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In essence, you're asking how to convey dread of a past event, past threat. There are several ways to do that.
Elders shaking in fear at the mere mention of "threat" is cheap. It can be used in conjunction with other elements, but not on its own, and not as your main mode of conveying the threat.
You can have multiple memorials - those are a marker to the reader that something bad and scary has happened in the past. You don't need to show multiple memorials - you can just mention it being "this village's war memorial". Similarly, you can mention graveyards, terrain that has been affected by fighting (e.g. overgrown trenches), you can mention that "Alice lost both sons to the PCs". All those examples are drawn from the effects of both World Wars on Europe.
You can follow this by showing how the fear of the PCs return affects current decision-making. For example, people might be willing to bear with hardships brought by maintaining whatever eliminated the PCs (high taxes, limiting personal rights, etc.), justifying this as being a better alternative than the PCs' return. In the same vein, existing PCs, even peace-loving ones, could be treated with mistrust, suspicion and fear, because of what they could do, and what "their like" have done.
"PC" could become a bad curse-word among the younger generation who have not seen the dread PCs, with the appropriate response from those who have.
In short, you can show the fear of the past threat through its effect on modern society. If you're looking for further ideas, look at the way a major danger period in Real Life affected later generations. I find the World Wars to be easy-to-work-with examples, as they are near enough that there's a lot of information, and yet far enough that you have multiple following generations. However, other examples exist of course.
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