There’s a thin line between being in love and being obsessed – earnestly confessing your feelings for someone and coercing someone to reciprocate to your feelings. Writers, filmmakers and other artists have been universally enamoured by the psyche of the “stalker” – the innocuous or fiendish guy or girl who pursues the person he or she is in love with. A love that borders on obsessive compulsive disorder.
Let us not confuse the stalker with the villain – the stalker doesn’t tease, pass malicious comments or try to molest / abuse / rape his beloved. On the contrary, the stalker goes all out just to convince the profundity of his or her love. In most cases, these characters are showered with sympathy – a feeling that would never arise in a real life scenario. Perhaps, just to neutralise the same, the stalkers are also meted out a tragic destiny, to highlight the dismal eventuality of such obsession or for creative justification.
The portrayal of the obsessed lover has varied, not necessarily commensurate with the change in the social milieu, but definitely in a way that could play to the gallery. In this post, I look at six films, which have glorified the stalker – the silent lover whose mania gradually overpowers the love, transgressing into the other’s person life, and eventually bringing both of them down. However, I have ignored any film (read the “Sleeping with the Enemy” remakes and the likes) in which the victim and her tormentor have a shared past.Continue reading “The Avatars of the Stalker”
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