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Most of us find movie villains more interesting than the heroes they go up against.
The rest of us are lying.
Evil is inherently more nuanced, foreign, chaotic and unpredictable - we live vicariously through it every time we go to the cinema.
That doesn't make us bad people but it gives us the opportunity to momentarily justify someone's death when they run up a staircase instead of out the front door to escape a knife-wielding murderer.
It allows us to have a disturbingly 'legitimate' pub conversation about the merits of Thanos' argument for murdering half the universe's population with the click of a finger.
And it's definitely why we can root for Amy Dunne in Gone Girl and only feel a little weird about it.
Villains challenge our way of thinking, they provide the necessary antagonism to little goody two-shoes protagonists.
Without them, there's no conflict, resolution or narrative driving force.
We're also guilty of hoping villains might one day change and put their misdeeds behind them to help satiate our craving for meaningful character development.
Think Terminator, the Grinch, Loki, Regina George, Severus Snape and practically every villain in the Fast & Furious franchise.
Side note: Deckard Shaw (played by Jason Statham) basically murders an entire hospital of people and more police than humanly imaginable in one Fast & Furious film, then joins the good guys the next.
If that doesn't prove our love of charismatic villains, nothing will.
Finally, there's a reason 'pure evil' exists as a phrase and 'pure good' does not - storytellers are quite rightly less interested in the latter.
Superman can go play fetch with a stick of kryptonite for all we care.
Give us the terrifyingly twisted and wretched minds of the Joker, Hannibal Lecter, Annie Wilkes, Patrick Bateman, Cruella, Voldemort, the Xenomorph, Hal 9000, nurse Ratched and Hans Gruber.
And as Halloween approaches - the holiday that celebrates the villains of the cinematic world - bring in the genre-defining emblem of pure and complete evil, the greatest killer of all time - Michael Myers.
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Tim Piccione
Tim is a journalist with the Canberra Times covering the ACT courts. He came to the nation's capital via the Daily Advertiser in Wagga. Contact: tim.piccione@canberratimes.com.au.
Tim is a journalist with the Canberra Times covering the ACT courts. He came to the nation's capital via the Daily Advertiser in Wagga. Contact: tim.piccione@canberratimes.com.au.
