10 Horror Movie Characters Who Died Breaking Their Own Rules

"Rules are meant to be broken."

For those of you reading the above sentence and nodding your head along in agreement, chances are that you would not last very long in a horror movie.

While these rules often take the form of a character's integral personal principles, there are also the rarer cases in which survival is quite literally contingent on the inherent directive of the respective film's universe.

As such, many players within horror films who choose to play it fast and loose with the rules often inevitably bite the dust in gruesome fashion. With the gift of foresight, character deaths in several standout genre examples can nearly always be traced back to the moment where they made the decision to contravene their own personal mandates.

Heroes, villains, supporting characters; no-one is safe from this brutal status quo, presenting them with a hellish conundrum. The insane nature of horror universes normally dictates that some form of rule-breaking is a necessity in the interests of survival, yet multiple examples exist in which the instant a rule was broken, the doom of the person who broke it was sealed. In this morbid light, it's an almost comically harsh state of affairs.

However, this is the horror genre, where happy endings go to die a grizzly death. For those wishing to break rules and survive, stick to Fight Club.

In one of the more noble examples on this list, we have the ship's captain in 2012's Prometheus: Janek, played in a superb supporting turn by action mainstay Idris Elba.

Janek is employed by the Weyland Corporation to captain the titular research vessel to LV-223. As such, he is under strict orders to carry out Peter Weyland's instructions to the letter, parroted by the mouthpiece of his daughter Meredith Vickers.

Elba's character is a good, moralistic man and clearly struggles with some of the more devastating decisions that the crew are forced to make on their harrowing journey. The captain notably pleads with Vickers to allow the stricken Holloway onboard the ship before she barbecues him with a flamethrower. Nevertheless, Janek ultimately does not prevent the archaeologist's gruesome fate, highlighting that loyalty to his employer is one of his key personal principles.

However, when all is said and done, Janek's Employee of the Month status at the Weyland Corporation does not prevent him from ploughing the research vessel into the Earth-bound alien ship like an intergalactic kamikaze fighter. The captain heroically sacrifices his own life, going out in a blaze of glory to protect his planet by taking out the Engineers' spacecraft. A hidden gem of a supporting character within the genre and a prime example of a character who met his end in abject defiance of his own professional code.