Vigilantes

Vigilantes refers to people who enact justice by extra-judicial means. Police and the judicial system (irrespective of whether one agrees with the rightness of their methods or whether a system is corrupt) are the designated enforcers of the law in any given society – for which see Law Enforcement in Fantastic Cinema.

Vigilantes are private individuals or groups that enact a personal sense of justice according to their own moral code. Police will usually arrest a suspect based on evidence that determines their guilt, while a vigilante will in many cases have no concern for evidence other than their own suspicions; where police will try a suspect in a court and send them to jail, a vigilante may well simply execute them. There is the frequent sense in many of these films that the justice system has become too liberal or inefficient and there is a need for people to right wrongs by their own hand.

The vigilante film took off with the Charles Bronson hit Death Wish (1974), which led to a number of sequels and imitators. The vigilante film has largely remained in the province of the Action Film where a vigilante is seen as a tough, individualistic hero who operates by their own sense of right and wrong. One noted variant was Day of the Woman/I Spit on Your Grave (1978), which gave birth to the Rape Revenge film in which a raped woman goes on a bloody spree of Revenge against those responsible.

The Superhero Film also sits with one foot inside the vigilante film given that most superheroes operate without the sanction of any law enforcement agency. Many of the Batman films from Batman (1989) onwards paint him as a grim vigilante. This was something that gained its strongest iteration with the various films and tv series based on Marvel’s ultra-violent The Punisher.