10 Most evil objects in movies.

Freddy Kruger is possibly one of the most recognisable faces in horror, even just his silhouette is instantly recognizable with the claw and hat. It’s a classic design.  Even when our bad guy doesn’t have a face, like Jason with his hockey mask and big old boots or Michael Myers with the bone white mask and boiler suit they all have strong character design. The bad guys’ design is particularly important and can make or break a franchise, if Darth Vader had rocked up in a silver suit instead of a stately black one, would he have had the same impact?

Here we look at bad guys who aren’t just unremarkable looking, they are straight-up ordinary objects, okay with one exception, but it still doesn’t have a face so it’s going on the list.

From a psychotic tire with telekinetic powers to an automatic ironing machine possessed by dark forces beyond our comprehension here we have 10 of the best bad guys in horror without a face.

Rubber is an absurd satire on filmmaking and the nature of stories that comes to us from French writer/director Quentin Dupieux. The film is a meta-commentary on how some things happen for no reason, with no motivation or intent. We’re told as much in the opening minutes of the film when a man dressed as a sheriff emerges from the boot of his car (just go with it) and rattles off a list of things that happen in movies for no reason. This sheriff, Chad, both comments on and participates in the action, which takes part in the movie for a live audience who watch the events unfold.

The main part of the story follows a sociopathic tyre with telekinetic powers called Robert (as I said, just go with it).  Robert rolls through the desert and kills anything he comes across with his mind until he happens across a crumby roadside motel.

Meanwhile, the ‘audience’ of the film is murdered by a poisoned Turkey, and Chad, having dropped the sheriff character has to get back into character and hunt down Robert, who he blows to kingdom come for the benefit of the last surviving audience member who then gets detonated by Robert who has reincarnated as a child’s tricycle – because of course he has.

It’s a daft, slightly grimy, and faintly unpleasant film that does what it set out to achieve.  And what was that? hell if I know!

Idealistic young new hire, Libby, goes to work for Canadian Cotton Company a trendy, if somewhat vapid, clothing shop on the same night that a new product launch is due, new jeans that are to couture what sliced bread is to sandwiches, these new shape shifter jeans are designed to flatter every body type.

Only one small – size zero, if you will – problem.  The jeans are enthused with the blood of an innocent child labourer who died harvesting cotton, and as such are hungry for revenge.  In this 2020 horror comedy, we take a deep dive into the bonkers, but if you just go with it you end up with quite a good yarn about consumer culture and how vapid corporate identity can be malignant. It’s filled with some genuinely funny moments and some nice character beats.

From a neurotic branch manager so keen to climb the corporate ladder that they are willing to ignore the cadavers of his erstwhile colleagues to the snarky passive aggressive co-workers the character beats are dead on, and anyone who has worked retail will be able to point to an archetype that they had to put up with for some time.

The director, Elza Kephart, delivers a fair few good kills – from one woman bisected by a particularly nasty wedgie to an (immensely satisfying) scene where the craven store manager is stripped down to the bone – as well as the funny stuff and at its core is a deliciously subversive message about how corporate culture and blind brand loyalty are powerful tools, that can be misused very easily. 

Split over two different time periods 11 years apart, Mike Flanagan’s Oculus tells the story of a pair of siblings battling a supernatural force that is contained in a 250-year-old mirror, which is odd, the only thing in my mirror is a slightly overweight, hairy, middle-aged man. Starring Karen Gillan (Kaylie) as the older sister of Brenton Thwaites (Tim). The split time period really works in the movie’s favour as past and present start to bleed into each other and as our heroes’ sense of what is real gets warped so we question if what we are seeing is real.

11 years ago Kaylie and Tim bore witness to their dad having a psychotic break and brutally murdering their mother, distraught and with one parent dead and the other a clear danger Tim shot their dad, except… it turns out it was all the fault of an evil looking glass, one that had been killing people since 1754, in a nod to HP Lovecraft’s work the true nature of whatever has made this mirror so evil remains unnamed and mysterious.

Concentrating more on a slow sense of creeping dread than on excessive gore this story of a malignant mirror mesmerises with a solid performance from Gillan in her first American role.  Oculus is worth your time if you want a break from the off-putting and disquieting fields of horror where unknowable evil hides as an everyday object.

