For the Greater Good: The Concept of Necessary Evil in Horror Fiction

Horror fiction is a genre that places a particular importance on it’s antagonist. Often, the villain of these stories are metaphors for real world sources of fear, raging from religious anxiety to discomfort with one’s own body. A common theme in horror is the all-powerful enemy or force of evil threatening a community, if not the world. The villain in these stories is always an outside threat. A cosmic, unknowable evil; a monster created through careless environmental maintenance; a lone psychopathic killer steadily culling the ranks of a summer camp’s teenaged counselors. Some authors, however, choose to train their focus on evil of a different origin. The community itself is the threat to an outsider antagonist. The motivation to threaten, terrorize or flat out murder the antagonist is not borne of to satisfy an insatiable hunger or some psychotic need to kill, but to protect the town/church/earth, what have you. The collective entities of the villains in these works view their evil as necessary, to protect the greater good, whatever the cost may be to the outsider who has suddenly found themselves a target.

  Ursula K. Le Guin’s “Those Who Walk Away from Omelas” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” are both prime examples of outsiders writing short works of fiction that feature individual rights/safety imperiled to protect the prosperity of a larger populace. Each of these women considered themselves outsiders and use that point of view to criticize the protection of a town at the expense of a powerless individual. While Jackson viewed herself as an outcast in the horror fiction community due to being one of the few women in the field in her career heyday of the 1960’s, Le Guin considered her success as a prolific science fantasy writer as an appointment to a higher social station, and took the stance of moral and intellectual superiority over the hoi polloi. Both authors cast communities who depended on sacrifice of helpless persons to thrive, and each story approaches the subject as someone apart from the community who clearly see the evil being perpetrated.