⭐ Star Horror Villains Builder

Horror is the genre where being vague gets you a guy in a hoodie. Ask for "a scary killer" and you get the same stock silhouette: no mask logic, no weapon, no wrongness in the skin. The specificity is the whole job, and nobody wants to type it at 1am.

⭐ Star Horror Villains Builder is the StarNodes answer. Seventeen dropdowns, three string outputs, no model, no VRAM. Pick an archetype, then pick what's wrong with it - the mask, the skin, the eyes, what it's holding - and the node assembles the prompt.

The mechanism, which is dumber and more useful than it sounds

Options live in json/star_horror_villains_builder.json: 17 lists (51 villain types in one of them), plus settings and a system_prompt. On load each list becomes a dropdown with none, random and exclude prepended.

none skips the category, random picks an entry, and exclude skips it and keeps it out when random_all is on - which is the point of three states instead of a checkbox. Set face and weapon to exclude with your choices locked in, flip random_all on, and you'll roll endless villains who all wear the same mask and carry the same blade. That's how you build a cast instead of a grab bag.

seed controls every pick: 0 re-rolls each queue, a pinned number reproduces the villain. The node reports itself changed on every run (its IS_CHANGED returns a timestamp), so nothing is cached and seed: 0 genuinely re-rolls.

One bit of actual language handling: entries from the face list get an article with the right vowel rule, so it reads "…with a burlap sack mask", not "…with burlap sack mask". Tiny, and why the sheet output reads like prose instead of tag soup.

Three outputs, three jobs

description is the plain comma-separated prompt. villain_sheet specifies a reference layout - two tall full-body panels left (front and back), a 3×2 detail grid right (face/mask front, profile, 45°, chest, pelvis, rear), expanding to 4×2 with close-ups of mask and weapon.

Then the style clause: "presented in a clinical and scientific way like a forensic case file, with flat, even studio lighting… and enforces absolute consistency in the villain's… appearance across every panel." A deliberate tonal collision - your style, shot like evidence. For a sheet it's the right call: even lighting is what stops a grid drifting into three different monsters, the failure mode anyone who's chased a turnaround knows (character-consistency.md).

system_prompt is the instruction text you'd feed an LLM to write these sheets itself, think-step-by-step preamble and all. Steal it if you're wiring an Ollama or API node upstream - LLM-assisted prompting went from novelty to default practice over 2025–26, and this saves you writing the system message (prompt-engineering.md).

What to actually set

• villain_type - 51 entries, doing more work than the rest combined: killer doll, ventriloquist dummy, cenobite, masked slasher, chainsaw butcher.
• face - 33 options, because the mask is the character. Burlap sack, scratched hockey mask, mask made of human skin.
• weapon, injuries, aura - what stops it reading as generic; aura is the one people forget.
• style - defaults to cinematic horror film still and lands in both outputs; the only dropdown whose default isn't none.
• age - free text; a number becomes 43 year old, random_age rolls 25–90.

Install

Manager → search Starnodes → Install → restart, or:

cd ComfyUI/custom_nodes
git clone https://github.com/Starnodes2024/ComfyUI_StarNodes
cd ComfyUI_StarNodes
pip install -r requirements.txt

The builder imports nothing beyond the standard library - the pip line is for the pack's other hundred-odd nodes, and install.py runs no installs of its own, so a bare clone still leaves you a working text node.

On the pack generally: it's a solo-run toolbox that updates constantly. Upside, things get fixed fast. Downside, re-check a workflow built on a StarNodes node after an update.

Where people get burned

Editing the JSON does nothing until you restart. Dropdown lists are read at module load. random picks re-read the file every run, so a new mask gets used immediately - you just won't see it in the dropdown yet.

Broken JSON fails quietly. The loader swallows the exception, prints StarNodes: Could not load star_horror_villains_builder.json, and hands back empty lists. The node still runs; the dropdowns shrink to three options and the prompt comes out nearly blank. Validate first:

python3 -m json.tool ComfyUI/custom_nodes/ComfyUI_StarNodes/json/star_horror_villains_builder.json > /dev/null

The sheet came out unclothed. There's a single outfit field here, not a wear rule, and if it's none the sheet prompt says plainly that the villain is unclothed in the full-body panels. Set an outfit, or set the field to exclude - the tooltip is honest about which way that cuts.

random_all overwrote your choices. Intended - that's what exclude is for.