From the blithely thoughtless Bill Lumbergh in Office Space to the outright villainous Nurse Ratched in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, we love a good jerk in our movies. Most of the time, we hope they get a hilarious comeuppance — but sometimes, the universe demands something a little more visceral.
The time? Somewhere around the second act.
The place? Horror films.
From a smug frat boy getting his final colonic irrigation to an abusive redneck setting off one of the most infamous kill streaks in the genre, here are ten jerks who truly got what they deserved.
Franklin Hardesty – The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974)
The brother of OG final girl, and certified badass, Sally. The badass genes skipped Franklin entirely, along with the likeable genes and even the competence genes.
Franklin is whiny, childish, and the most annoying thing on wheels — at least until the Cybertruck was released. (Suck it, Elon.) He throws tantrums and blubs his way through his time on screen until meeting the business end of Leatherface’s favourite chunk of light machinery.
To be fair, he was given the raw end of the deal, being a wheelchair-bound character in a genre where running away is 90% of the job description. However, he is so utterly unlikable that he uses up this small reservoir of goodwill and then some by the time he starts to throw a toddler-like tantrum outside of the Sawyer ranch.
He holds the honour of being the only character in the original movie to be killed with a chainsaw and the first on-screen kill in a franchise that would end up scoring more than 250 kills in total. Getting the wrong end of a chainsaw was not the end for this annoying character; he was last seen in Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (1986) as a skeleton hanging in the amusement park. The ghoulish Sawyer family had kept his body there for 13 years.
Cause of death: Death by protagonist fatigue (and chainsaw).
Margaret White – Carrie (1976)
In every iteration of the character, Margaret White is a bat-shit-crazy, ‘Christian’ fundamentalist zealot, who skipped all the bits of the Bible about not being a complete tool to anyone different from you.
She is a strict disciplinarian who punishes the titular Carrie for starting her menstrual cycle. And, when Carrie asks to go to the prom, Mrs. White reacts as if her daughter had just casually asked permission to date an entire biker gang.
We have seen this character die many times by this point, including the original Stephen King novel, various film adaptations, and even a musical. And I think that’s letting her off lightly.
Played to perfection in the 1976 original by a wild-eyed Piper Laurie, Margaret becomes convinced that Carrie is a witch. Rather than have her transferred to Hogwarts for her senior year, she busts open the Old Testament and decides to kill her, Exodus 22:18 (“Thou shalt not suffer a witch to live”).
Margaret stalks her bloodied, traumatised and vulnerable daughter, repeatedly stabbing her with a butcher’s knife and making Carrie recite the Lord’s Prayer. So yeah, Margaret is just a peach.
In her death, she is stapled to the wall with various bits of kitchen hardware and utensils, her body left in the same position as the statue of Saint Sebastian in Carrie’s “prayer closet”.
Cause of death: Death by divine redecoration.
Trent Sutton – Friday the 13th (2009)
Fun fact: if you do a Google image search for ‘Horror Movie Jerks’; you get an image of Trent Sutton smugly mugging for the camera.
Arrogant, aggressive, and adulterous (and those are just his sins that begin with an A), Trent is the smug, rich, college jerk who would pull all his peer group to his parents’ palatial 2nd home in the mountains. Not to have a fantastic time, but to rub their peasant noses in his immense and unearned wealth. So, thanks to comrade Voorhees for dealing with the ultra-bourgeois swine.
We first encounter the extent of Trent’s douchebaggery when we see him rudely harass Clay, who is handing out leaflets to find his sister. Trent is far too busy and impatient to wait in line like a decent human being and let things lie, so he has a minor altercation with Clay. He then proceeds to cheat on his girlfriend with her best friend, Bree, with whom he shares the most cringeworthy sex scene in slasher movie history, which, as you can imagine, is up against some pretty tough competition.
Trent meets his end, having run around screaming like a highly strung nine-year-old girl with her hair in ringlets, at the hands of Jason, who makes a rich-kid shish kebab.
Trent was designed to be unlikable, so congrats to the writers. He has no redeeming features as a character whose only purpose is to beef up Mr Voorhees‘s already magnificent body count of around 200 kills throughout the franchise, including the 13 from this movie.
Cause of death: Impaled by the invisible hand of class warfare.
