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Column # 9: A More Vulnerable Evil

During viewing The Hills Have Eyes remake, specifically a rather grisly fight scene, I saw something that upset me. Fighting for his life, our protagonist was picked up and thrown by his mutant combatant like he was a rag doll. “Oh,” I said, “apparently radiation endows one with super human strength.”

The un-killable, invincible bad guy has been a staple of the genre ever since “The Night HE Came Home.” And while the villain in Hills wasn’t invincible, he certainly was more than human.

If there’s one thing I’m tired of seeing in horror movies, it’s one dimensional, “the physical embodiment of pure evil” type of villains who are not only recognizably inhuman, but possess amazing supernatural abilities that give them an enormous edge over their victims.

Don’t get me wrong, I love Halloween, and I like a simple, “un-killable villain stalks teens” movie as much as the other guy, but I think that type of film has over-whelmed the genre, turning horror into a genre that only showcases wild fantasy.

Villains like the superhuman brute in Hills have become a dime a dozen, and have seemed to push the human villain into the realm of obscurity.

As a horror fan I would like to see more interesting, multi-layered villains who, get this, are just regular people. Michael Myers can seemingly disappear from one point to another at the convenience of the script, but wouldn’t it be interesting if he couldn’t? How would a real killer find his victims, how would he get from place to place? Why is he trying to kill people anyway?

Hills, and a gazillion films like it don’t care about these questions, choosing to ignore them with an overly simplified “good vs. evil” angle. Not only is the bad guy bad, but he’s so bad that he can’t be killed, and he can do and survive anything thrown at him until the climax of the movie. To my jaded eyes this is too convenient, too simple, and, frankly, too boring.

Max (Kevin Howarth) looks pretty normal...

Flawed, human villains aren’t completely extinct, just look at The Devil’s Rejects, Session 9, or the great UK film The Last Horror Movie. In Last, we watch the video journal of serial killer Max Perry. The film is interesting in the sense that not only does it show Max’s monstrous side, but it shows him playing with his sister’s kids, eating dinner with friends, and visiting his grandmother.

Real evil does exist, and is not perpetrated by demons and monsters and deformed cannibals, but by people like you and me. People who make choices, horrible choices yes, but ones that horror cinema should more often choose to look at in a serious way.

The next time you watch Jason slash his way through an hour and a half, just remember that brain dead, emotionally neutral killing machine isn’t what real horror looks like. Real horror lives in the eyes of Max Perry, as he smiles and talks about the first time he killed someone. -Vhs Caveman, 5/1/06