The Absolute Worst Horror Movie Boyfriends
When it comes to horror movies, there are a lot of trends and tropes that seem to dominate the genre. The car won't start until the killer is just close enough to brush fingertips to the door handle. The power goes out just as the biggest crack of thunder rocks the whole house, and the neighbor's dog starts going nuts. And all babysitters are required to field at least four hang-up phone calls after the kids go to bed. Even the most inventive fright flicks abide by at least a few of these standard plot lines.
One constant that we don't talk about often enough, though, is how universally terrible the boyfriends in horror movies tend to be. Whether they're psychotic stalkers or pompous jerks or just terrible decision-makers, scary movie beaus tend to cause a lot more problems than they solve. Let's take a look at those horror movie boyfriends who were absolutely the worst.
David meets Daddy's girl
There's obsessed, and then there's David McCall. In Fear, we're unfortunately introduced to David (Mark Wahlberg, still trying to break away from all his Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch fame at the time), and he's any father's worst nightmare right off the rip. It takes him almost no time to start developing an unhealthy infatuation with our leading lady, the teenaged Nicole (Reese Witherspoon), and bucking any attempts by her dad to keep him away from her.
Nicole's dad isn't just being overprotective about the guy either. Little by little, David starts to reveal how unhinged and violent he is, harming everyone from her best friend to a security guard to the poor family dog (and you know someone's a true movie lunatic when they go and hurt the dog). Despite all that he does to her loved ones, though, he still somehow believes that he and Nicole have a future and considers his lethal home invasion plot as just some grand gesture to get the two of them back together again. He's dangerous and deranged and completely clueless about what women want. The full package, folks.
Be afraid, be very afraid
To be fair to Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum), it isn't necessarily his fault that he's being slowly morphed into the Brundlefly in The Fly, but that doesn't mean anyone would want to put up with him once the side effects start kicking in. Even before he merges DNA with a horsefly, Seth is a bit questionable as boyfriend material — not only is he odd, but he's also a bit possessive over Ronnie (Geena Davis).
He becomes especially unpleasant, however, once he starts turning into the insectoid, after his little teleportation experiment goes so wrong. He starts being aggressive and showy on a physical level, and eventually loses all trace of empathy and emotion. Instead of trying to protect Ronnie from the danger he poses to her, he tries to force her to carry his baby to term and even attempts to fuse them together like some tri-brid fly-female-fetus monstrosity. It's bad enough that he gets himself into this mess by being so sloppy with his work station, but the fact that he wants to drag his girlfriend and unborn child down with him makes Seth an especially buggin' boyfriend.
Hello, Sidney
From the very start of Scream, it's clear that there's something just not right with Billy Loomis (Skeet Ulrich). With all of his shaggy hair, breathy talk, smouldering expressions and his rule-the-school-style sense of entitlement, he doesn't do much to hide the fact that he's a generic dirtbag throughout the movie's runtime. The film even winks to the fact that audiences will get a weird read on him by having him arrested early on and released when new evidence emerges that seems to exonerate him. What we don't find out 'til the end, though, is how thoroughly depraved the character really is.
He convinces girlfriend-slash-target Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) that he's innocent by employing the classic "I'm mad at you for even thinking it was me" defense-turned-offense. After successfully luring Sidney to give up her virginity to him, he's free to let his partner-in-crime Stu (whose own girlfriend Billy murdered earlier) take her out now. It doesn't work, and she eventually finds out that the two of them are responsible for all of those phone calls and cat-and-mouse games.
They say it's all just revenge for Sidney's mother breaking up the Loomis parents' marriage and that they're just emulating scary movies with their approach. Still, there's something particularly sinister in the fact that Billy turns his relationship with Sidney into a bedroom conquest that must be completed before the killing can begin. On top of being a psycho killer, he's also a sleaze.
He's sorry!
