8 Horror Movie Villains You Can’t Help But Sympathise With

6. The Family - Us

Jordan Peele left audiences everywhere with a dropped jaw when 'Us' hit theatres. A fantastic horror with an even better soundtrack, Lupita Nyong'o smashed it out of the park with her unfaltering performance as both 'Adelaide' and 'Red'.

After being terrified by her reflection at a carnival House of Mirrors as a child, Adelaide was rendered mute by her parents and a psychiatrist due to her experience. The audience is soon after introduced to a fully grown Adelaide with her present day nuclear family and follow their trip to the old boat house she used to holiday in as a child.

Upon returning to the house, Adelaide can sense that something does not seem quite right, and confides in her husband about her experience at the carnival as a young girl. As the day draws to a close and night falls, a family of speech-impaired doppelgangers gain entry into the boat house and terrify Adelaide and her family.

Here the audience meets these individuals called the 'tethered' and comes to understand the true motivations behind their actions.

It turns out Adelaide’s counterpart, Red, and the rest of her family, have been forced to live underground mimicking the lives of their above partner. Every move that Adelaide made, Red would have had to follow. Every time Adelaide gave birth to another child, Red would have no choice but to do the same but without medical assistance.

The true extent of the burden of the ‘tethered’ is addressed further into the movie, but the sympathy for these characters starts to arise almost immediately after hearing Red’s story, and only grows as the film progresses.