Horror Films and Shelly Syndrome, A Not Too Serious Look at Tropes.

I want to take a short break from talking about individual films, and talk about a concept that I have brought up in most of my overviews. That concept is “Shelly Syndrome”, a term I introduced in my discussion on Evil Dead 2. The term “Shelly Syndrome” (SS) comes from the idea that a character is used as a way to pad out runtime, and crank up a bodycount. This character will usually have little lines, and sometimes even less personality. It’s an idea that has been around the horror genre for decades, and while it has been present even before the first Evil Dead film, where the character of Shelly originated from, I thought that Evil Dead was a good place to start bringing it up. So what does it mean to be a bodycount number?

An SS character will have little lines, and a passing personality, as I’ve mentioned before. Not only that but they will usually bear a light amount of weight to the overall story, and taking them out will usually only leave the film with one less death scene to watch. An example of this comes from Halloween Resurrection, in which a camera operator is introduced and killed off in the same scene. The scene isn’t all that important to the film, and could be removed without much consequence. I don’t even remember the guy’s name, which is an unfortunate side effect of the curse. The curse of being known only by how they died rather than their personality, or even their name. There’s actually a second type of character that can suffer from “Shelly Syndrome”, but still hold weight…