Certain villainous characters make you love them by connecting on an empathetic level, some train you to enjoy them, and we seek out others for more primal experiences — like our own arousal. More accurately, this arousal is actually the fear we experience while watching slasher-horror films featuring villains like Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Michael Myers. Continue reading “How Your Fear Can Actually Be Really Sexy”
Certain villains are all too human. They are flawed and empathetic. They are beings we can recognize ourselves in and grow from. Other villains are just monsters — vampires, aliens, werewolves and countless strange creatures that spring from the creative mind. There’s little to empathize with; little for the audience to connect to. So why are these monstrous villains still so popular? Perhaps because we’ve been conditioned to enjoy them — not unlike Pavlov’s Dog.
Continue reading “How We Are Classically Conditioned To Love Monsters”
From Marvel’s supervillains and Darth Vader to the (slightly) more realistic Walter White in Breaking Bad, villains are fascinating; you can’t take your eyes off them. But why? What is it about those so clearly, classically wicked that makes them so compelling to an audience? One possibility is that, in experiencing these villains on-screen, we can face our own inner dark side.
Psychiatrist Carl Jung believed everyone has a darker side, a shadow-self, within their personality. This shadow consists of everything the person considers unacceptable to express: envy, rage, selfishness, the desire for power and baser animal instincts. It’s not something that the person is consciously aware of but something they must acknowledge and face in order to grow as a person.
This is where villains come in as archetypes, representing the clearest forms of those negative aspects of one’s personality. With their bad traits on the forefront, villainous characters allow for easy access to the audience’s shadow self.
Continue reading “How Villains Force Us To Look At Our Inner Darkness…”
Wicked Nerdery 