"The Devil's Rejects" (2005) and the Complications of Character Identification

Who are we meant to identify with in The Devil's Rejects? If you look at your options, it's either the corrupt police sheriff John Quincy Wydell (William Forsythe) who abuses his institutional authority to get revenge or the sadistic psychopathic mass murderers known as the Devil's Rejects (Sid Haig, Bill Moseley, Sheri Moon Zombie, Leslie Easterbrook). And neither of those options look at all pleasing or satisfying. But Rejects doesn't seem all that keen on allowing pleasure to be had at any turn. Characters are colorful and interesting but never entirely lovably so, and the actions they take are disturbing at best and uncomfortably atrocious and excessive at worst. It's a highly sleazy and grisly film where torturous death and pain are the only certainty.

Initially the film seems poised to have us see the protagonist as the police. They're a bit douchily hyper-masculine but they have the goal of righteous justice on their side. They want to stop the reign of terror of the Rejects who are completely irredeemable. The Rejects, by contrast, are inbred hillbillies who have taken pleasure in gruesomely murdering countless people. They're horror movie villains shown plain as day for what they are: morally bankrupt maniacs. They know this is what they are and revel in every opportunity to be exactly what people see them as.

And yet, they are our protagonists, not the police. We spend the majority of screen-time with them as they struggle to stay ahead of the police and brutally kill people. But as the body count rises and viscera increases, it becomes harder and harder to sympathize with the characters. They're antiheroes, emphasis on the anti. It's a film shown largely from the perspective of the horror villain rather than the person who would normally be the hero.

But on the other hand, the sheriff's quest for justice doesn't contrast him as any better than the people he seeks to stop. The sheriff takes his task as a personal one; he hopes to avenge his brother, who died at the hands of the Rejects. Justice, however, quickly morphs into vengeance, where any gratifying retribution is lost. The sheriff's mission slowly drags him down to the level of the Rejects.

He's no better than them, and that's why Rejects reads so bizarrely as a viewing experience. Beyond the victims of the Rejects, there's no one who's clearly a decent person and didn't deserve their fate. The heroes have become just as bad as the villains, and the hero is okay with that as long as justice is served, no matter the cost. But it leaves the world feeling a bit more off-kilter, like the ground has been cut out from under our feet.