Two men, actually: Daniel Plainview, Blood's violent and scabrously greedy oilman, brought to life with terrifying force by Daniel Day-Lewis; and Anton Chigurh, Country's itinerate, air-tank-wielding serial killer, played by Javier Bardem with an unhinged calm not found onscreen since Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter.

Both actors earned Oscar nods for their portrayals — plus multiple other accolades, including Screen Actors Guild Awards — and for good reason. They and their respective villains serve to remind us, yet again, why evil holds us captive at the movies: It gives us a glimpse inside our own blackest recesses. But after taking that look, after plunging down that oil shaft of grease and muck and slime, we might have cause to wonder what we've found.

Here's what: Darkness. Death in bowling alleys. Dumb clucks with holes in their foreheads. What you won't find is an explanation for all the bloodletting, because none is given in either film. Plainview and Chigurh are presented without backstories.

There's no psychology to their evil, no abusive daddy or unattentive mommy or tragic loss of a One True Love. They simply are. Their behaviors are unknowable, unstoppable, somehow unhuman and apart: evil as a monstrous outsider.

This enemy-intruder idea is most obvious in No Country for Old Men, which outfits Chigurh as a stand-in for all evil in all of society. He's designed as a metaphor, so we can forgive him if he doesn't talk much about his childhood.

In There Will Be Blood, the outsider arrives in a dusty California town with glad-handing talk of prosperity, and while he looks and sounds like a regular fella (more or less), he never shakes that uncrackable strangeness of an outsider. And that's before he kills people. That's before the impulse overtakes him and the victims go splat.

We love movies that finger evil as the guy from outta town — if not from another planet entirely. The sight of a viscous alien exploding from John Hurt's chest is reassuring, in its existential way: You won't find that ugly thing inside me, no sir. Most major monotheisms hold that everyone is capable of evil — since Adam and Eve, it's been kind of a problem — but the species persists in believing otherwise. We thrill to narratives of any type (film, books, television, lurid news accounts of Ted Bundy psychopathology) that suggest the existence of a superpowered super-evil, and why not? They aren't us. They're other. We see nothing of our own reflection.

Yet even comic books — speaking of superpowers — give archvillains a backstory. The Joker didn't just spring like Athena from the brow of Zeus; he fell into a vat of acid, and boy, is he upset. The late Heath Ledger will flash the Joker's grin at Batman when The Dark Knight opens July 18, but you needn't wait to find a man (and how often they're men) mutated by tragedy. Just check out Johnny Depp's Oscar-nominated performance as Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street for the nearest cutthroat nut job in pancake makeup. He's as hellish as Chigurh, but at least we know where he's coming from. At least we know why he wants Judge Turpin dead. And, OK, everybody else.

Horror fans appreciate the origin myth — the flashback scene or entire prequel that explains the whens and whys of young Hannibal's craving for human flesh, of little Mikey's fondness for masks. But moral turning points offer subtler rewards than the gore of Hannibal Rising or Rob Zombie's retake of Halloween. They are, in fact, the central force behind two other films nominated for best picture (and lots more) in this year's Oscar race.

In Atonement, a young girl (Saoirse Ronan, also nominated) twists a shocking revelation into a lie of destructive force. She doesn't slash anyone's neck, but hers is an evil act that demands repentance.

In Michael Clayton, a washed-out lawyer (George Clooney, ditto) slides toward corporate violence and skids to a halt near the end: He wavers between good and evil in one powerful scene of will-he-or-won't-he ambiguity.

So maybe evil doesn't always lope into town with a gun and a taste for blood. Sometimes it crawls up from the depths of humanity, and sometimes it looks like us.

amy.biancolli@chron.com


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