate, not to be loved, and like Machiavelli's princes of old, are most effective while playing this role, rather than trying to be both hated and loved, and falling flat in both categories instead.
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