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From split personalities to tragic time loops, discover a list of horror characters who were their own worst enemy. This video examines how internal struggles and fatal flaws led to their ultimate demise.
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00:00Sometimes protagonists don't need a big bad to send them reeling into terror, murder, mayhem, and death.
00:05Sometimes they manage it themselves.
00:07Whether by time travel, duplication, alcoholism, or a distant relationship with reality,
00:12these characters manage to screw up their lives beyond repair,
00:15causing the breakdown of their relationships, the death of their friends, and often grievous injury to themselves.
00:21So with that in mind, I'm Ellie with WhatCulture here with horror movie characters who were their own worst enemy.
00:27Malcolm in Identity.
00:302003's psychological horror flick Identity treads a fine line between compelling mystery and shamelessly bonkers surrealism.
00:37Serial killer Malcolm Rivers is on trial, awaiting a verdict on whether he will receive the death sentence for his
00:43crimes.
00:44Meanwhile, a group of ten strangers gather in a hotel and begin being killed off one by one.
00:49But how do these narratives connect?
00:51Well, writhing in on the wave of split personality films of the late 90s and early noughties,
00:56Fight Club, Primal Fear, Identity sought to take things one step further down the science fiction chain by having the
01:03vast majority of the film's action take place within one man's head.
01:07All ten characters are distinct personalities of Malcolm's, and Ed has been tasked with rooting out and eliminating the one
01:13murderous persona in hopes of liberating Malcolm from their deadly designs.
01:17Unfortunately, not all goes to plan, and Malcolm's evil personality, the nine-year-old Timmy, triumphs by killing all the
01:24others, assuming full control of Malcolm's psyche once and for all.
01:29And if that's too much to wrap your head around, think how Malcolm feels.
01:32Adam slash Anthony in Enemy
01:35Prior to his recent string of blockbuster hits, Denis Villeneuve was making his name on smaller but no less thought
01:41-provoking features,
01:43and few of these are more thought-provoking than the psychological sci-fi-inflected horror drama Enemy.
01:48While Enemy may be smaller in production scale and budget than the likes of Dune, it takes aim at far
01:54weightier concepts.
01:55Jake Gyllenhaal inhabits the role of both protagonist Adam Bell and his doppelganger and apparent antagonist Anthony Clare.
02:03Adam is a history professor with a dry life and a reliable schedule.
02:07Anthony is the exact opposite, an actor who drives a motorbike and frequents underground sex clubs.
02:12As the pair meet and reject each other, they begin having similar dreams and soon infiltrate the others' lives,
02:18sleeping with their opposite's wives and trying out each other's lifestyles.
02:22Their lives converge. Anthony is killed in a car crash with Adam's wife,
02:26and Adam appears to adopt Anthony's life wholesale before things pass a surreal tipping point.
02:31The film is tough to unpick, but whichever way you cut it, Anthony is a manifestation of Adam, and Adam
02:37is tearing his own life apart.
02:39Either he has regretted too long the things he didn't do, or is paying the price for the things he
02:44has done in secret.
02:45Maud in Saint Maud
02:47Saint Maud is a bit of a misnomer, as its main character Maud is anything but.
02:52The film focuses on the titular young hospice nurse, whose newfound Roman Catholic tendencies mingle with her growing psychopathy,
03:00resulting in devastating effects for those in her care.
03:03Identity, or a lack thereof, is central to the many ways in which Maud fails herself and the vulnerable people
03:09who are exposed to her,
03:10most notably atheistic dancer and choreographer Amanda, who is terminally ill with stage 4 lymphoma.
03:17In a case of extreme over-adjustment, Maud attempts to bury a hedonistic past in which she was responsible for
03:23the death of one of her charges,
03:25by acting holier-than-thou and thrusting her religion and moral strictures on those around her.
03:30Rather than seek psychological help, Maud looks outside of herself and blames the world while failing to deal with her
03:36own issues,
03:37ultimately ending in the murder of Amanda and Maud's self-immolition on the beach.
03:42Hector in Time Crimes
03:44Time Crimes may not have yet made it further than cult status, but the low-budget sci-fi horror nevertheless
03:50leaves the genre with a mind-bending plot and disastrously inept protagonist.
03:55Hector is a simple countryside dweller whose curiosity gets the better of him.
03:59He becomes the unwitting victim of a causal loop and must go to extreme lengths to try and prevent himself
04:05or his other selves, if you will, from continuing to exist.
04:09Hector's day starts out simply enough, renovating his house, peeping at a topless girl across the way,
04:15and being guided into a time machine by a mysterious voice on a walkie-talkie.
04:19Because of wibbly-wobbly-timey-wimey stuff, Hector is only sent back an hour, yet encounters not one or two,
04:26but three continuously changing versions of himself,
04:29all of whom have seen the actions of his future and past selves, and reacted accordingly in hopes of preventing
04:35him-slash-them entering the time machine several times over.
