10 MORE Ridiculous Horror Movie Villains That Shouldn’t Have Worked… But Did

It’s a classic story: a pair of young lovers go on a crime spree, breaking away from society’s norms to express their love through violent transgression. In Villains’ case, the couple are Mickey (Bill Skarsgard) and Jules (Maika Monroe), and their crimes kick off with a petrol station heist, before they rather ironically run out of petrol, leading them to break-and-enter a house in the sticks.

But, as we horror fans know, a house in the sticks is the last port of call in a storm. Mickey and Jules are thrown into a chaotic fight to survive when the eccentric homeowners, Gloria (Kyra Sedgwick) and George (Jeffrey Donovan) - who, by the way, have a young girl chained up in their basement - return home and open up a can of psycho.

Running contrary to the film's purported realism, the ascot-and-lace-bodice-wearing homemakers are exceedingly OTT from the outset, but this is precisely where the film finds its foothold. Their presence jacks things up into a different register, offsetting the bare facts of what, without them, could have been a rather grim kidnap/torture home invasion movie.

Despite the foreboding premise, and the presence of IT-man Bill Skarsgard, Villains manages some genuinely hysterical black comedy as a result, playing the young criminals’ idiocies and inefficacies off against the deep absurdities of their reluctant hosts, encompassing fake doll children, awkward bondage seductions, and a general wackadoo tone.