While on holiday in Mexico, four American students meet a charismatic German backpacker, Matias, who invites them to an archaeological dig in the ruins of an ancient Mayan temple hidden in the jungle.  The temple looks impressive, it was apparently 3 different huge sets, and it really looks the part, and the titular vines snaked all over it look fantastic, as our clueless gringos get closer a man rides out of the rainforest like a bat out of hell, shouting at them and waving a hand cannon around. There is a wonderfully tense scene where our heroes are trying to work out what the armed, alarmed and in command stranger wants (at what stage do you just lift your hands and back the hell out of their clearing?) but one of our heroic team gets shot dead, while another steps onto one of the vines.  This really doesn’t sit well with the leader who is beside himself now shouting and waving his gun around.

What follows is a solid tension thriller as they come to realise that they are being quarantined in the ruins, there is an utterly harrowing bit where one of them injures themselves badly and has to have their legs amputated. 

The vines themselves have a taste for blood and start to infest the remaining students, the Myans are just trying desperately to contain the deadly creepers. Creepers that we find out are able to mimic the sound of a mobile phone ringing or make sounds like people talking, as they succumb one by one to insanity or the infestation.

A word then, on wishes, if you are gifted an item that grants wishes then – for the love of Gygax – say the words “I wish” With the caution you would normally reserve for “Please castrate me with a rusty can opener.” It never ends well, In Wish Upon we meet Clare Shannon, a high school student who saw her mom commit suicide some years ago. Clare’s dad deals with his loss by becoming a hoarder who harvests junk from local dumpsters (much to her chagrin when he does it in front of the school).  Of course, Clare has a bully in the form of a rich mean girl, an unrequited crush and – shock horror – just wants to be popular. Now, horror gets a lot of stick for the protagonists always being pretty young things who act like thirty-somethings, wish upon seeing that trend and swerve off to the side making Clare, depending on your viewpoint, realistically immature or a selfish bowl of bitch sauce.

Clare is gifted a music box that her dad found in a dumpster, a box that, she finds out after getting some of the ancient Chinese translated, grants wishes. As she starts to wish for things to make her life immediately better, her bully to suffer, a cute boy to love her, money, and popularity… a price is paid.  Clare is told plainly about the blood price, knows that it is, in fact, real and just goes ahead making wishes anyway with the arrogance of youth and it does not end well as the bodies pile up. 

An old favourite, the mangler is set around Gartley’s Blue Ribbon Laundry service and in particular one of their machines that comes down with a nasty case of demonic possession. Based around a Stephen King short story, the Mangler spawned two sequels of questionable quality and has a pretty solid cast with Robert Englund and Ted Levine taking centre stage. 

The film follows John Hunton, a police officer as he looks into some weird happenings that he traces back to the laundry, with the help of his brother-in-law who is a demonologist (and after an encounter with a possessed refrigerator) they come to understand that the blood of a virgin (Gartley’s Niece) got into the machine and accidentally made it home to a particularly nasty demon, only, some antacids also found their way in that contained belladonna.  This is important because as Mark is fond of reminding us, this is also known as the hand of glory and is like speed for demons. As they try and exorcize the machine, it seems for a moment they have won, but we find out it was just playing possum.  It morphs around itself shedding parts as it goes and chases Hunton and Sherry through the laundry that looks as if it belongs in Pinhead’s property portfolio. They manage to outrun it and get away. 

However, the machine has ‘marked’ Sherry as one of its own because for generations powerful people in the town have been giving sacrifices to the machine in return for good fortune.  And as she raises her hand to wave, we see she is missing her ring finger and that the machine is back in its place without a scratch on it.

Stephen King has got some serious issues; he wants his readers to be scared of everything from a friendly old Saint Bernard to an oversized trouser press… he even had us looking nervously at toy soldiers and cigarette smoking (more than once!) and in 1983 he wanted us to think very carefully about our cars.

Christine is a story about a killer 1958 Plymouth Fury, is so bonkers that even the Screenwriter Bill Phillips thought that it was a joke when he was asked to adapt a novel about a killer car to the big screen.

It’s a solid slasher, once you adapt to the killer being a car that is. Overall, there were 24 cars that represented Christine in this adaptation, as more than once the car gets wrecked (but magically heals itself) and all but 2 of the cars used were destroyed during the making of the film – cars accounted for 15% of the budget for the movie.

