It was time for an uneventful hike in an Arizona sky island, a couple winters ago. We went up a canyon or draw, up to a saddle that I recognized from an earlier hike. Although I favored backtracking, since that is the safest thing to do, the little poodle made the decision for me. He headed up to the saddle, which would suck us into making a loop. It was good to see him exonerate himself from his unmanly behavior on a recent hike.
I stopped in my tracks when I saw a dead teddy bear cholla. Since my photograph didn't do it justice, I deleted it. It was as startling as seeing Norman Bates' mother at the end of "Psycho". The dead cholla was more anima-morphic in three dimensions than in the photograph. You could see its two eyes and maw. It was standing up with curved forearms. Its face seemed frozen in a death-agony.
Since villains are seldom that scary when you actually see them, Hollywood has learned to give the viewer indirect views of the villain, at least in the beginning of the movie.
Another of their tricks is to intensify the hatefulness of the villain by endowing him with some gratuitous quality, such as arrogance. There is nothing particularly scary about the visage of John Malkovich, but he oozes evil with his elitism and intelligence.
People who are new to the desert might have an exaggerated fear of snakes and such. I've only seen a couple rattlesnakes close up, in years of biking and hiking in snake country. I got to within six feet of a coiled rattler once. Since it was motionless and semi-dormant it was no real threat. It was the perfection of the coil that made it seem arrogant and more malevolent.
But for me, the best representation of a Malevolence was in the movie version of Stephen King's "Children of the Corn". He was never shown overtly but his terrible effects on the ground and sky were shown, leaving to the viewer the job of imagining the cause. The Evil One was never quite named. The children referred to him as He Who Walks Behind the Rows.
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