Last week, I explored how backstories can ruin great villains—but today, we're flipping the coin. Sometimes, a well-crafted origin story doesn't soften a villain; it sharpens their teeth into something infinitely more dangerous.

While Disney trips over itself to explain away every dark impulse with tragic childhood trauma, these villains prove there's a better way. Their backstories don't beg for sympathy—they twist the knife deeper, making their evil more comprehensible and therefore more terrifying.

Here's how to give a villain an origin story without accidentally turning them into a misunderstood antihero.

The Joker (2019) – When Mental Illness Becomes a Weapon

Todd Phillips' "Joker" succeeded where countless villain origins fail by making Arthur Fleck's descent feel like watching a car crash in slow motion—horrifying, inevitable, and impossible to look away from. This wasn't Disney's usual "he was actually good all along" nonsense. This was a meticulous documentation of a mind shattering under societal neglect.

What makes Phoenix's Joker truly disturbing isn't the violence he commits—it's how his transformation forces us to confront uncomfortable truths about how we treat mental illness. Every laugh, every delusion, every act of violence comes with context that explains without excusing. By the time Arthur fully becomes the Joker, we understand exactly how he got there. And that understanding makes him more terrifying, not less.

The film's genius lies in never asking us to sympathize with evil—it forces us to witness its birth. Unlike Disney's recent villain makeovers that essentially argue "trauma justifies everything," the Joker shows us that understanding a monster's creation doesn't make them less monstrous.

Killmonger – The Villain Who's Actually Right

Erik Killmonger transcends typical superhero movie villainy by embodying something Disney consistently fails to grasp: legitimate grievance turned toxic. His backstory as Wakanda's forgotten son doesn't soften his extremism—it weaponizes it into something far more dangerous than simple revenge.

What makes Killmonger's origin so effective is how it avoids the Disney trap of "explaining away" his darkness. Instead, it shows us a villain whose methods are wrong but whose anger is completely justified. When he delivers that devastating line about dying like his ancestors who jumped from slave ships, we don't feel sorry for him—we feel the terrible weight of his logic.

This is what Disney's live-action remakes consistently miss: you can give a villain understandable motivations without making them sympathetic. Killmonger's backstory doesn't ask us to forgive his extremism—it makes us understand why someone might choose extremism, which is infinitely more unsettling.

Magneto – Trauma That Creates Monsters Instead of Heroes

Magneto's Holocaust origin represents everything Disney gets wrong about villain backstories turned inside-out. Where Disney uses trauma to explain away evil, Magneto's past amplifies his danger by showing how suffering can create monsters instead of heroes.

His backstory doesn't diminish his villainy—it elevates it into something more profoundly disturbing. Here's a man who witnessed humanity's capacity for systematic evil and drew the logical conclusion: never again. His extremism isn't born from simple hatred but from desperate prevention. Every cruel action carries the weight of historical tragedy, making him something far more dangerous than a simple villain—he's a monster created by monsters.

This is the antithesis of Disney's "misunderstood villain" approach. Magneto's origin doesn't make him relatable—it makes him inevitable. And that's terrifying.

Heath Ledger's Joker – The Power of Remaining Unknowable

While we're praising effective villain origins, let's acknowledge when the most powerful backstory is no backstory at all. Ledger's Joker terrifies precisely because his past is a void filled with contradictions. "You wanna know how I got these scars?" he asks, each time offering a different story designed to manipulate his current victim.

This approach works because it transforms the very concept of a villain's backstory into a weapon. Unlike Disney's desperate need to explain every shadow in a character's past, Nolan understood that some villains are more terrifying as agents of pure chaos than as men with tragic histories.

The contrast with Phoenix's Joker is illuminating—one becomes more disturbing through our understanding of his descent, the other through our inability to understand him at all. Both approaches work because they serve the story's needs rather than the audience's desire for simple explanations.

Why These Work While Disney's Recent Attempts Fail

These villains succeed because they understand a fundamental truth that Disney has forgotten: explaining a villain's actions shouldn't excuse them. A good villain backstory should make us think "Oh god, that makes perfect sense" not "Oh, poor baby, they were just misunderstood."

Disney's recent villain rehabilitation projects—looking at you, Maleficent and Cruella—make the critical error of confusing explanation with justification. They take characters who were effective precisely because they were unapologetically evil and try to prove they were actually good all along.

The villains that work don't soften their evil with understanding—they contextualize it. They show us how monsters are made without asking us to forgive the making. They prove that the most terrifying villains aren't the ones we can't understand—they're the ones we understand too well.

In our current landscape of villain rehabilitation, these characters remind us that sometimes the most powerful thing a backstory can do isn't make us love a villain—it's make us fear how easily we could become them.

And that's infinitely more disturbing than any amount of tragic childhood trauma Disney can throw at us.

XOXO

Athena Starr