Firestarter 2022 Ruins One Of Stephen King’s Best Villains

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Despite improving some of the elements of the character, Firestarter's 2022 remake ended up ruining one of Stephen King’s best villains and, in doing so, the movie contributed to an unfortunate trend among recent adaptations of the horror writer’s work. It is not hard to ruin a classic horror villain. While it can take a lot of work for a movie, novel, or television series to come up with an original, authentically unsettling villain to terrify audiences, all it takes is one misjudged moment to ruin their mystique and make the monster un-scary.

In the Friday the 13th franchise, sending Jason Voorhees to space in the critical failureJason X proved that the Camp Crystal Lake killer only worked on earth, while the Halloween remake's attempting to establish the backstory of Michael Myers instead just proved that his status as an enigma was all that made the original character scary. Similarly, Stephen King adaptations such as 2020’s The Stand and It: Chapter 2 have taken villains who worked in the horror author’s iconic source novels and reduced them to self-parodies. Unfortunately, Firestarter’s 2022 remake can now be added to this ignominious list.

Related: Stephen King’s Firestarter Remake Missed Its Best Casting Trick

For most of the story, Firestarter’s main villain is Rainbird, an assassin who hunts down the pyro-kinetic child Charlie and kills her parents. Technically, the Shop (a pretty obvious CIA stand-in) is the big-picture villain of Firestarter, but for most of the movie’s story, it is Rainbird who pursues Charlie. Rainbird, like his fellow child-hunting horror villain Freddy Krueger, has a backstory that makes the character's motives easier to understand and harbors a twisted belief that what he does is morally