Coach Schneider – Nightmare on Elm Street II (1985)
There is one in every school: A bully who happens to be the jerk in charge of your pubescent ass until you graduate. If you’re lucky, you can deflect and detract and not take that much flak from them. But Coach ‘Leather Daddy’ Schneider is an entirely different kind of twisted.
This gym teacher is one of the most uptight disciplinarians ever to wear a whistle and shorts. Before his turn to outright villainy, Coach Schneider is shown to have a somewhat sadistic streak, making protagonist Jesse do push-ups for fighting Ron.
On another occasion, Schneider overhears the boys badmouthing him and has the pair do laps.
As it turns out, Schneider is into the Springwood BDSM scene and frequents a gay leather bar called Don’s Place, and it’s rumoured around town that he likes ‘pretty boys’, just like Jesse. When Jesse, in the depths of a Freddy-induced dream, finds himself in the leather bar, Coach Schneider takes him back to the high school to run laps while he prepares the skipping ropes, clearly with bad intentions at heart.
Schneider is dispatched by Freddy in one of the only positive karma kills in the series
Cause of death: Detention… forever.
Paul Allen – American Psycho (2000)
Self-absorbed, self-righteous, arrogant and vapid, this co-worker of Patrick Bateman (the eponymous ‘American Psycho’) is all about style over substance and is the very embodiment of 80s superficiality.
He first comes on Bateman’s kill radar when he starts comparing himself to another co-worker that Paul mistakes him for (Bateman makes pains to point out that he has a better haircut). Paul continues to assume that Bateman is a co-worker right up until the point where Bateman, while discussing the finer points of the back catalogue of Huey Lewis and the News, takes an axe and pounds Paul into investment banker-themed confetti.
Paul Allen’s death was the catalyst for Bateman’s spiral from run-of-the-mill evil to top-tier cinematic villainy incarnate.
Paul Allen isn’t the worst person on this list, but his death scene is so iconic and the character such a hollow, empty shell of a human that when Bateman brings his shiny new axe down into his oblivious face, it’s very difficult to muster up much sympathy for the ignorant one per cent prick.
I guess that’s what happens if you have a better business card than your psychopathic co-worker, even if you did misspell the word Acquisitions on it… I think I will stick to scrawling my number on bar napkins.
Cause of death: Death by Huey Lewis and the News (and a big ass axe)
Hunt Wynorski – The Final Destination (2009)
Hunt is a survivor in a Final Destination film, a franchise that might as well put ticking clock icons above the heads of each hapless meat sack on the poster. Insensitive, bone-headed and obnoxious, Hunt has very few redeeming features. He is a college student who likes to have meaningless sex while he is meant to be checking on the mental health of his on-again-off-again girlfriend, drink hard liquor during the day and attend NASCAR events solely to see the crashes.
When the inevitable shit strikes the proverbial fan and the bodies start to pile up like firewood, Hunt acts with cold indifference—claiming that he didn’t have to care about the other victims of the McKinley Speedway disaster since they didn’t have a member of their cohort who could predict the accident and have a ‘lucky’ coin.
Once the supernatural force of death itself starts picking off the survivors of the disaster one by one, this human dildo proves his worth by saying, about the death of Samantha Lane (a wife and mother), “We lost a really hot MILF”.
While relaxing by the pool at his country club, he loses his ‘lucky’ coin into the swimming pool. He dives in after it and ends up getting stuck ass first on the drain at the bottom of the pool. After an implausibly long amount of time underwater, his torment is put to an end by his insides being forcibly removed and ejected, along with his lucky silver dollar.
Cause of death: Death by coin-operated karma.
Evan Fletcher – Thanksgiving (2023)
Of all the jerk jocks ever to grace our screens, Evan is possibly the biggest. Not only is he a callous prick, but he was also a key player in instigating the riot that kick-starts the revenge massacre carried out by John Carver.
He took a worrying amount of pleasure in recording and watching the RightMart riot, where he kicked a fellow shopper right in the waffle iron. All the while, Jessica, Gaby, and Yulia were clinging on for dear life, trying not to get trampled, callously ignoring Gaby’s begging for help.
Evan is an asshat so colossal that you would need NASA to measure his dimensions and magnitude. From his fame-whore shit-posting to minor everyday acts of entitled arrogance like fraudulently using a disabled parking space, Evan displays a cavalier lack of compassion, empathy and even basic human dignity. Wanting to simultaneously chase clout and also absolve himself from responsibility for the harm the footage he shot caused, Evan is even disliked by his generally unlikeable friend group. A real dick among slightly less worse dicks, if you will.
