It is all about restraint, whether you are a writing a scary villain or sexy scene. Some things are better left to the imagination or hinted at – after all our minds are great at creating and filling in the details.
How Steven Spielberg Handles his Villains
By Steven Pressfield
Steven Spielberg loves to tease us with his villains.
He shows them only indirectly.
In the audience we see the effects of the Bad Guys’ actions, but we rarely see the malefactors themselves.
This is tremendously powerful because it makes us imagine what the forces of evil look like, and that’s always scarier than actually seeing them in blinding daylight.
Remember the scene in Jaws with the three yellow barrels? Our heroes in their boat (Richard Dreyfuss, Roy Scheider, and Robert Shaw) harpoon the shark with cables linked to three huge yellow air-tank-like barrels. The barrels float on the ocean surface, enabling our hunters (and us) to see the shark’s movements from the boat even when the finned menace is submerged.
The great cinematic moment is when the three barrels go churning across the surface at high speed toward the boat, then dive under and come up on the other side.
We never see the shark.
But wow, how we imagine him.
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