04:38By the film's conclusion, we discover Hector is the architect of every disaster that has befallen him,
04:44from initially being drawn into the machine, all the way to the accidental death of the topless girl.
04:50Bruised and battered, he sits on his lawn, reflecting on everything he's done, perhaps reckoning the difference a day makes.
04:56Nina Sayers in Black Swan
04:58Darren Aronofsky has a rich history of bringing complex and self-destructive characters to the screen,
05:04but few are as much their own worst enemy as Nina Sayers, the protagonist of Black Swan.
05:10Leading a production of Swan Lake with the New York City Ballet Company,
05:14Nina finds herself competing for and embodying the roles of both the fragile, innocent White Swan and the dark, seductive
05:21Black Swan.
05:21She finds her opposite in Lily, and while for much of the film it would appear that Lily is attempting
05:26to sabotage Nina at every turn,
05:29not all is as simple as it seems.
05:31Collapsing under the pressure of the production, Nina fails to get enough me time and goes postal,
05:36succumbing to a persecution complex and nightmarish hallucinations of herself, Lily, and the creatures from the ballet.
05:43Determined, despite her ailing physical and mental health, to complete a perfect performance,
05:47Nina pushes and pushes herself,
05:49climaxing in a fight in which she stabs herself with a large shard of glass from, of all things, her
05:55mirror.
05:56Adelaide in Us
05:57Before Nope, there was Us, Jordan Peele's second foray into the world of horror,
06:02and by all accounts, one of the more creative and intriguing horror films to hit our screens in years.
06:08Lupita Nguongo leads the cast as Adelaide Wilson,
06:11a mother of two who suffers from chilling memories of a dark and disturbing past,
06:15and who tries to get away from it all for a while by going on vacation with her family.
06:19But it seems a quiet life is too much to ask for,
06:22and a family of four doppelgangers, the Wilsons doubles in every way but their voices,
06:26turn up at the beach house with murder and vengeance, and who only knows what else on their minds.
06:31Adelaide's counterpart is Red,
06:33and we discover that her horrific anti-family comes from a tethered world underneath the one we know,
06:38where each individual, or genetic clone as is later revealed, shares a soul with their human counterpart.
06:44Not only is Adelaide her own worst enemy in the sense of her soul-tethered doppelganger reaping havoc upon her
06:50life,
06:50but it transpires that Adelaide is in fact Red herself,
06:53having tricked the real Adelaide and switched places when they were younger.
06:57She in Antichrist
06:59There aren't many possible horrors that haven't been visited upon Lars von Trier's characters
07:04across the course of his perpetually shocking career,
07:06and yet few do so much to harm themselves and ruin their own lives as the female protagonist of Antichrist.
07:12Regular Trier-hugger Charlotte Gansborg plays the part, credited only as she, opposite Willem Dafoe's he.
07:19A researcher in the history of witchcraft, she is having sex with her husband
07:23when their toddler son climbs onto a windowsill and falls to his death.
07:27What follows is the manifestation of her grief, pain, and despair at the accident,
07:32manifesting in an ever more unhinged approach to the world she inhabits.
07:36The couple abscondes to a cabin in the woods to try and work through some things, as you do,
07:40but while there, she tortures her husband, mutilates her own genitals,
07:44and essentially baits her partner into killing her.
07:47Why?
07:47Well, as if that all wasn't enough.
07:50It turns out she watched her infant son climb onto the windowsill and did nothing,
07:54perhaps to aid her studies on witchcraft and evil, or perhaps simply because she was evil.
08:00Jess in Triangle
08:01British indie horror Triangle has never quite made the numbers it should,
08:06but in terms of plotting, execution, and sheer twisted fun,
08:09it rivals the likes of Primer as one of the best dark time travel flicks around.
08:13At the heart of the story is Jess, a young woman with a serious case of déjà vu,
08:18who sets out on an ill-fated boat trip with her friends.
08:21The boat gets caught up in a storm, and Jess and the gang are forced to flee onto a passing
08:25ocean liner.
08:25Drawing liberally from the X-Files episode of the same name,
08:29Triangle's deserted ocean liner harbours a murderer,
08:32a mystery, and a precarious position in the space-time continuum.
08:36When a maniac in a hessian hood starts slaughtering the friends,
08:39Jess has to act if she's to survive.
08:41But perhaps she acts a little too much.
08:43Unmasking the killer, Jess discovers it is, well, Jess,
08:47who tells herself to kill her pals.
08:49Caught in the time loop, Jess comes to believe that the only way to escape
08:52is by murdering everyone on board, because that checks out.
08:56Consumed by a mixture of idiocy, desperation, and the noxious fog of fate,
09:00Jess goes on a rampage that leads her not just to kill her friends,
09:04but also herself many times over.
09:06The film ends with the only surviving Jess boarding the boat from the beginning of the film,
09:10thus starting the loop all over again.
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