10 Horror Movie Villains With Surprisingly Boring Day Jobs

Seymour “Sy” Parish is a kindly technician at the one-hour-photo in SavMart, developing photos for families while they shop and always serving with a smile.

However, beneath this surface, he is obsessed, having been stalking the Yorkin family for years, copying their photographs and fixating over every aspect of their lives. Turbulent times lead to his firing, and soon he is untethered from the boring job that gave him meaning, and ready to stalk and manipulate the family into being everything he wants.

One Hour Photo (2002) showed us precisely what Robin Williams was capable of as an actor, trading on the credentials he had built with heavyweight roles like 1997’s Good Will Hunting and 1998’s What Dreams May Come. This time, however, he was the villain – a corrupted, lonely and lost individual whose most interesting elements were not in his work, but the darkness inside himself.

It is this contrast of such an everyday, mundane job and the dark secrets of Sy’s psyche that make him such a compelling villain, so in a sense we should be thankful for his day job, because without it he might just have been an unexceptional, well-adjusted human being. And where’s the horror in that?