10 Horror Movie Characters Who Got Off Too Easy
These characters all deserved SO much worse.
Much as horror movies are largely concerned with death and destruction, they're also often about wish fulfilment, of introducing the audience to easy-to-loathe characters who, by film's end, we expect to see brutally killed by the antagonistic force.
Not all horror films work this way, but a lot of them do, because it's that much more satisfying to watch someone get skewered by the hatchet-wielding maniac when they happen to be an absolute chud. Yet sometimes horror films decide to defy the expected outcome and let their most unlikeable characters get off light, leaving the audience wishing something much, much worse happened to them.
In some of the following ten movies it's simply that the horrible character in question managed to survive against the odds, while in others viewers were left complaining that their death scene just wasn't nasty and punitive enough. Whatever the reason, these horror movie characters all ended the movie without receiving a sufficiently gnarly comeuppance for their obnoxious, criminal, and downright nauseating conduct.
While we can't always expect folk to get what's coming to them in the real world, in movies it sure is nice to see that fantasy played out. But alas, not in these films...
10. Edwidge Owens - The Purge: Election Year
One of the primary villains in the third Purge film is Edwidge Owens (Kyle Secor), a minister and Presidential candidate for far-right political party The New Founding Fathers of America.
Even for the low standards of the NFFA's racist, hateful membership, Owens is a real piece of work alright, not only plotting to have his political rival Charlene Roan (Elizabeth Mitchell) assassinated, but annually holding a grim midnight mass on Purge Night where he sacrificially slaughters innocents.
He's a maniacal religious zealot, and so it sure as hell seemed like he was going to get his brutal comeuppance at film's end. But eh, not really. Though most of Owens' congregation are killed in Election Year's climax, Owens himself is spared when Roan insists that he stay alive so she can beat him in an election. How noble.
And while that's ultimately what happens, with Roan winning the election in a landslide, Owens never sees any tangible, physical punishment for his many crimes, and hasn't been seen in the series since.