Carl Rudolph Stargher

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Evil-doer
Full Name	Carl Rudolph Stargher
Alias	N/A
Origin	The Cell
Occupation	Mechanic Serial killer
Powers / Skills	Physical strength, cunning intellect, skills in engineering
Hobby	Collecting dolls, suspending himself by his piercings, ritualistically masturbating over the corpses of his victims
Goals	Continue his killing spree (failed)
Crimes	No information
Type of Villain	Serial Killer, Mentally Ill

“	Mairzy doats and dozy doats and liddle lamzy divey /a kiddley divey too/wooden shoe?	„
	~ Stargher, singing "Mairzy Doats" right before suffering a schizophrenic breakdown

Carl Rudolph Stargher is the main antagonist of the 2000 psychological sci-fi thriller The Cell; a serial killer and kidnapper, he has developed a unique modus operandi for dispatching his victims - namely a fully-automated prison cell. This glass enclosure is designed to gradually fill with water over the course of approximately forty hours, eventually drowning the captive - whereupon Stargher subjects the corpse to further ritualistic treatments before dumping it for the authorities to find.

Much of The Cell's action is prompted by the FBI's search for his eighth and final victim, for though they manage to capture him comparatively early in the film, Stargher has lapsed into a coma and is unable to answer questions - consciously at any rate...

He is portrayed by Vincent D'Onofrio, who also portrayed Edgar the Bug and Kingpin

Biography

Early Life

Carl Rudolph Stargher was born with a very rare form of latent schizophrenia known as Whelan's Infraction: caused by a viral infection in utero and triggered by water-related trauma, the condition remained dormant for much of his early childhood until he was six years of age, on the day of his baptism. Completely immersed in the waters of a river for a little longer than necessary, Carl believed he was drowning and suffered a seizure while still underwater - the water-based trauma needed to trigger his schizophrenia. Not long after the ceremony was complete, he began hearing voices, one of them eventually ascribed to an imaginary friend (never formally named but simply titled "him") that would help and advise him when nobody else wound. However, this "friend" eventually became the personification of his increasingly violent impulses, often making itself heard prior to the serial killings later in life.

Much of Carl's childhood was spent in the company of his abusive father, who regularly physically and emotionally abused him for little to no reason whatsoever: in the aftermath of his near-death experience at the baptism, his father broke three of his ribs and fractured his jaw for reasons that were never made entirely clear. Violent outbursts followed even the mildest of slights, with the act of accidentally breaking a plate being cause for beatings, screamed insults, and claims that Carl should have been drowned at birth "like the runt of the litter." Carl attempted to find an escape from the abuse by playing with dolls and retreating into his fantasies; however, his father soon discovered the truth and, in a monstrous attempt to make it clear that "I didn't raise no faggot," proceeded to burn his son with a clothes iron. Snippets of memories overhead suggest that Carl's mother left the family, possibly to escape being abused herself, and Carl's father used this as further ammunition in his psychotic lectures: having either remarried or acquired a girlfriend at some point, he eventually went so far as to force his son to look at the woman naked, pointing out her privates as "a place of evil."

It was at some point while wandering outside to escape his father's violent temper-tantrums that Carl happened to find a wounded bird, helpless and unable to fly. Curious, he took the bird in and did his best to care for it; unfortunately, his father soon found out, and Carl quickly realized that it would only be a matter of time before something horrible happened to the bird. So, rather than let his father torture the wounded bird just to hurt him, he quietly drowned it in the sink, rationalizing that he'd "saved" the bird from further torment. This incident was to shape the rest of his life, forming the basis of his beliefs and his methods as an adult - and a serial killer.

Serial Killings

As an adult, Carl was able to keep up a relatively respectable facade despite his increasingly delusional private life, having no prior arrests on his record and making a legal wage as a mechanic. He'd even acquired a pet, an albino German Shepherd named Valentine. Ultimately, though, it was his day job that was to form the final push towards his transformation into a serial killer: some years prior to the events of the film, a developer by the name of Bainbridge attempted to build a machine works in Delano, California, making use of pumps and hoists provided by Carver Industrial Equipment; however, Bainbridge's efforts ended in bankruptcy, and both the land and the failed machine works was made property of the state government - who immediately ordered it shut down. By chance, the job of sealing the place up went to none other than Carl Stargher.

With the property officially abandoned and a wealth of industrial devices left on the premises, Carl had everything he needed to make his fantasies a reality. Taking an industrial hoist back to his house, he arranged it for use in one of his hobbies - suspension: through eight metal rings implanted in the flesh of his back, he was able to hoist himself into the air, deriving pleasure from both the sensation of floating and the masochistic strain on his skin. Then, he returned to the abandoned machine works, having established it as a secondary base of operations, and began work on what was to become his favored means of dispatch.

Following extensive modification of the materials left at the site, he was able to rig up a fully automated prison cell for enacting his violent delusions on human victims. The targets of his obsessions were selected well in advance and stalked at length, sometimes for months on end: without exception, they were young, female, successful, and usually with a great deal of future potential - Carl having selected them both out of pathological loneliness and out of a belief that he was "saving" them by doing so. Capturing them though a mixture of deception and ambush tactics, he knocked them unconscious and drove them out to his secondary base at Delano, where they were locked in the cell and simply left there; the automation of the cell ensured that he had no need to conduct any of the torture himself, ensuring that none of the victims ever saw his face.

Over the course of their time in captivity, his victims were provided with food, water and a toilet: however, every hour, sprinklers implanted in the cell's roof would blast the captives with water for several minutes, apparently as part of a cleansing ritual; after forty hours, the outgoing drain sealed shut and the sprinklers flooded the cell, ensuring the victim's death by drowning. For good measure, video cameras recorded the entire incident for Carl's sick pleasure. Well after the forty hours were up, Carl himself returned to the machine works, drained away the water and took the corpse home: in the basement of his house, he bleached the bodies of his victims to make them resemble dolls, then suspended himself over the corpses and masturbated at length - often while using the recorded footage of their deaths to enhance the experience. The next day, he would decorate the corpse with a specially-made collar to demonstrate his ownership of them, and then quietly dump them in the wilderness.