A high school nerd – Arnie – buys the wrecked car for a song and starts to restore it. As he works on Christine, he ‘improves’, shedding his nerdy glasses and dressing better, his mannerisms becoming more self-confident, cocky even. Arnie even gets himself a flesh-and-blood girl. (She and Christine don’t get along.) Buddy, a bully who was suspended for threatening Arnie with a switchblade, takes a little vengeance as he and his gang wreck the car, Christine heals from this and hunts down the vandals one by one. Things get worse from there ending with Arnie perishing with his beloved car as Christine is crushed into a cube.

A supernatural tail, based on a 2015 short film, itself cribbed from a 1994 episode of Are You Afraid of the Dark? This dark story looks at the rings video tape and asks, “But how about with more child murder?”

We join Bird; a shy, introverted photography geek as she is gifted a vintage Polaroid camera her outgoing friend drags her to a house party, so far so cookie cutter, as it turns out though the camera isn’t just a standard hipster accessory, anyone who has their photo taken with this camera dies horribly soon afterwards.

As the group of disposable pretty young things try and work out why they are being bumped off we learn a little backstory, the only information we have to go on is the original owners initials scratched into the case, RJS, we find out about Roland Joseph Sable a photography teacher who tortured and killed a group of his students back in the 70s. later on we find that the camera actually belonged to his daughter, Rebecca Jane Sable, and we are told that Roland murdered those children because they bullied Rebecca into committing suicide because of some humiliating photos (and all without the need for social media too!) except… that was a lie as well! The only survivor from the incident was the sheriff who drops the real truth, Roland was not only a child killer he was also abusing his daughter, it was HIS photos that led to Rebecca’s suicide, and when Roland was shot dead by the police, guess what he was holding as he died? Leading to one seriously haunted Camera.  Your probably better off with the camera on your phone.

Not so much of a movie as it is a fever dream, no for real, I was sick when I first watched this and had to stay up and watch it again just to make sure I wasn’t completely going out of my gored! Where to start? The acting is, well If I where to say it was bad, that would imply there was actual acting taking place. There isn’t any, at one stage a guy loses all the flesh on both hands and reacts to this with an expression of bored indifference.

The writer/director apparently wrote the whole film in one draft after having the plot come to him in a dream, and despite its relatively small budget of $30,000 the film had quite a protracted release, the film was shot in and around Detroit, Michigan in 1972 and finished in 1977.

The plot of the film is broken down into 4 courses, through out which we learn that in 1897 a demon fell in love with a human woman, as they often do, and conjured up a bed to consummate there union on, during the process of which the woman died, the demon was so moved he wept tears of blood which spilt on the bed and imbued it with a kind of unholy life. And boy, is it one hungry lump of bedroom furniture. The only person to be spared the unhallowed fate of being eaten alive was the films narrator, identified as Aubrey Beardsley but only credited as ‘the artist’ who – due to being deathly ill – was instead cursed to reside in a drawing and watch the bed devour its victims.

Part acid trip, part non sequenator nightmare and all bonkers this is worth tracking down just for the novelty value, its not a good film, far from it, and somehow its all the better for that.

Ah! Hello again Mr King, this time we go from a killer car and an iron with a strop on to a hotel room that will kill you… he just wants to ruin weekend trips, doesn’t he?  Initially, 1408 was never intended to be a full story, let alone a movie, he wrote a couple of pages for his book “On Writing” with the intention of showing how the drafting process works, the story caught his mind, and he ended up adapting it for an audio-book compilation of short stories.

In 1408 we follow a jaded and cynical writer of supernatural travel guides, Mike Enslin, who is looking for a way to end his latest book with a bang, and as it transpires the Dolphin has a nasty little surprise hiding on its 14^th floor, a room that over the 95 year history of the Dolphin has been the cause of 56 deaths.  As Gerald Olin dryly informs Enslin, no one has lasted more than an hour.  But , he ignores Samuel L Jackson (never a good idea) and insists that he be let into the horrific room as Enslin settles in and starts to rattle off a description of the rooms pedestrian appearance, the Carpenters starts to play on the radio alarm clock and pretty soon the room is going all out to kill him, drive him insane or force him to kill himself.

The 1408 is a well plotted and tightly written supernatural horror story, culminating in Mike lighting up the room with a bottle of brandy and, as he can’t leave, sitting down in the flames and smoking his emergency cigarette.

There are a couple of endings, ranging from the happy – Mike gets out and lives happily ever after to Mike perishing in the fire.  None of the four endings quite matched kings own ambiguous ending.