From Nobody To Nightmare / Live-Action Films

1 Following

Examples of From Nobody to Nightmare in film.

• Hoax, the nebbish protagonist of 976-EVIL, uses the powers granted by the titular supernatural phone line to get back at everyone who's wronged him. He then becomes Drunk on the Dark Side and goes on a general killing spree.
• Ace of Aces: Adolf Hitler is a soldier among many in the trenches during World War I. Fast forward twenty years or so later, he rules a country that persecutes Jewish people and already talks about dominating Europe.
• The Amazing Spider-Man Series:
  • The Amazing Spider-Man 1: The Lizard is the Superpowered Evil Side of Dr. Curt Connors, a good-natured scientist dedicated to trying to solve major health problems by introducing animal DNA into human systems, including the regeneration of his own missing arm, while paying his dues for (it's implied) causing the death of an old friend through inaction by running a mentorship program in his lab. The film plays with the trope, however, by comparing his dependence on the lizard serum as something of a drug addiction, and by the end it's very clear that when he's in control of himself he'd much rather be a nobody than a nightmare.
  • The Amazing Spider-Man 2: Maxwell Dillon was a nerdy electrician whom everybody picked on or ignored, who then deluded himself into thinking he was Spider-Man's sidekick after the hero saved him and showed him compassion. After gaining electrical powers, he decides he doesn't want to be ignored anymore, becoming a very powerful supervillain.
• The Assassination of Richard Nixon is based on the real-life person Samuel Byck, whose sanity is being worn out from being a loser and feeling that he is ignored by society. Eventually he tries to hijack a plane with the intention of crashing it into the White House. His mission ultimately fails, but he ends up killing a number of innocent civilians in the process.
• Batman Returns:
  • The Penguin is a deformed former freak show dumpster baby who becomes a charismatic gang leader bent on dominating Gotham City.
  • Catwoman was a nebbish secretary with no backbone and no personal life who gets murdered and resurrected as a sexy catburglar vigilante.
• Black Lightning (2009): According to Kuptsov, he once had no money under his name, starting from trading flowers, to trading modern technology and weapons.
• In Blindness (2008), the King of Ward 3 is seen, early on in the movie, as just a normal bartender who works at the luxury hotel and chats to the girl with dark glasses. Next we see him he has become a monstrous antagonist.
• Blitz (2011): Berry starts off as a common street punk who got into it with some guys at a night club. When the police showed up, he insults the wrong one, resulting in him taking a severe beat down. Obsessed with revenge, Berry starts killing all the cops that arrested him in the past, while at the same time undermining the whole department by trying to become infamous in the media.
• Chip 'n Dale: Rescue Rangers (2022): Sweet Pete was once a respectable actor, but getting blacklisted by Hollywood has turned him into an amoral criminal who disfigures and sells toons to the black market.
• In Chronicle, Andrew Detmer gets exposed to some weird artifact/mineral/thing and develops telekinetic powers. Over the course of the movie, he goes from an abused, bullied teenage outcast pulling pranks and experimenting with his newfound abilities to a psychotic with delusions of godhood.
• Concussion has a heroic example in Dr. Bennet Omalu, a Nigerian-born Pittsburgh pathologist who became a major threat to the NFL through his discovery and relentless research into chronic traumatic encephalopathy caused by repetitive head trauma in athletes.
• The Crow (1994) has a heroic example: a murdered goth-rocker is resurrected as a superpowerful avenging angel.
• The Dark Knight Rises:
  • Bane was just another inmate of the worst prison in the world before he became the intimidating, charismatic terrorist who leads Gotham's disaffected and disgruntled in nearly destroying both Batman and Gotham City. As he puts it:
    Bane: Nobody cared who I was until I put on the mask.
  • One of the inmates of the prison tells Bruce the story of Henri Ducard/Ra's al Ghul, Bruce's Evil Mentor and leader of the League of Shadows, the terrorist group that trained Batman and Bane. Ducard had once been a mercenary working for a warlord and fell in love with the warlord's daughter; before long they were separated, with the woman being condemned to the prison in her lover's place. Some years later, their daughter escaped the prison after her mother's murder and found her father, who returned to the prison and exacted his revenge on the men who murdered his wife before reinventing himself as the head of the League of Shadows.
