Stephen King has really voiced his concerns that if Donald Trump managed to secure a third term, it would be an absolute disaster because “Trump is a horror story.”
If anyone knows a thing or two about horror, it’s Stephen King. So let’s dig deep and see if we can find which famous horror movie character Trump most resembles, if any!
Horror movie monsters may at first appear like cold and calculating killers who delight in hunting and playing all manner of diabolical mind games with their petrified prey. However, scratch the surface and behind those beady and demonic eyes that scream death, despair, and the end of everything, there’s a person with a past, a personality, and yes, a name.
That name may be Damian Thorn, Leatherface, Pennywise, or Patrick Bateman. Yet to date, none of them have been called Donald Trump.
But what resemblance, if any, do these savage brutes have to the commander-in-chief?
Let’s start with the Antichrist.
In the Omen trilogy, the son of Satan, Damien Thorn approaches life with a Trump like joie de vivre that can be unsettling to others. It’s there in the scene when he mows his mom down with his aggressive tricycle riding, and it’s there in his little smug smile when he realizes he’s the catalyst for the chaos that erupts all around him, like, for example, his nanny jumping out of the window with a noose around her head.
As the young Prince of Darkness grows and becomes a US ambassador and potential destroyer of worlds, we can observe the classic Trump characteristics of ambition and charm utilized to dire ends. Thorn’s Achilles heel, of course, is the curse of all psychopaths – an explosive temper and massive ego, like the scene where he demands Jesus Christ faces him like a man for a one-on-one confrontation.
Yet even Trump’s fiercest critics would be stretched to compare him with the son of Satan!
As a dancing clown who’s also a serial killer, who’s also a shape-shifting alien from an undiscovered void beyond mortal comprehension, it would be unfair to compare Pennywise from the film ‘It’ with Trump. Yet they do both have a tendency to utilise charm as a weapon and can switch from sober to crazy in the space of one red-hot minute.
The question is, could Trump get away with dressing up as a giant and sinister-looking clown, hang around in sewers while persuading unsuspecting kids to grab a balloon, or maybe vote for him?
Trump and Leatherface are both sensitive souls who love their families and are at their happiest when surrounded by their nearest and dearest at the dinner table, tucking into mom’s homemade meat pie.
On the downside, they both tend live in a twilight world where the stark lines of reality are often blurred into an incomprehensible mess, and they can drown in their own and other people’s sorrow.
Despite wearing their skin on the outside, it’s hard for them to share their pain with others, and they hate to be vulnerable. And as well we all know, no one feels vulnerable whilst carrying a chainsaw or sledgehammer. Or, for that matter, being able to nuke a country on a whim.
Nevertheless, Trump does not live in a basement or hang people on meat hooks. And so any comparison with Leatherface wood be laughable.
The star of “American Psycho” Patrick Bateman is in many ways from a similar environment as Trump. When this lion roars people pay attention, and a fair few end up dead, but for the killer cat with the immaculate haircut, it’s as nature dictates, because he believes he’s born to rule.
As a Wall Street yuppy who not only survives but thrives in the dog-eat-dog world of the 1980s, whilst killing random strangers in his spare time, it would be cruel and cynical to compare Patrick Bateman to Trump.
And so the end, pretty much where we began, no clearer to what horror movie character Trump would be. Perhaps he would be a terrible combination of all four? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, you decide.
