As a 15 year-long horror tv show, it’s no surprise that Supernatural has a lot of villains. Some are the kind of evil that eventually turn good. Some are the kind of evil that win sympathy from the audience. Others are just pure evil and, frankly, bland. However, what makes Lilith such a well-written villain is that she is pure evil and has fun with it.
At first, Lilith chooses to possess little girls. This isn’t for any sort of advantage. It’s simply for the fact that she finds it fun terrorizing people in the form of someone meant to be cute and innocent.
The most chilling portrayal of Lilith was, in my opinion, Sierra McCormick’s in No Rest For the Wicked. When Dean asks the question “what the hell does a demon do for fun?” we immediately cut to a terrified family of a mom, dad, and grandpa discussing how there’s something evil inside their young daughter. Cue Lilith, in the form of a sweet looking little girl wearing a white dress covered in blood, walking in and perkily asking what they were talking about. This immediately brings a whole new level of tension to the scene, as the grandfather stammers that they were just talking about “how much we love you” in a terrified voice. When the horrified mother asks what happened to her dress, Lilith casually states, “oh, Freckles was mean to me”. Apparently, the answer to what Lilith has been doing for fun is choosing a random family (the Fremonts) to terrorize in the form of their beloved daughter.
What make’s McCormick’s performance as Lilith so great is her ability to shift from sweet to threatening in a matter of seconds. It’s her way of inflicting fear upon the Fremonts while pretending that everything is normal. When Mr. Fremont asks if she could let them go while she’s smiling and hugging him, she immediately releases herself and asks him with a dead serious face, “why?” When he stutters, she goes on, “don’t you want me here? Don’t you love me?” And instead of sounding like a heartbroken child it sounds exactly like a threat made by someone with all the control. The family nervously states that they all love her, and she continues in her threat to Mr. Fremont: “don’t be mean to me, daddy. Like Freckles or what’s-her-name, my mean old babysitter”. Terrified, he apologizes, and she immediately snaps back into a sweet little girl demeanor (“that’s okay, silly! Now let’s go and play!”).
This goes on throughout the next scene with the birthday cake, when, while seemingly enjoying making the Fremonts celebrate her birthday every day, she suddenly turns on the grandfather and kills him in front the parents for going to the neighbors for help. She orders the parents not to scream because “screaming makes me mad” then smiles and cheerfully asks Mrs. Fremont, “mommy, can I have ice cream with mine?” once again asserting that she has control over the situation and is loving it.
At some point Lilith ends up having to possess Ruby’s vessel, a blonde female, and from then on continues to appear as a blonde, attractive young woman throughout season 4 and when she returns in season 15. Just as she has fun terrorizing people through their expectations of a child (innocence), she uses their expectations of her older vessels by being creepily seductive. This is simply another way of her having fun with her vessels and enjoying the terrifying effect she has on her victims.
Lilith is often associated with the color white; she’s the only demon with white eyes, she chooses mainly blondes to possess, and she’s almost always wearing a white dress. In cinema, white is used to symbolize purity and innocence. This is far from how Lilith really is but it’s still the persona she likes to portray to others: a sweet little girl or an unassuming, flirtatious young woman. When we see her as a little girl in a white dress covered in the blood of that little girl’s pet, it’s very clearly displaying how she likes to take the form of innocence and twist it to her evil nature.
Going back and examining Lilith’s character with the knowledge that she knows she is going to be killed in order to start the apocalypse means that everything she did to terrorize people was not only just “for fun”, but it was how she chose to spend her last free moments on earth. This makes her, in my opinion, one of the most horrifying villains Supernatural has ever produced.
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