Since there’s no horror forum, I might as well vomit this on here.
I think it’s fair to say that a decent majority of us have really creepy characters. Those unnerving guys/gals that just lurch in the background of a story until the reader and protagonist start to notice them.
It would be really fun to see how that feeling of creepiness is achieved in characters, and how they actually come across.
I’ll start with one of my own because why not? Feel free to critique this guy if he starts to feel a bit more edgy than creepy.
One of the various antagonists I developed for a WIP would be a Machine called Fly-Eyes, a psychic Mech that served the Intellans, basically a Robot-Illuminati.
In my pile of drafts, Fly-Eyes would appear sometime during the 5th episode, after the defeat of another Arc villain, a Mech named Bedbug that watched people while they’re sleeping.
He would appear sneakily amongst a crowd of Soldier Robots that looked just like him, just more plain looking since they weren’t modified.
Since these drafts were all written in the 1st person for various characters, a passing reader of the drafts would probably think that I forgot the perspective they were written in.
Of course, in this case, I pulled a funny trick.
Fly-Eyes was the character narrating the story by this point, evident by the text beginning to hyper-obsess over the main protagonist and his distain for the others.
Fly-Eyes would then begin invading the 1st person perspective of the main protagonist in question through minute ways. The text would become a whole lot more formal than normal, and whole sentences (Portions that Fly-Eyes inserted into the narration) would be italicized as normal text rather than as dialogue or as one word.
This would go on for a long while as Fly-Eyes’ italicized text would begin feeding the protagonist feelings of insecurity, sadness, and suicidal i*deation. Fly-Eyes would also use this text to berate the protagonist, having disguised himself as her inner voice.
He’d also begin whispering incomprehensible gibberish and random strings of letters as well as numbers at random points.
However, this wasn’t a 4th wall break. I’m saving that for someone more insane than Fly-Eyes.
The italicized text from Fly-Eyes actually represented his psionic uplink into the mind of the protagonist.
His goal was to slowly infect the mind of the protagonist in order to weaken her hidden Psychic strength and steal enough memories from her mind to make the protagonist not herself anymore.
From there, he reasons that if the mind leads the body, then the captain should go down with the ship.
Fly-Eyes had come dangerously close to his goal. Thanks to the turmoil of getting dumped in a junkyard and the anxiety that she’s getting used like a toy by everyone around her, Fly-Eyes was able to convincer her at a subconscious level to “tug” at her body until it was nothing more than weak scrap being held together by an even more crippled mind.
While this attempt was unsuccessful, the protagonist still struggled with depression, insecurity, abuse of Robot-Substances, and a feeling of uselessness. This wasn’t helped out by the looming feeling that she caused the near-genocide of the human race and the purging of the robots blamed for the fiasco.
Also, Fly-Eyes somehow managed to slip away during all of this. While he’s been banished from the deeper corners of her mind, the protagonist sometimes catches wind of Fly-Eyes’ voice talking to himself, laughing, and sometimes talking to her. I haven’t written the specifics of the ending yet, so for now, Fly-Eyes just remains as a normal and unsettling constant that floats around in the protagonist’s conscious mind.