• Death Race: Downplayed with September Jones in the prequel. She is a former Ms. Universe, but lost her crown for cheating and ended up a weather girl, then head of an Intrepid Reporter camera crew. Capturing footage of a prison riot inspires her to convince Private Profit Prison CEO Weyland to start Condemned Contestant reality shows and make her the host and producer. She becomes Drunk with Power and does things like make Lucas participate in her Games by putting his loved ones in horrifying situations and getting a more moral colleague fired.
• Madeline Ma-Ma Madrigal from Dredd. When you go from being a lowly prostitute to one of the most feared gang lords in a Crapsack World filled with sadist types, it's pretty damn indicative that you're this trope.
• Falling Down: William "Bill" Foster started his day driving to his no longer existing job. By the end of the day, he's become the most violent menace in Los Angeles, attacking gangs, Nazis, and unhelpful clerks, and gotten known under the moniker of "D-Fens".
• Fight Club has the Narrator, who starts off as a bored insomniac working a boring job with people he hates and turns into a terrorist leader who blows up buildings and leads a group of anarchic followers who will listen to his every command (although this is more so the work of Tyler, his split personality).
• Freddy's Dead: The Final Nightmare attempts to humanize Freddy Krueger by showing him in flashbacks as a somewhat creepy young boy driven into bludgeoning a school hamster to death by taunting classmates, and then as a quiet, unassuming family man with an unhealthy obsession with serial killers, who actually becomes a serial killer himself for a vaguely sympathetic reason. Not only that, but he was also taken in by an alcoholic asshole. That's all offered in contrast to the present day, where, after a Deal with the Devil made while he was dying, he's turned into a prophesied nightmare king who's left his hometown in ruins, its surviving inhabitants insane, and now has designs on the whole world. The disturbed but comparatively sympathetic man he used to be reappears briefly near the end of the film in what seems to be a Fighting from the Inside moment, but it was a trick to briefly lull the heroes into letting their guard down. It's hard to imagine that Freddy was ever truly normal, though, given that he was born after his mother was raped by hundreds of inmates in an insane asylum, causing him to be frequently called the "Son of a Thousand Maniacs". If there was any way that a child's conception could make him turn out bad, this would be the way.
• Friday the 13th: Jason Voorhees began life as a bullied kid with hydrocephaly... until he supposedly drowned at Camp Crystal Lake at age 11. Upon reaching adulthood, he becomes a dangerous Serial Killer, and eventually a Nigh Invulnerable zombie, to the extent that in Jason Goes to Hell: The Final Friday, the FBI sets up an elaborate sting operation to take him down.
• From Dusk Till Dawn: While the first movie doesn't elaborate on Santanico Pandemonium's origins, the third installment, The Hangman's Daughter, is a prequel revealing her story: she is the half-breed daughter of a vampire priestess and a hangman, who took her away and raised her personally, albeit he turned abusive later on. She grew up to be a relatively normal Girl Next Door that would have led a likely uneventful life had one day an outlaw hadn't kidnapped her and inadvertently returned her to her mother, who awakened her true nature. Centuries after, she became the cruel and sadistic vampire queen we see in the first movie.
• Marcus Macrinus from Gladiator II. He used to be a slave before gaining great wealth as a skilled merchant supplying Roman legions with weapons and sponsor of gladiators. Now, he's a powerful power broker with his eye on the imperial throne.
• The Godfather: Don Vito Corleone started out as an orphaned kid stuck in an unknown country. Over the course of Part II, he rises to become the most powerful criminal in New York.
• Godzilla:
  • Godzilla's origins vary based on the film, but they all agree that he was some sort of reptile on a small island near Japan that was hit by nuclear fallout and turned into a colossal, radioactive killing machine.
  • Godzilla's nemesis King Ghidorah also has this trope applied to its origin story in Godzilla vs. King Ghidorah, in which Western Terrorists from the future who seek to make the West dominate the world and crush Japanese influence create King Ghidorah by leaving three harmless critters called Dorats on an island that's doomed to a nuclear explosion.
