Celebrate Father’s Day with Horror’s Best and Worst Dads
Steve Barton
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Chris Cleek, The Woman
Actor: Sean Bridgers
Lucky McKee’s adaptation of Jack Ketchum’s disturbing novel The Woman (his follow-up to Offspring) follows Chris Cleek, the morally bankrupt patriarch of the Cleeks, a family comprised of meek wife Belle, detached daughter Peggy; deviant son Brian, and innocent Darlin’. After happening upon the titular Woman, a feral human female, on a hunting trip in the woods, Chris takes it upon himself to capture and “civilize” her, by any means necessary. His word is law as he forces every member of the family to pitch in while performing acts on the Woman that range from perverse to inhumane. But that’s not among his worst offenses, which
include cultivating his only son to follow in his sexist footsteps and apparently having impregnated his own daughter, all the while verbally and physically abusing his wife. He gets what’s coming to him in the end but only after agonizing years of inflicting suffering onto the Cleek children.
Actor: Jon Lormer
Nathan, star of Stephen King’s short story “Father’s Day” as seen in Creepshow, is a real piece of work. His family’s rich all right, off of the suffering of others. After emotionally abusing his daughter, Bedelia, for a number of years, treating her like dirt, and capitalizing on the pain he induced on others (not to mention those he murdered and extorted), Bedelia’s finally had enough and offs him with a marble ashtray – on Father’s Day, no less. What’s he do? He has the nerve to come back to life after Bedelia mistakenly spills whiskey upon his grave, moaning and yowling for the Father’s Day cake he was never able to eat – screaming at his daughter to bring it to him. He kills off every last one of his heirs and has the audacity to go after the daughter he abused all her life, all to get at that stupid Father’s Day cake, which he hadn’t earned by any means whatsoever.
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