10 Horror Movie Villains Who Were Completely Unprepared

The Grabber, Ethan Hawke's twisted take on a masked serial child murderer, is the primary antagonist of 2021's The Black Phone. The film begins in the midst of a spree of recent child abductions and the police simply cannot find Hawke's elusive predator. It's a great story; the problem is just how unbelievable it is.

The Grabber is an almost spectral force, able to swoop in and seize a child, before disappearing in a figurative puff of smoke, leaving the boys in blue scratching their heads. The issue is the sharp juxtaposition between the Grabber's actions within the film and his terrifying, almost untouchable, aura of menace.

Hawke's antagonist wastes no time in highlighting just how spectacularly unprepared he was for a long-term turn as a terrifying kidnapper. In the first instance, the cretinous villain is revealed to have hidden his latest victim and the film's protagonist Finney, in the same house as his brother Max, who is somehow blissfully unaware of both the young boy in the basement and of how dense he and his brother are.

Does any of this scream "well prepared"? The Grabber also somehow manages to fall asleep on duty, as one does when they have an abducted person locked in their basement, allowing Finney to nearly escape. Hawke's murderer ultimately is tricked into falling into a hidden pit - after essentially losing a brawl with a scrawny teenager - and is strangled by Finney with a phone cable. Welp.