When the Villain Isn't All Villain
The complexities of horror villains who might have a point
Is evil something you are? Or is it something you do? - American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
When you think of a horror villain, chances are that you think of a character that is pure evil. The slasher age of horror pushed this narrative with characters like Michael Myers, Chucky, and Freddy Krueger.
There’s no denying the morality of a character like Chucky. He’s evil. That’s it. Simple.
So when horror films decide to challenge the norm, it makes the audience dance around a fiery circle of questions.
Uncertainty runs rampant, with judgment clouded by what’s considered to be morally sound. Questions upon questions build up, disrupting the thought process and forcing one to rethink their beliefs.
Perhaps one of the most infamous cases of this is the franchise giant Saw. I would assume most of you know about Saw, but in case you somehow missed it, the film series relies on torture porn. Take a group of morally grey characters, put them in a room with torture devices, and force them to play “games” to survive.
When it first came onto the scene in 2004, it presented itself as something different. Saw wanted to stand out from the other horror films during the early aughts, a tough feat when your competition is that of The Ring, House of 1000 Corpses, and Freddy vs. Jason. Certainly, it managed to stand on its own, building a cult following and now hoarding a whopping ten films under its belt.
Of course, there was something specific about Saw that made it so unique. Sure, the torture porn was something that was welcomed, especially when people were craving more raw horror. In a post 9/11 world, it took a lot to truly scare American audiences, and Saw managed to capture that fear, even translating it worldwide.
Torture porn aside, the characters of the film intrigued people. More specifically, the serial killer did.
The main villain of the Saw franchise is John Kramer. Played by the talented Tobin Bell, Kramer’s voice is just as iconic as Darth Vader’s. His role of being the Jigsaw killer in the franchise has garnered a multitude of fans, with people finding sympathy for the character.
See, John Kramer is quite an interesting case. His origins began as a civil engineer whose pregnant wife was accidentally injured during a robbery. Due to the injury, she unfortunately miscarried, with Kramer becoming depressed and bitter. This would lead to their divorce.
Poor Kramer would then be diagnosed with cancer and attempt suicide. His failure, however, revives his appreciation of life, in which he would try to spread his message through his games, with the robber who caused the miscarry to be his first victim.
Kramer typically only victimizes people who he perceives as having moral flaws, therefore making their game mirror their own issues. Essentially, he forces them to face their problems, though through the most extreme means necessary. By the end of it all, they should have a new value of their life.
Only the strongest survive these trials and tribulations. The rest of the group die out of their own stubbornness or stupidity. As audience members, we grow desensitized to the kills just as Kramer does. From the start, we are told that the people put in that situation are there for their own good, to gain a new sense of morality, and that they simply don’t value life enough if they fail.
It’s an usual shift for audiences. We’re usually meant to cheer for the victims, but Saw flips this idea on its head and makes the audience see a different perspective. John Kramer always gave his victims the opportunity to win, the victims just had to fight for it — thus, the games were fair, and Kramer operated with good intentions.
It was why audiences fell in love with his character. He wasn’t a good guy by any means, but he also didn’t fully feel like a bad guy. He was much more grey in his morality, following a code of radical therapy. His point of valuing your life to the fullest by doing good is certainly a valid one, but his way of doing things cancels out the message.
Similarly, the Showtime original series Dexter also presents a serial killer with a good guy agenda. Dexter has ASPD, along with homicidal urges that he can’t control. To combat this, his adoptive father taught him from a young age to only go after criminals.
Dexter is a serial killer, yes, but he only kills people that one would deem as “bad guys.” His victims are not innocent, but rather the scum that manages to slink around the streets. The audience can see the inherent “good” in Dexter — he strives for normality, deeply rooted in his confusion of emotions and what it means to feel said emotions. Not only is the series challenging the black-and-white evil or good narrative, but it challenges the demonization of mental illness and personality disorders.
