The lackeys of Evil

For today's countdown to Halloween post, I wanted to talk about a stock character in the horror genre: the creepy servants that show up in scary stories. You know, the hunchback servant in Frankenstein and Dracula movies, often called Igor or other such name. Well, he is not always hunched back, but he is often either deformed or otherwise has an evil appearance. Like that fellow on the picture, which I took in a Halloween display last year at a local garden centre. Ironically enough you don't see the character often, if at all, in literature, not in the classic ones anyway. Renfield might have been a prototype, but he was a madman in an insane asylum, not a proper servant. It is cinema that truly gave life to the evil lackeys of evil masters. More often than none humans, but in constant contact with the supernatural and the monstrous, deformed maybe because of inbreeding, maybe because of ill treatment, or both, they are scary because they are a reflection of what we could become if we were in constant contact and subservient to evil powers: deformed, sickly, ugly, dehumanized slaves.