• Hellraiser: Pinhead is a rare anti-villain/anti-hero example for a horror film series; he went from Captain Elliot Spencer, a shellshocked World War I veteran, to becoming one of the most powerful Cenobites in the Hellraiser series after solving the Lament Configuration.
• The Hunger Games: Katniss Everdeen was a nobody from District 12 who volunteered as tribute and was not initially expected to survive. From there on, she blasts through the Hunger Games, kills numerous people, becomes one of the most well-known people in the world (with the sole exclusion of President Snow) and becomes the face of a revolution intent on toppling the government. Not bad for a young girl who only wanted to save her sister.
• James Bond:
  • Ernst Stavro Blofeld, 007's biggest Arch-Enemy and the notorious leader of SPECTRE, started out as a man of humble origins from eastern Europe, but eventually rose to the top of the criminal food chain by becoming the head of a terrifying criminal empire that's capable of plotting geopolitical events for its gain and holding the entire world at gunpoint if its leader doesn't get what he wants.
  • Dr. No has the titular Mad Scientist Dr. Julius No. He was "the unwanted son of a German missionary and a Chinese girl from a good family" and is now a feared supervillain.
  • The Man with the Golden Gun has Francisco Scaramanga. The son of a circus owner who grew up to become the most menacing assassin around.
  • Skyfall has Raoul Silva. He went from a normal MI6 agent who was abandoned to torture by M to a freelance Cyber-terrorist who disgraced MI6, killed five agents and M, herself.
  • The version of Blofeld in Spectre started out as the son of an Austrian climber and an estranged foster brother of James Bond, but eventually became the head of the titular worldwide crime syndicate.
  • The biggest one of all is Lyutisfer Safin from No Time to Die. He was the son of an unremarkable family of chemists who were murdered by Mr. White on Blofeld's orders. Now, Safin is a Diabolical Mastermind and No-Nonsense Nemesis that has the plans to wipe out the majority of the world's population with a nanomachine virus, kills Blofeld and even kills James Bond.
• John Wick 1: Played with. Iosef Tarasov, the son of a Russian mobster, thinks John is just a nobody when he stole his car and killed his puppy. His father Vigo responds by telling him John is the very reason why his gang ended up being one of the top crime syndicates in New York. Iosef still doesn't process what he's just done, and thinks "finishing what [he] started" will be a piece of cake. It's only when John starts attacking him in the Red Circle nightclub that he finally realizes he's screwed. Granted, extended material reveals that John was a nobody during his childhood, but that status was long diminished by the time Iosef met him.
• Joker (2019): Arthur Fleck starts as a shy, mentally ill man who gets ignored, or downright abused, by people who don't understand his nervous fits of laughter. However, after getting fired from his job as a party clown, being told that he won't receive psychiatric help due to budget cuts, getting mocked for his disastrous stand-up act, and finding out that his adopted mother lied about him being the son of Thomas Wayne, he descends deeper into madness until he becomes Gotham City's most infamous criminal and one of Batman's greatest Arch-Enemies (or not, if Joker: Folie à Deux is any indication).
• In Limitless, a simple street loan shark is turned into a criminal mastermind when he gets hooked on the new drug that increases your mental output.
• In Little (2019), Jordan Saunders went from being a nerdy, bullied teenager to a tyrannical, bullying boss as an adult.
• In Looper, Joseph Simmons travels back in time to prevent the rise of the Rainmaker, a mysterious individual who singlehandedly took over international crime syndicates. Eventually, he finds Cid, a boy living with his mother on a farm. Initially sweet, he will kill anyone who threatens his mother, with telekinetic powers equal in power to a small nuke. While it is implied that he became the Rainmaker in the original timeline, it is left unclear for the present one.
• Marvel Cinematic Universe:
  • Iron Man 3: Aldrich Killian started out as a sort of sad and nerdy scientist with a physical disability, but 13 years after being stood up by Tony Stark, he had become the ruthless and homicidal true alter-ego of The Mandarin, and the creator of the Extremis virus.