There's no doubt that the most abusive relationship Sarah (Robin Tunney) has in The Craft is with Nancy (Fairuza Balk) and the pair of selfish sidekicks who enable her. However, Chris (Skeet Ulrich) is a classic case of creepazoid as well. Instead of trying to pursue a legitimate relationship with Sarah, he decides to go and sully her reputation before she's even had a chance to establish one at her new school, telling everyone that he's already slept with her just to make himself look all big and bro-tastic. Not cool.
And while audiences might be reticent to blame the guy for every single act of desperation that follows him being put under that love spell by Nancy's newfangled coven, the curse probably only elevates behaviors which he is already capable of. So, later on in the movie when he tries to force himself on Sarah after she refuses to sleep with him, that is certainly still him being an inappropriate scumbag, cursed or not.
Just pass it along
Technically, "Hugh" a.k.a. Jeff Redmond (Jake Weary) isn't a horror movie boyfriend, but he is a horror movie hookup gone horribly wrong in It Follows. Hugh takes Jay (Maika Monroe) out on a date — first to the theater (where he has to make a speedy exit), and then to have a quick drink. Knowing what we do, it might've made more sense to do something else, like a bar crawl or a romance run, but perhaps he's just trying to play normal with these choices. Ultimately, it works because he manages to convince Jay that he's an ordinary guy with no ulterior motive whatsoever, and the two wind up hooking up in the back of his car.
Once the deed is done, he reveals the true motive for his interest and advances: he's passing her a terrifying supernatural curse in the hopes that she'll then pass it along to someone else who'll pass it on — and so on, until Hugh is so far removed from the chain that he can still live a long happy life. The whole movie is a thinly-veiled metaphor for the real-life threat of communicable ailments, and sexually-transmitted diseases in particular, so Hugh's decision to condemn her to a probable death just to save his own skin is both indefensible and one heck of a cinematic case for abstinence.
Love and a lamb mask
There are a lot of reasons it's not a good idea for students to date their college professors. It creates an unfair power dynamic, it could be against the university's policy, and, well, it's just kind of icky. The threat that they might secretly be plotting to kill you and their entire family during a group getaway probably isn't one of the common consequences, but in You're Next, that's exactly the situation Erin (Sharni Vinson) finds herself in. She joins her boyfriend Crispian (A.J. Bowen) on a family retreat with his siblings and parents, but he disappears while everyone else is being slaughtered by masked home invaders.
By the movie's end, Erin learns that Crispian actually orchestrated the attack and contracted the killers. Even though she's infinitely tougher than him or the hit squad he's hired to do his dirty work — apparently, she's kept some secrets from him as well — she's still hurt in the melees. As if sentencing his own family and girlfriend to death wasn't bad enough, Crispian was too afraid to even participate in his own vicious scheme. Coward.
Demons suck
To be fair to Paranormal Activity's Micah (Micah Sloat), he really did have a point when he said that Katie (Katie Featherston) should have given him some kind of heads up about her family's ghost curse before she moved in with him. That still doesn't excuse some of the stupid and unhelpful things he does once a vengeful spirit begins wreaking havoc on their home.
For one thing, he has an annoyingly relentless obsession with taping everything — he is worse than a helicopter parent at a kindergarten graduation with how glued his camera is to his palm — but at least that is a convenient plot device to help frame the film in its signature found footage style. The real problem with Micah is the fact that he decides it's a grand idea to taunt the demon that has been haunting them and then ignore Katie's wishes by "borrowing" a Ouija board, and of course all hell literally breaks loose. It's one thing that he goes all Blair Witch Project on everything, but it is quite another when the dummy starts actively inviting trouble from the mad poltergeist.
Top girl
Does a creepy internet stalker who pays a girl to flirt actually qualify as a boyfriend? The jury's still out on that one, but Tinker (Patch Darragh) is about as close as it gets in Cam. He seems to genuinely care about Alice (a.k.a. Lola_Lola), calling her directly on a regular basis to chit-chat about her off-camera life and showering her with tips and compliments. He even moves to her hometown to try and win her over in real life.
