Villain Protagonists in Horror

[atelierpenny]

 

Spoilers for:

The Babadook (2014 film)

Mouthwashing (2024 game)

The Only Good Indians (2020 novel)

 

I titled this post “Villain Protagonists in Horror” but it is really about misdirection in horror, and I noticed they all happened to be protagonists themselves in the end, in some fashion or another. Get misdirected IDIOT

My opinion on The Babadook changed several times throughout viewing. The titular hatman children's book entity stalking a broken family is quite stupid and hard to take seriously. I damn near burst out laughing whenever the monster popped out on screen. If it was not for the honestly very effective prop and good acting, I would have written this movie off partway through. However, the babadook is not the true monster. Amelia, a grieving mother gets slowly more and more fed up with her son acting out in school and at home. Sure, the kid is loud and misbehaving. But hes just a normal kid unable to express his developing emotions over the loss of his father and the seemingly random and cruel actions of his mother. Sure, the kid is scared of monsters in his book (I was scared of the damn I SPY haunted house skeleton so he is way more justified than me), but the story is infinitely clearer when viewed from his perspective rather than the moms. Hes scared that the one person who is supposed to love him cannot stand him seemingly at random. Not that the film is saying that mental illness and trauma irreversably breaks a person or anything. Amelia is the protagonist and the film is very sympathetic to her, mostly taking place in her own head. The babadook himself is her anguish and hurt festering within her, and hence what the kid is scared of. I do feel the film makes the metaphor a bit too real by making the babadook seemingly a real thing within Amelia's house that she has to feed bugs or whatever the fuck lest she tries to kill her son. When presented in this way, the film portrays the depression and anguish central to it as cartoonish, the way a shitty parent might brush aside their child's mental health problems because they think the kid is just being lazy or over-dramatic. However, living in the mind of this child, experiencing his fear and broken trust, made viewing the film more than worth it.

Mouthwashing views Jimmy, the player character for most of the game, in a far less compassionate light than The Babadook does to its protagonist. I probably do not have much to say about this very beloved and praised game that has already been said, but its narrative did touch me and stick with me. The characters of the space traveling delivery ship in Mouthwashing are all doomed, with a scant few cryostasis pods to let the crew potentially live. At the root of this is a traumatizing, horrific sexual assault of flighty ship doctor Anya by the protagonist off-screen. Jimmy hates nearly everyone on the ship, viewing them for their lowest moments and in the harshest of lenses. He is the protagonist, the one to escape, because he demands to tell the story, lest anyone know the whole truth of what he has done. Anya is doomed to be a side character, a thorn in the side of this putrid man demanding to be the hero of the story. Other entities in the ship are at play, sure, but much of the horror lies in the different ways Jimmy exploits and ruins the trust his crew places in him throughout the narrative.

I save The Only Good Indians for last because it has perhaps the most interesting view of this type of protagonist. The novel jumps between different perspectives of the Elk Head monster's victims as they die. The second perspective follows Lewis, a man who left his friends at the Blackfeet tribe reservation after a traumatizing night of hunting to settle down with his later-wife, an outsider. He tries to assimilate to life in a predominantly white area, but finds trouble, especially as he is reminded of his past. A series of illusions (viewed, through the eyes of the narrator and genre savvy reader, as very real and threatening) lead to him viewing various people in his life as a vengeful spirit bent on revenge. Something that is in part true but not in the way he thinks. These illusions eventually drive Lewis to kill his wife and close friend (someone who the spirit acts as later in the book). In many a horror story, this is where it would end, open and shut. However, years pass, and you get to see Lewis's friends back home react to and reminisce on the murky and mysterious events of Lewis's final moments before the police kill him for his crimes. Some assume the best of him, some think he really did go crazy; it lingers on their minds for the rest of the novel, informing their decisions.

A writing trick like this is far from new, despite what the release dates of these works may lead one to believe. I know it is nothing special, but moments like these particularly stuck with me as a horror fan who has been around the block and as someone who had their trust massively violated very recently. Anticipation and suspense and terror seem to hit me far harder when they come from somewhere I once viewed as a harmless place.