John Rollins

John Rollins was the supporting character turned main antagonist of the 2007 film, The Messengers. He was portrayed by John Corbett in the 2007 film and by Norman Reedus in the prequel.

Biography
5 years prior to the story, he murdered his entire family in a fit of madness of his wife trying to leave him. After that he changed his last name to Burwell. 5 years later, when the Solomon family moved from Chicago into the house in the small town in North Dakota, he was hired by the family’s patriarch, Roy, to work on the sunflower farm Roy was hoping to start.

Soon, however, it became apparent that the house the Solomons moved in became haunted. The crows were constantly flying around it, and the ghosts began tormenting the family’s children, Jess and Ben, in which the parents didn’t believe Jess, and Ben who was unable to speak due to a car accident that Jess caused due to Jess being drunk, was unable to confirm her story.

When Jess learned of the Rollins family that once lived there, she suspected that something bad happened to them. When she saw a newspaper clipping of the family at a local store, she realizes that they were the ghosts that haunted the house and she also discovered that Burwell was the father.

When the crows attacked Burwell, he became delusional. When he sees the Solomon matriarch, Denise bringing bags to the porch after she saw one of the ghosts, he believes that Denise is his wife, Mary and starts to attack her, but she ran and takes Ben to the cellar. When Jess and her new friend Bobby came back, John knocked out Bobby with a pitchfork causing Jess to run to the cellar where she found Denise and Ben. John broke the cellar door open and began looking for them thinking that Jess is his daughter Lindsay, and Ben is his son Michael. He then non-fatally stabbed Roy who arrived shortly thereafter.

While John torments Jess, the ghosts of his slain family arose from the mud. Just as John was about to stab Jess, she rolled her body in the nick of time and causing the pitchfork to get stuck on the floor. When he struggled to get it free, Jess who told him that her family isn’t his, kicked him into the mud where the ghosts of his family got their revenge by pulling him down to join them, but not before he attempted to pull Jesse down with him before her parents saved her, and the ghosts' work was complete.