  • The Big Bad of Captain America: Civil War not only starts out with no powers, he never gains any, but becomes the most effective MCU villain to date and the first one listed under The Bad Guy Wins. He's "just" a former special forces soldier with no personal connection to the protagonists until his father, wife, and son were killed in Sokovia in Avengers: Age of Ultron, but uses experience, patience, and The Power of Hate to cause repeated fights between the heroes, paralyze Rhodey, get everyone on the Anti-Accords side jailed, and ultimately break up the Avengers in a way they might never heal from.
  • Thor: Love and Thunder: Much like in the comics, Gorr starts out as just a regular member of his alien race who was nearly dying and prayed to his god to save his dying daughter. Once he finds said god who mocks him as a mere mortal, he grabs the Necrosword and slays the gods present. He then goes on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge with the sole goal to wipe-out every god in the universe. Even Zeus and other famous gods in Omnipotence City are deeply afraid of him.
  • Thunderbolts* (2025): Robert "Bob" Reynolds is a drug addict and implied to have a bipolar disorder when he was taken in by Oxe to be experimented on. As a result, he won the Superpower Lottery and gets mightier than the the whole Avengers. Unfortunatly, now possessing nearly god-like powers results in Bob manifesting an evil side calling itself "the Void" that plans to pull everyone in New York into darkness.
• The Menu has murderous high-class chef Julian Slowik, who started out as just some ordinary cook at a burger joint before climbing up the ranks to become a world-famous culinary artiste. In fact, he's primarily motivated by how his life as a superstar chef is much more miserable and dissatisfying than his life as a nobody.
• In Milk, Dan White goes from being an average citizen to a mentally unhinged assassin.
• At the beginning of Mr. Right, Martha is an endearing Cloud Cuckoolander who likes dragons and dinosaurs, is somewhat irresponsible, and who has terrible taste in men. After meeting the titular character (a goofy former hitman who now uses his ability to see in Bullet Time and his ridiculous reflexes to kill anyone who tries to hire him or force him to become a hitman again, while wearing a red clown nose), she discovers that she has similar abilities to him, and ends the movie being essentially just as deadly as he is, complete with her own goofy accessory (cat ears in her case).
• Thana from Ms. 45 is a Villain Protagonist variation. After being raped twice, she goes from a reserved, mute seamstress to a violent vigilante with a body count in the double digits.
• The tagline for Napoleon (2023) goes like this: "He came from nothing. He conquered everything."
• In None Shall Escape, Wilhelm Grimm goes from being a schoolteacher at the end of WWI to a ruthless Nazi officer during WWII.
• Jonathan Mathias from The Ωmega Man. Jonathan Matthias was just some random news broadcaster that snapped as the world came to an end and denounced Man's technology and the politics of its users as the reason the world died — fast-forward a few years and he became the head of a murderous luddite cult of personality that destroys anyone unlucky enough to be declared an enemy of said cult (and this is without taking into account the whole "mutant albino" thing).
• In the earlier Pink Panther films, Dreyfus was merely Clouseau's boss who was driven crazy by his antics and tried to kill him. The Pink Panther Strikes Again sees him become a full James Bond supervillain leading an army of criminals (committing crimes such as kidnapping and bank robbery), threatening the world with destruction unless his demands are met. His goal of killing Clouseau remains the same.
• The Big Bad from The Postman, who before the war which turned the States into a Crapsack World, was... a copy-machine salesman.
  General Bethlehem: What do you think that I did before the war?
• A Prophet: Malik starts the film as a 19-year-old illiterate loser who gets his shoes stolen from him on his first day in prison. By the end of the film, he's the boss of the prison.
• Rampage (2018): George, Ralph and Lizzie were all just ordinary wild or tame animals but after being mutated by CRISPR, they become instant gigantic rage-driven titans who devour and kill humans, being powerful enough to overwhelm the United States Army.
• In Revenge (2017), Jen goes from some wealthy asshole's arm candy to avenging angel who leaves nothing but oceans of blood in her wake.
• Saw:
  • John Kramer, the Jigsaw Killer, was once just a mild-mannered civil engineer. Then his pregnant wife had a miscarriage, and shortly after that he found out he had incurable cancer. He then attempted to commit suicide, and when that failed, he decided to dedicate the rest of his life to "teaching" people to appreciate their lives. The rest, as they say, is history.
