Ever since I can remember I have had a fascination with aliens, werewolves, vampires, ghosts and of course zombies. I remember watching R. L. Stine’s ‘Are You Afraid of the Dark?’ every weekday after coming home from school. My fascination has not changed in the least bit. As I mentioned in my introduction, in the Student Lounge, I love to read. Anything about the macabre is my type of genre, from Stephen King and Dean Koontz to Richard Frost and Walt Whitman.
Whatever mythical story you have read, or heard, has had a villain. Whether the villain was another human, monster or demi-god, they were there to destroy the hero. When we were young we were taught about good/right and evil/wrong, evil must exist to comprehend the good. This is the case of mythology. For everything in the world has an opposite. I believe that mythical villains symbolize adversity. How would the main character learn a lesson if there is nothing to learn from? In other words if there were no villains there would be no heroes, nothing for us/them to be saved from.
Dependent upon which mythological villain we are taking into consideration, yes. Hera, although consider ‘good,’ used mind control on Hercules to make him kill his wives and children. A loss of control leads to fears, it taps into our deepest fear of losing the security of our familiar surroundings. Or even worse having our surroundings change around us. Not only that, but when/if we could encounter these mythological beings we would not be able to predict their behavior. I find that in horror movies it is not good enough that the villain be an axe murderer, but that they must be a demonically possessed axe murderer. The antagonist is possessed with extreme superhuman powers and could crush us at any moment, and so we are not just outmatched but powerless and not the holders of our own fate.
In Greek Mythology, most villains are not ‘evil’ until faced with a dilemma, threatened or jealous. Take Athena for example; she was the...