Evan meets his end at the hands of the movie’s masked killer when he gets his head pounded into viscera by a meat tenderiser.
Out of a group of unlikeable doofuses, Evan stands tall (as much as a man can, having lost his head)
Cause of death: didn’t like and subscribe to being a good person.
Ivan Landsness – Saw IV (2007)
Ivan Landsness was a really shitty guy. And amongst characters from the Saw movies, being a standout for being the most garbage human being is a special achievement. It makes me think there should be a mirror-universe Nobel Prize for bastards.
A brutal, vile, and utterly reprehensible pervert who got his kicks by torturing his victims in twisted and terrible ways, Landsness hid his true, dark personality by acting friendly and helpful towards others, but it was just a ruse to cover the dark pit of psychopathy where his heart should be.
He was also a coward, a liar and an unrepentant specimen, saying over and over that he had paid his dues for his atrocious crimes, even though he never faced justice
And on top of all of that, he smelled weird, and his mother dressed him funny.
Landsness was, ostensibly, the proprietor of a flea bag motel, which he used as a base for his awful acts, tying women to a bed and violating them all while recording the whole thing, to pour salt in the wound. And in another franchise, he would have been the villain of his own film; here, however, he is just another meat sack to be dissected by Jigsaw’s painfully inventive Rube Goldberg machines of death and destruction.
He met his maker by having his limbs pulled off like the world’s least popular GI Joe toy. Couldn’t have happened to a nicer fellow.
Cause of death: Went out on a limb.
Trevor Lyle – Candyman (1992)
A smug, condescending, and unfaithful, callous jackass, Trevor Lyle is the very definition of a bad boyfriend in a good horror movie.
Trevor, a university lecturer, is cheating on the movie’s protagonist, Helen, with a student half his age — like a classy guy. Not only was he happy to be unfaithful to Helen, as soon as The Candyman started wrecking shit up, as only the late great Tony Todd could do, Trevor was more than happy to let Helen rot in an asylum while he grieved their relationship for all of about five nanoseconds before taking up with a new lover.
He is shown grieving for Helen after she dies, but by then it is too late for him, because as he is grieving Helen’s death, he says her name over and over again, in front of a mirror, leading to him getting a radical, extremely fast, and unnecessary, unnecessarily clumsy appendectomy. Helen, who is now part of The Candyman mythos, appears behind him to claim her vicious prize.
Trevor is just the low-level ‘bad bloke’ that plagued movies in general and horror movies in particular during the early nineties, and the kind of slimy jerk that usually skates through life unaffected by their bad karma; however, not this time.
He also looks like he would be sticky to the touch.
Cause of death: Forgot that the Candyman, indeed, can (kill you)
Ronnie White – Halloween (2007)
Ronnie White is a vile, vicious villain — very vividly vivisected by a young, pre-Shatner-mask Michael Myers. Ronnie is a bad guy; he is verbally abusive to his children and stepchildren; he openly muses about his girlfriend’s daughter’s body and tells Sheri Moon Zombie’s Deborah Myers that he would like to violently orally violate her; oh, and his abusive behaviour helped to hand sculpt one of the biggest psychopaths in cinematic history.
Part of the mystique of Michael Myers is that no one knows why he went from a sweet-looking boy to a killing machine. Rob Zombie’s 2007 reboot of the franchise looks at that mystery, shrugs and says, “Yeah, but what if we make the answer redneck scum?”
Ronnie has no redeeming features, and he seems to be rather proud of this dubious honour. Tormenting young Michael and trying to provoke a reaction from him when it’s revealed that the blooming masked killer has been suspended from school for his violent behaviour and indiscriminate small animal torture.
Ronnie gets passed out drunk one fateful Halloween night and meets his maker at the hands of Mr. Myers with the aid of a knife large enough to qualify as agricultural equipment and enough duct tape to restrain the Hulk.
Cause of death: Karmic parental intervention.
So, there you have it, my friends, who was your favourite horror movie jerk? Did I leave anyone out who deserves deliberate dissecting during debate? Sound off in the comments section below, and don’t forget you can reach out to me via email at RobinBDevlin@outlook.com until next time,
Peace, Love, Corn syrup
-Rob D.