  • Amanda Young was once a hopeless and desperate young woman who was put through a grueling test by Jigsaw. Ever since then, she found herself drawn to his insane methodology, to the point where she proved just as good at building death traps as him, and came close to surpassing him as the resident Jigsaw killer.
• Scarface (1983): Tony Montana goes from being a dish cleaner to bring the most feared drug dealer in Miami.
• SHAZAM! (2019): Thaddeus Sivana starts as a meek little boy who is constantly belittled by his father and pushed around by his older brother. After being rejected by the wizard Shazam to be his successor since he was tempted by the Seven Deadly Sins, he gets into an argument with his brother and father, which causes the latter to crash the car they're in, and it's heavily implied that the abuse got worse. Decades later, using his father's company's assets to conduct a secret search for the wizard Shazam, he goes to confront him and allows the Seven Deadly Sins to enter his body. Sivana then uses the demons' powers to murder his older brother and father in cold blood, as well as the board of directors, and hunts down the new Shazam in order to steal the power for himself, and is willing to kill anyone standing in his way.
• A Shock to the System: Graham starts out as a mild-mannered, henpecked ad executive. Then after accidentally killing a homeless man begging him for change and no one notices, he has a revelation about how easy killing is. He resolves to murder everyone who's causing him problems (his wife, his boss etc.) and make their deaths appear like accidents. It works, transforming him into a cold-blooded, cunning murderer.
• Shot Caller: During his time in prison, Jacob transforms from a frightened fresh inmate into one of the leading members of a powerful prison gang. This is especially obvious in his interactions with Shotgun; when they first met, Shotgun spoke down to him, but after they meet again on the outside ten years later, Shotgun is flat-out terrified of him.
• Silent Hill has Alessa Gillespie, a small girl (9 in the original, 11 in the sequel) who is burned alive by a cult, either because they believe that she's a witch or because they want to impregnate her with the cult's god. Prior to that, she may have had some psychic powers, but nothing too dramatic (an early deleted scene had her demonstrating her powers by making butterflies move in an unusual pattern, and in the film, she may have snapped a chain). Afterward, the cultists literally only survive for as long as they do because she wants them to be absolutely broken before she kills them.
• Spaghettiman (2016): Dale. He was originally a good-hearted police officer who never held a single grudge towards Clark, or his co-workers, no matter how poorly they treated him. When Clark/Spaghettiman gained superpowers, he condemned him for trying to take money from the people saved and told him he believed had the chance to make a difference in their community for good. At the same time, all of Dale's efforts to pass the police exam went unrecognized despite him trying his best, while Clark became more famous due to footage spreading of his vigilante actions. Dale began feeling inferior compared to his best friend, especially as he had never put in any hard work to get where he was, so he allied with a gang of dangerous criminals to humble him and kidnapped the pregnant wife of Spaghettiman's new lackey Anthony as well. In the end, both Clark and Anthony face off against him to rescue her, and when the police arrive, Dale's reputation has been destroyed and it is clear he will spend the rest of his life behind bars.
• Star Trek (2009):
  • Nero was just an ordinary captain of a mining ship when his home planet was destroyed and he got sucked into an alternate timeline. In the past, his mining ship can outfight any other vessel, and he has the capability to destroy planets and alter the timeline.
  • This applies to the Narada as well, at least according to the comic series The Countdown. In its original time setting, it was a simple Romulan mining ship as Nero said. Later however, it's upgraded with reverse engineered Borg technology from the Tal Shiar, turning it into an Eldritch Starship (even by the standards of the original timeline).
• Star Wars:
  • Anakin Skywalker/Darth Vader started out as a slave on the impoverished, marginal desert planet Tatooine. That's about as low as you can get in a galaxy far, far away. Through the will of the Force, he was found and raised by the Jedi to be The Chosen One destined to destroy the Sith. Through the will of Palpatine, he destroyed the Jedi first. Then he ruled the galaxy with an iron fist as the Emperor's right hand man, culminating in him killing The Emperor with his own hands. Revenge of the Sith strongly hints that Anakin was the product of Darth Plagueis's twisted attempts at "creating life" through the power of the dark side, though the person claiming this is a Manipulative Bastard.
