10 Horror Movie Characters Who Repeatedly Made The Wrong Decisions
When horror movie characters have negative survival instinct.
It's not unfair to say that most horror movies are set in motion by characters acting in irrational, even stupid ways, because if everyone conducted themselves sensibly, most horror films wouldn't last that long.
It's a concession we as genre fans must accept, and while great horror fare attempts to offer up smart characters with an actual regard for their own well-being, they're still rarities.
It's basically expected that most horror movie characters will do at least one dumb thing which threatens their own survival, and honestly, a little stupidity isn't the end of the world, given that most folk wouldn't act totally sensibly in a real life-or-death scenario. But in the case of the following 10 characters, each repeatedly made awful decisions which caused them to become endangered and, in most instances, end up on a morgue slab.
If we as viewers like to see characters learn from their mistakes and do better next time, these hapless meat-sacks just made bad decision after bad decision, enough that it became increasingly difficult to root for their survival, no matter how much the movie wanted us to...
10. Dr. John McCabe - The Beyond
As a famous movie villain once said, "You should've aimed for the head."
Lucio Fulci's classic 1981 zombie film The Beyond centers around Liza Merrill (Catriona MacColl), who inherits a Louisiana hotel which happens to be built over one of the entrances to Hell.
The other main character is Dr. John McCabe (David Warbeck), who apparently has never seen a zombie movie in his life before - perhaps a slightly more reasonable "crime" in 1981 - nor even appreciates the basic idea of cause-and-effect.
In the movie's climax, McCabe grabs a gun and starts firing away at the undead horde, but having no apparent familiarity with either firearms or zombies, he continually aims for the torso rather than the head.
However, one of his stray bullets does eventually catch a zombie in the head, killing them instantly. A seemingly revelatory lightbulb moment for McCabe, right? Nope.
Throughout the scene, McCabe bafflingly alternates between shooting the zombies in the chest and head, as though he just can't quite connect the dots as to why some of the zombies are dropping down dead-for-good and others aren't. For an apparent expert in anatomy, that's mighty dumb.