ABSTRACT
The term villanero is particularly adorable because of a space between the two words it can be translated as House of Nero, the playground of that horrid Roman emperor who fiddled while Rome burned. There's a long list of memorable villaneros: Freddy Krueger, Dracula, Travis Bickle, Hannibal Lechter, Vincent Vega, and many more of that ilk, and they've all made being bad seem kind of fun and glamorous. But, as interesting as villaneros are to be more careful creating them if people want to write more ethical scripts. The author thinks that the men who destroyed the World Trade Center were evil. Screenwriters who create villaneros and blur the distinction between good and evil people fall into the trap of making statements that certain crimes by certain kinds of criminals may not be so bad after all, that everyone who commits an evil act isn't necessarily evil, and that there's a sliding scale for evil itself.
