User blog:BigBadSquid/PE Proposal: Mr. Gray

During my proposal for Aylmer a few days ago, user ScaryMovie53 mentioned how he sounds like Mr. Gray but worse. Kudos to him for the idea of this week’s villain for proposal.

What's the Work
Dreamcatcher is a 2001 novel written by everyone's favorite horror storyteller Stephen King, and later became a 2003 movie. It follows four childhood friends who were given telepathic powers by Duddits, and they have to put it to use when aliens attack during a hunting trip in Maine.

I haven't read the original King novel, so instead I'm going to focus on film adaptation since that's the version I've seen (cough cough, through Nostalgia Critic and CinemaSins). Correct me for any mistakes.

Who is Mr. Gray? What has he done?
Mr. Gray is the leader? Hive mind? Father? Owner? He's the one who sends the Ripley/Byrum/Sh*t weasels, younger life-cycles of himself, on Earth with the intention of infecting everyone with the Ripley so he can kill off all life and take over the planet. The Ripley enter through your mouth, eat their way through, and erupt from your reckum. When the Ripley invade the friends' lodge to kill Rick and Beaver, Mr. Gray shows up and attempts to infect Jonesy but can't possibly due to Jonesy being "killed" in a car accident months prior. So Mr. Gray instead possesses Jonesy and gains a British accent.

For the rest of the movie until the ending, Jonesy is trapped inside a “library” in his mind consisting of all his memories, and he locks himself in a room where Mr. Gray cannot find him. Meanwhile, Mr. Gray as Jonesy arrogates Pete into telling him where they got their powers and how he can find Duddits. Pete says that he should "bite his bag", so Mr. Gray reveals his true form and bites Pete and half while Jonesy is forced to watch.

On his way to Massachusetts where Duddits lives, Mr. Gray kills a truck driver delivering infected cadavers and feeds them to his dog, and later a cop to steal his car when the truck runs out of juice. Duddits tells Henry that Mr. Gray's goal is to contaminate the Quabbin Reservoir (the largest lake in the state) with the saying "One worm infects the world".

So Henry and Duddits confront the evil alien overlord who exits Jonesy's body to impale Duddits with his tail. But Duddits survives because plot twist, he was also an alien all along. Both aliens explode in red mist and Jonesy crushes the last Ripley before it can escape down the drain.

Yeah, this film has some weird symbolism.

Mitigating Qualities
Here's where the Type Dependent on Version category comes into play.

In the book, Mr. Gray's motive is revenge behind the destruction of his home planet and people, which was destroyed by humanity's actions. In the film, however, nowhere is this Freudian excuse mention, and Duddits reveals Mr. Gray is rather invading the planet for his own sadistic reasons.

Sure, there are other aliens similar to Mr. Gray in this film, but they are nowhere close to him in terms of evilness. In fact, they try to use their psychic powers as a way to beckon mercy before the military blows them up. Mr. Gray isn't bothered by this massacre and continues his vile way.

Heinous Standards
There's only two heinous characters in this film, Mr. Gray himself and the colonel played by Morgan Freeman. In Freeman's case, fighting aliens for 25 years has made him gone mad, but he's an extremist at best because he believes he's doing the right thing even if the alien invaders are peaceful.

For Mr. Gray, he's definitely the worse of the two cases. He implants lamprey-like aliens into both people and animals, which have a horrifying case of parasitism by eating your insides, and he's determined to contaminate the whole world with this. Not to mention he kills two people just to steal their cars and poisons a dog for good measure.

Sure there are minor setbacks to make his character "less-threatening" but only when he's possessing Jonesy, such as talking in a British accent for no reason, and they added stupid scare sound-effects whenever he turns his head or puts his jacket hoodie on. Otherwise, he is for the most part, always taken extremely seriously.

Final Verdict
Sounds like a keeper.