  • Speaking of said Manipulative Bastard, exploiting this trope was a big part of Palpatine's plan to come to power. While certainly not a nobody, being the senator of the Naboo system and the current Dark Lord of the Sith, he nonetheless played the role of the humble and compassionate statesman, all while subtly guiding and manipulating events (along with the occasional Indy Ploy to use his own setbacks to further his aims). Revenge of the Sith ends with Palpatine as one of the most powerful — and evil — men in the franchise. If that's not bad enough, The Rise of Skywalker reveals that he's not only found a way to cheat death, but essentially is the Dark Side, possessing the spirit and power of every previous Sith before him.
  • Zig-zagged with Rey. At first, it's seemingly played straight in The Last Jedi: Rey is a nobody from a backwater planet, but Luke is terrified at not only her raw power, but how readily she nearly delved into the Dark Side of the Force. Snoke and Kylo Ren both want to invoke this, with Kylo Ren especially playing on her pain over being abandoned on Jakku and the lies she tells herself about her family in an effort to turn her. Then Rise of Skywalker reveals the situation is inverted: Rey is not a nobody at all, but the granddaughter of Palpatine himself; his son and daughter-in-law fled from him to protect her, and were essentially nightmares who chose to become nobodies. And then played straight once again, as Palpatine wants her to kill him so he can Body Surf and merge his spirit with hers to make her the new Sith Empress in a galaxy in which there are no Jedi left to oppose her.
  • In Solo, Han's childhood sweetheart, Qi'ra, goes from an orphaned street kid to the right-hand woman of a feared crime lord and eventually takes over the syndicate herself.
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street: Benjamin Barker was a happy, ordinary London man, with just an exceptional talent at barbery. Then he was jailed on trumped up charges and sent away for ten years to Australia. He came back to find his wife had poisoned herself, and the man who did this to him had taken his daughter. Thus was born Sweeney Todd, the Demon Barber.
• Anderi Sator from TENET. Andrei Sator was working clean-up after a nuclear accident on a Soviet Black Site, just an expendable mook with a short lifespan. He becomes a powerful oligarch and Arms Dealer after digging up an inverted Time Capsule and accepting the Deal with the Devil it offered.
• The Metal Fetishist from Tetsuo: The Iron Man. He started out as a deranged homeless man with a warped fetish for metal, to the point of stabbing and inserting it into his own skin. After his encounter and near death experience at the hands of the salary man, he gains metal manipulation powers and wrecks havoc on not only the salaryman and his girlfriend, but the world at large.
• There Will Be Blood: Though it occurs in a microcosm of a small mining community, the overarching theme of the whole film is this trope, happening in slow motion.
• The Toxic Avenger was originally a mere frail, socially-awkward nerd who worked as a janitor, until some delinquents decided to pull a humiliating prank on him. Said prank ended in him falling into radioactive waste, causing him to turn into a hideous, but powerful mutant superhero who cleans Tromaville of vile criminals.
• In Transcendence (2014), RIFT is mentioned as having grown from a relatively harmless group that protested the effect of cell phones on socialization. Now they're full-blown terrorists.
• TRON:
  • The MCP from the original movie went from a simple chess program to a program designed to oversee the company's computer network and eventually plotted to take over the computer systems of both the Pentagon and the Kremlin.
  • Clu has gone from an ineffectual program that falls off a cliff a few minutes into the original film to the Big Bad of TRON: Legacy.
• Us (2019): Red, protagonist Adelaide's doppelganger, started out as an ordinary little girl but went on to become the Tethered's Dark Messiah, leading a revolution that involves killing all of their original counterparts.
• Valentine: Jeremy Melton was once the biggest loser in middle school. Then he was framed for Attempted Rape, beaten by a Gang of Bullies, and locked up in a mental institution. 13 years later, Jeremy has become a cold and calculating Serial Killer hell-bent on revenging himself on the women who framed him. He succeeds, gets away with it, and ends up with the heroine.