When the going gets tough, though, and Tinker finds out that his favorite cam girl's feed has been taken over by a computerized clone version of her, he fails spectacularly to intervene or even care very much. Instead of helping Alice in her hour of need, he sneaks off to chat with the impersonator who is making her life so hellish, because all he really cares about is looking at Alice online, in any form. It's bad enough that he takes the digital adult entertainment game way too seriously, but when he betrays Alice, after all that personal time she spent with him, that's when he becomes truly disconnected.
How stupendous
It's hard to know what has possessed Jenna (Danielle Panabaker) to ever date Trent (Travis Van Winkle) in the first place in the Friday the 13th reboot, but these movies don't exactly work if the characters all use logic and make good choices, do they? Trent is spoiled and arrogant and only invites his "friends" to his parents' lake house to show off how wealthy he and his family are.
He is also completely unkind — he even starts an argument with a guy who is only out searching for his missing sister. On top of all those terrible personality traits, he's also a cheater of the worst order. As soon as Jenna steps away from the lake house to do a good deed, he hooks up with her best friend, and their love scene is cringey enough to make anyone wonder why Jenna gives him the time of day. We won't quote it here, but what he says about the woman's bosom will make you laugh and cry all at once. Beauty is only skin deep with this one, that's for sure.
Kill her if you can, loverboy
What's a guy to do do when the woman he loves is suddenly turned into a Deadite by an ancient evil force that's been awoken by a weird book? For Ash Williams (Bruce Campbell) in The Evil Dead, the answer is to decapitate Linda (Betsy Baker) and then slice her still-animated body into bits. What a catch. Never mind the fact that this is all his fault, really — he's the one who brought out the Necronomicon and tape reading that set all the hellfire in motion in the first place.
Forgiving that, it's his next action that proves he's completely undateable forever. The 2000 video game Evil Dead: Hail to the King continues the Ash action and shows him dating a poor girl named Jenny from S-mart, whom he convinces to go back to the same cabin where all of the crazy and terrible things happened before. We're later told she died in an "accident" with a bus, but that's a little too convenient to be true, isn't it? Any time a guy has an alter-ego called "Bad Ash," it ain't good news.
Mother's cookies
The idea of a high school teacher engaging in an affair with a student — even if the student is past the age of consent — is upsetting under any circumstance. Worse than the college setting for such affairs, high school years are still so formative and devoid of responsible decision-making that it's inherently dangerous and predatory for teachers to have any personal relationship with students. So, The Boy Next Door's Claire (Jennifer Lopez) definitely deserves some scorn for sleeping with Noah (Ryan Guzman), knowing that he's her next-door neighbor, her son's friend, and a student at her school. But after she decides to call it quits as a result of the guilt and shame she feels about it all, his overreaction is intense.
He starts trying to win her back by vandalizing the school wall with a lewd message about their fling and blackmailing her with pictures and a video of their tryst. When that doesn't work, he starts making threats to her family — and all of this comes with the explicit caveat that his aggression will only end if she continues being his girlfriend. No definitely does not mean no for this guy.
Walk away
Carter Duncan (Michael Ealy) might be what the title's referring to in The Perfect Guy, but he is anything but. At first, he seems completely handsome and charming and exactly what Leah (Sanaa Lathan) needs to get over her breakup with Dave (Morris Chestnut). But when a simple encounter at a gas station with a stranger turns into a full-on attack from her new lover, his true personality reveals itself. He's not warm at all — he's vicious and impetuous and dangerous. Breaking up is hard to do under even the best of circumstances, but when a guy has as many screws loose as Carter, it's practically impossible.
Leah ends up having to recruit her ex-boyfriend to protect her from Carter as he stalks her at work, sneaks into her home, and even steals her cat... and that's the tame stuff. Eventually, things turn violent, and Leah must take matters into her own hands to prevent him from doing this all again — to her or other unsuspecting women. If you thought your last Tinder date was terrible, this guy could make anyone look like swipe right potential by comparison.