10 MORE Ridiculous Horror Movie Villains That Shouldn’t Have Worked… But Did
7. The Dress - In Fabric (2018)
In Fabric centres around Sheila (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), a recently divorced bank teller who seeks new romantic opportunities and needs the right dress to make this happen. Unfortunate for her, then, that she buys her new red gown from a department store, whose staff and stock seem stuck in some haunting liminal state, and whose wares should most definitely not be trusted.
Director Peter Strickland's films are all replete with strange characters, odd setups and unconventional strings of causality, well and truly putting the art in horror, but this one takes the biscuit. The film's villain turns out to be the dress itself, which curses Sheila, breaks her washing machine, repeatedly attempts to injure her and ultimately succeeds in killing her and finding a new owner.
On paper a dress cannot work as a horror movie villain, and yet in practice it does just that. Occupying a space between Monkey's Paw cursed object and a demonic spirit in its own right, the dress menaces every scene it features in. Even when it's not floating in the road or choking its victims or slipping around the house, its mere presence makes us sit up, pay attention and never want to go clothes shopping again.