9 Movie Heroes & Villains That Didn't Know Each Other Existed
6. Mort Rainey & John Shooter - Secret Window
A bit of a cheeky one this perhaps, but c'mon, how could we resist the urge to include one movie where the hero and villain are actually the same person?
In Secret Window, protagonist Mort Rainey (Johnny Depp) is a depressed author who is accused of plagiarising a short story from a man called John Shooter (John Turturro).
Even accepting that Mort by his own admission did indeed steal another writer's story prior to this, he's insistent that Shooter is mistaken, and as he pushes back, finds Shooter threatening his very existence.
We're clearly on Mort's side against Shooter here, then, but everything changes when the climactic twist reveals that Shooter is actually a figment of Mort's imagination - a creation of his dissociative identity disorder, made to carry out murders which Mort consciously cannot.
By film's end, the Shooter personality has taken full control of Mort's body, and it's finally implied that the Shooter and Mort personas may have merged into a new whole.