Generally speaking, the most satisfying moment in any horror movie should be the antagonist – whether a mask-wearing slasher or CGI monster – finally being killed by the remaining survivors.
But sometimes horror movie villains are a little lacking in the IQ department and, one way or another, basically tee up their own demise through their ill-thought-out actions.
That’s absolutely the case with these 10 horror movie baddies, each of whom did something so profoundly stupid, so thoughtless, and so absent-minded, that they basically handed victory to the heroes on a silver platter.
Perhaps they took their eye off the task at hand and exposed their major weakness, attempted to foolishly play God, got misguidedly over-confident, or simply turned up to battle unprepared.
Whatever the careless, idiotic act, it ensured they were foiled, even if they were lucky enough to live to see another day (which, unsurprisingly, most of them weren’t).
No matter how many people these villains killed and how close to winning they got, they were still lunk-headed enough to cause their own dumb demise.
Any budding horror movie villains out there should absolutely take note of where these fools went wrong…
Werner Herzog’s Nosferatu the Vampyre may offer up a more sympathetic, tragic depiction of Dracula (Klaus Kinski), but he’s still Dracula, and in an ironic twist like only Herzog could serve up, goes out like an absolute chump.
Lucy Harker (Isabelle Adjani) hatches a plan to both exploit her beauty and take advantage of Dracula’s overpowering loneliness, by luring him to her bedroom and inviting him to drink her blood until dawn, effectively sacrificing herself for the greater good.
And the ruse works – Lucy’s radiant beauty distracts Dracula for long enough that he fails to notice the sun rising while feasting on her, causing him to suddenly collapse to the floor, dead. And to finish the job, Van Helsing (Walter Ladengast) then shows up and drives a stake through the Count’s heart.
While Dracula dying such an anti-climatic and avoidable death certainly fits Herzog’s vision of the horror icon as tortured and anguished, it doesn’t make him seem any less stupid.
