10 Horror TV Shows That Broke All The Rules

Pretty often, the heroes that we root for and fall in love with in horror are sold as being completely without serious fault. It’s a rule of horror: to survive you must be deserving of it in the most basic, un-nuanced way. If you do even just one bad thing, you shouldn't survive.

Squid Game, however, uses the first couple of episodes to set protagonist Seong Gi-hun up as a selfish, reckless, thieving scum-bag. He steals from and mooches off his elderly mother, he’s a deadbeat dad with little to no interest in actually engaging with his daughter, he’s a reckless gambler who refuses to get help and change his ways - he really is quite a horrible bloke.

Whilst we see glimmers of potential, the overwhelming sense we get is that he is mostly out for his own gain - something you don’t often see as shows try to endear you and force you to connect with their characters.

Each of the characters we meet are far less than perfect: there are murderers, drug-traffickers, liars and thieves, the whole lot! In the genre, so often only the virtuous final girl survives as the rest of the sinners are punished, but Squid Game gave us a whole host of hugely flawed characters and made us fall in love with them all the same as their true natures blossomed.