Further, Dexter, like Kramer, is a likeable character. He too suffers from trauma, seeking the answers to make the world better. And, just like Kramer, the audience is faced with a character who is using the extremes to make a point.
On the other end of the spectrum, we have Jordan Peele’s Us. Us followed a family trying to survive the invasion of doppelgangers known as the Tethered. As the film explains, the Tethered were created by the government, being a failed cloning experiment that was meant to control the population, but now live in the shadows underground. The Tethered finally escape, causing mayhem on their counterparts due to their years of mistreatment.
What’s interesting about Us is that the main character we grew fond of, Adelaide, isn’t who we thought she was. It’s revealed that she is actually a Tethered, and the real Adelaide (now known as Red) had been living underground with the clones.
The plot twist forces the audience to reevaluate who the real villain of the film is. Red, who was the main cause of the Tethered revolution, seemed like the obvious choice. She led a massacre of America, murdering innocents to gain freedom. But in learning of Adelaide’s deceit, we realize that Red did what she did out of grief for a life that was stolen from her.
On the other hand, Adelaide’s actions are seen in a more sympathetic light. She stole Red’s life out of desperation, not of malice.
There’s not really a true “villain” of this story, nor is there a true hero. They are simply two wrongs creating no rights, both feeling correct in their stance considering their twisted origins.
Both of them have their sympathies, and you could even argue that the actual villain of the film is really the U.S. government, especially since they were the reason any of the events of the movie happened to begin with.
Both Adelaide and Red were victims before they ever hurt anybody. Adelaide saw an opportunity to finally have a life, but in the process doomed another to the pain she lived through as a Tethered. It’s like cruel poetry, with the two mirroring each other in more than just their looks.
Finally, we have Carrie. The original 1976 film gave us Sissy Spacek as the lead, traversing through high school as a highly sheltered girl who came from a fanatically religious home. As we know, Carrie White is bullied relentlessly throughout the film.
You can’t help but feel for Carrie. The torment she’s put through is never justified, being bullied simply for being “strange” or “different” from her peers. Throwing tampons at her was just the icing on the cake.
So, then, it was so no surprise that after the pig blood fell, that Carrie finally reached her breaking point. Not only was she humiliated, but Tommy Ross, one of the few people who showed her kindness, was killed by proxy.
Carrie snapping wasn’t uncalled for. In fact, her entire telepathic massacre wasn’t a shock. It was never a twist, a turn, or even a bump in the road. No, this was something that was obvious. Carrie White was endlessly abused, and she finally abused them back.
The issue is that this brings the audience to yet another crossroad. It’s difficult to see her as a villain, considering she’s much more of a victim than anybody else in the film. Part of you wants to say “That’s what they get,” before realizing just how fucked up that is to say about a gymnasium full of dead teenagers.
Carrie certainly isn’t a hero, but her backstory sways you into caring way more about her than any other character. At her core, it’s clear that Carrie was a kind hearted person. Her only flaw was that she was unaware of the real world, boxed in by her mother and forced to deal with the trauma. An abusive household, an abusive school, and overall an abusive life: the girl never stood a chance.
It’s why many point to Carrie as a warning to the effects of bullying. One that, especially in modern times, is eerily accurate and important to remember.
Villains like these start to make you think, “Do they have a point?” And, let’s face it, that is the point.
These types of characters are meant to be more complex than the typical villain we see in slashers of the 80s. They aren’t cut-and-dry, black-and-white characters that kill just to see some guts. No, these are characters with actual emotions and trauma. It’s trauma that they don’t know how to process properly, but trauma nonetheless.
These are tragic tales, told to hammer in the point of what trauma and abuse can do to the human brain. We may understand why Carrie killed her class, and may even feel sympathy for her, but we also understand that murdering an entire student body wasn’t… you know… the right thing to do.
These characters may have had a “point,” but their deadly execution cancels out their argument.
An eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind.
These kind of villains are fascinating to watch in action. It is their very ambivalent morality, more than anything they actually say or do, that makes them threatening.