Horror movies are supposed to make us afraid. The killer is coming. The monster is on the loose. Something horrible is waiting in the dark. But sometimes, the character we want to see most suffer is not the one holding the knife. It’s the person who has been driving us crazy for the last hour.
Every horror fan has encountered them: the whiner, the bully, the fanatic, the manipulator or the person determined to make a bad situation even worse. They aren’t always villains and they aren’t always bad people. Sometimes they are simply so irritating that when the killer finally catches up with them we experience something that almost feels like relief.
Then there are characters that go far beyond annoying. These are the people we genuinely love to hate.
The Ones Who Drive Us Crazy
Franklin Hardesty from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) is an obvious place to begin because he occupies an interesting place on the hateability scale. Franklin isn’t a bad person. He’s not cruel, selfish or secretly plotting against anyone. He’s a frightened young man stuck in an increasingly horrific situation and considering what happens to him, it isn’t difficult to feel sorry for him. Unfortunately, feeling sorry for someone doesn’t mean you have to enjoy spending time with them.
Franklin spends much of his time in the movie complaining, arguing and expressing his frustration with the people around him. His circumstances certainly justify the fear, but after a while, even the most sympathetic viewer can find themselves running out of patience. He’s incredibly irritating. Part of it is his constant complaining, but even more than that, it’s his voice. That high, strained whine cuts through the film every time he gets upset. Once you’ve heard it, you can’t unhear it. You find yourself wishing somebody would reassure him or Leatherface would just end his nightmare, and yours.
Harry Cooper from Night Of The Living Dead (1968) is another example of a character who makes an already impossible situation considerably worse. Harry is wrong about everything, which is what makes him in part so frustrating. He wants to protect his family and believes the basement offers the best chance of survival. His stubbornness puts him at increasing odds with Ben and the others. While the dead are gathering outside, the people inside are fighting among themselves about what to do. This confrontation and Harry’s unwillingness to listen to reason, ultimately costs him his life.
Characters like Franklin and Harry aren’t necessarily people we want to see die. They are simply people who make us understand why horror fans have such strong feelings about certain victims. When you’re watching a movie in which everyone is supposed to be working together to survive, the person constantly making things more difficult can become almost as irritating as the monsters outside.
The Ones Who Get Under Our Skin
Then there are characters who don’t simply annoy us. They manipulate us.
Peyton Flanders in The Hand That Rocks The Cradle (1992) is frightening because of how easily she hides what she’s really doing. She doesn’t need to storm into a house brandishing a weapon. She arrives as somebody the family trusts, patiently works her way into their lives and uses that trust against them.
Peyton’s calmness makes her especially unsettling. She smiles, plays the perfect nanny and quietly destroys the family from within. By the time people around her realize what she’s doing, she has already become part of their household.
Annie Wilkes from Misery (1990) takes control in a more direct way but her greatest weapon is still manipulation. She begins as Paul’s rescuer, giving him shelter after his accident but that kindness quickly reveals itself as a prison sentence.
Annie can be terrifying one moment and almost childlike the next. Her moods change without warning, leaving Paul constantly trying to figure out what version of Annie he’s going to face. That unpredictability is what makes her so difficult to watch. We know she is dangerous but Paul doesn’t know when she will become dangerous again.
And then there’s Rhoda Penmark from The Bad Seed (original 1956, remakes 1985 and 2018). Rhoda doesn’t need to raise her voice to threaten someone. She’s a child that has already learned to lie, manipulate and hide what she’s done. Her innocence becomes part of the deception.
There’s something deeply uncomfortable about watching adults dismiss the warning signs because Rhoda looked so sweet. She knows exactly how people perceive her and she uses it to her advantage.
The Ones We Really Hate
Some characters are irritating. Others are just awful.
Carter Burke from Aliens (1986) belongs firmly in the second category. At first, Burke seems like the reasonable company man sent along with the Marines. But as the situation on LV-426 collapses, it becomes clear that he is far more interested in protecting the company’s interests than protecting the people around him.
Burke’s worst quality isn’t cowardice. It’s the fact that he sees the nightmare unfolding around him and he still thinks he can get out of it. The Xenomorphs are not just monsters to him, they’re valuable specimens. Even the people around him become expendable if sacrificing them serves his need for success and the Weyland-Yutani Corporation’s interests. That makes Burke particularly easy to hate. He’s not some crazed killer. He’s a perfectly normal corporate executive who believes there is a price to be paid for promotion.
But if there is one character designed to make audiences furious, it’s Mrs. Carmody in The Mist (2007).
Carmody understands something very quickly: frightened people are looking for someone to tell them what to do. Instead of calming them, she gives their fear a purpose. She turns uncertainty into religious certainty and begins convincing the people around her that their suffering has meaning.
The danger isn’t that Mrs. Carmody is completely wrong. It’s that people start believing her.
As the situation deteriorates, she becomes more powerful, feeding on the panic of everyone around her. This causes the people near her to become almost as dangerous as the creatures outside. Carmody doesn’t need to be the strongest person in the room. She only needs everyone else around her to be afraid enough to listen.
And that’s why characters like these stay with us. The monster may be the one who gets the poster, the trailer and the nightmares but the human character is the one who makes us truly angry. They’re familiar. We recognize their selfishness. Their arrogance. Their cruelty and their ability to exploit fear.
The best horror villains frighten us.
The characters we love to hate make us want to reach through the screen and tell them exactly what we think of them.