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@ethryndal

If we’re really talking the fear factor, I don’t see many villains like that.

In the original edition of The Sword in the Stars (I haven’t read the rewritten version to know if it’s changed), the villain is a creep because:

1. He’s powerful.
2. He has no regrets.
3. He’s twisted and you get to see some of the twisted things he does.

So he does inspire some fear, but much more horror.

But I do think horror and fear can go together. This is particularly manifested with demonic activity.

Recently, I picked up a book by one of the inklings called The Decent Into Hell. Unfortunately, the writing style was so dense I didn’t finish it, but one of the ideas he packed into the story that utterly fascinated me was the idea of pure goodness as a terrible thing. I think where he was getting was that if we saw pure goodness we would be terrified (Saini as an example).

As I’ve thought about this I’ve realized humans are really incapable of fully understanding goodness. In the same way, it occurred to me that we’re unable to understand pure evil.

And that’s, I think, where fear and horror meet: the fear of the unknown.

For a villain to be terrifying, we can’t understand him. To start with, I think this means it’s best not to step into his POV (like was done in The Sword in the Stars). He should also startle us with something totally outside our expectations (like pleasant Bilbo suddenly turning into a fiend or a family man going to work and whistling while he kills Jews). I’m not saying that the villain has to appear normal at some point, though that could work for sure, but he has to act on a logic outside of what we’re able to fully calculate. At no point should he feel human. He should be completely other.