3) Howard – 10 Cloverfield Lane
10 Cloverfield Lane‘s Howard – big frame, heavy breathing, hateful stare – isn’t someone you’d ever want to get into a car with on a dark night. The only way you’d do that is if he’d purposely crashed into you and taken you as his prisoner. Howard (John Goodman, in a tour-de-force turn) probably tells himself he took Mary Elizabeth Winstead’s Michelle and locked her in his bunker for honorable reasons. There is an alien invasion going on outside, after all.
Really, to Howard the attack was just an opportunity to claim himself an unwilling new wife. Throughout the course of the film we come to learn Howard has already kidnapped one woman before, ultimately dissolved in a vat of acid when she displeased him. A truly pathetic monster, we don’t mind much when Michelle eventually comes to escape Howard’s clutches, melting him with his own tub of chemicals and blowing him to pieces inside his own bunker.
