Moral Event Horizon / Live-Action Films

"There's a line you cross, you don't never come back from. Point of no return. Dave crossed it. I'm here with him. That means I'm going along for the ride, the whole ride. All the way to the end of the line, wherever that is."

— Carlito Brigante, Carlito's Way

Moral Event Horizon in Films.

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Film franchises with their own pages

• Disney
  • Marvel Cinematic Universe
  • Star Wars
• Harry Potter
• Jurassic Park
• Power Rangers
• Sonic the Hedgehog
• Star Trek
• Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (includes the live-action films)
• Tolkien's Legendarium
• Transformers

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#

• Two Hands: Acko's hit-and-run killing of street kid Pete and apathetic reaction to the accident cement him as the only irredeemable person in the film for many fans.
• 12 Years a Slave: The brutal and abusive treatment towards the slaves, with a few noteworthy examples of the horizon being crossed:
  • John Tibeats crossed it by sabotaging Northup's hard work and antagonizing him, to the point where Northup's retaliation is so satisfying to watch. It doesn't end there; Tibeats and the other staff members try to hang him to death, but fail and leave him tied to a tree to suffer slowly and painfully. Ford sees this and is horrified, even selling Northup in order to save him.
  • The bounty hunters crossed it by lynching and hanging two slaves. They let Northup go (with an added kick), but they showed him that had they not been merciful to him, he would've joined them.
  • Edwin Epps crossed it numerous times throughout the movie, such as raping Patsey and his callous disregard towards his slaves' lives. The most evil things that Epps did were spurred by sheer pettiness, such as chasing Northup with a knife when he heard him talk to Patsey and forcing Northup to whip Patsey while threatening to shoot him and the other slaves if he didn't. When Northup is overwhelmed with guilt, Epps snatches away the whip and beats the poor woman until her back is covered in Gorn.
  • Mrs. Epps crosses it by physically abusing Patsey to the point where she starts crying in pain and subjecting her to Eye Scream, because she was jealous of Patsey for being her husband's sex slave. (Not that Patsey had a say in the matter.)
• 22 Bullets: Pascal Vassetto feeding a man to dogs for snitching on his gang.
• 100 Bloody Acres: Lindsay Morgan crosses it by trying to mulch his own brother.

A

• Korshunov from Air Force One crosses this when he murdered an innocent woman begging for her life.
• A Fistful of Dynamite: Colonel Reza and the Mexican army cross it with the murder of Juan's children.
• Alaska: After Perry and Koontz kill the young polar bear Cubby's mother, Koontz then proceeds to taunt Cubby with his mother's pelt by waving it in front of his cage for fun. He even jokes to Perry by saying "Shame to separate a mother and her child, isn't it?" The Nostalgia Critic summed the scene up pretty perfectly in his review of the movie:
  NC: Ok, that is beyond sick, man. That's fucking demented!
• Alexander Nevsky: When the Teutonic Knights throw babies into a huge bonfire.
• In the Australian film Alexandra's Project, the titular woman's revenge on her husband for years of sexual objectification and financial control is completely and utterly out of proportion with the mistreatment she received, especially since she apparently didn't complain much about it beforehand, and that her "project" is far too elaborate and long-running to be the work of an irrational mind.
• Burke in Aliens, when he tries to impregnate Ripley and Newt with alien embryos, so he can smuggle them through quarantine, and ultimately use them for bioweapons research. Even before that, he did the same thing with the colonists themselves. When being interviewed on The Tonight Show, Paul Reiser (who played Burke) revealed that he took his parents to see the film — and when the scene came where his character was killed... his parents simply nodded their silent approval. Damn — if your parents want the character you're playing dead, you know he's passed the Moral Event Horizon. Ripley said it best when confronting him about it.

  Ripley: You know, Burke, I don't know which species is worse. You don't see them fucking each other over for a goddamn percentage.

• In The Amazing Spider-Man 2, Donald Menken crosses it when he removes Harry Osborn from Oscorp simply for trying to get details on Max Dillon–details that Harry needed to stay alive, if not Spider-Man's blood. This sets off a chain reaction that causes Harry to become the Green Goblin. Not that it makes Harry setting off the chain reaction that ends in Gwen Stacy's death OK by any stretch, of course.
• American Heart: Rainey crosses it when he shoots and quite possibly kills Jack.
• American Justice: Sheriff Payden shoots Boyd in the face for complaining about finding no money.
• Apocalypto: The Dragon Middle Eye's sadistic behavior becomes unforgivable within a very short period of time, after the deliberate murder of Jaguar Paw's father and the (thankfully offscreen) rape of several of the villager's women.
• Lyla's father from August Rush. Taking the Stage Mom and Helicopter Parents tropes to the max, he tries to keep his daughter on a path that she doesn't want to pursue. After she gets pregnant from her boyfriend, she gets into an argument with her father regarding the baby and her career as a cellist. As she's about to rush out the door, she gets hit by a car and goes into a coma. So what does her father do? He sent the baby to an orphanage after it was born (while his daughter was in a coma) and said that the baby died. Granted, he does eventually confess his sins to his daughter, but he better know that there is no coming back from that one.
• Austin Powers: In the third movie, Goldmember already has a somewhat misguided compass. When Dr. Evil has a Heel–Face Turn, Goldmember crosses it by putting their plan to cause a global flood back in motion. If that's not enough, he also holds Foxxy Cleopatra hostage and shoots at Austin and Dr. Evil when they attempt to thwart his plan.
• It's hard to tell when Quaritch in Avatar crosses this, but the most likely candidate is when he murders Grace while our heroes are trying to escape from him.

B

• This trope caused a scene to be removed from Back to the Future Part III. Originally, the movie was to have contained a scene where Buford Tannen, ancestor of Biff, shoots and kills Marshall Strickland in front of the lawman's son. According to screenwriter Bob Gale, the scene was removed because it was felt that after Buford is seen committing such a deed, it doesn't seem right that he not die (and he can't die, seeing as he will need to live long enough to extend the family line).
  • The scene made it into the novelization of the movie, however. And the Marshall's son grew up with a strong sense of discipline, and made sure it got instilled in all his kids. So Buford just made life hell for all his descendants in general, and Biff in particular.
  • It's also referenced and possibly canonised in the Telltale Games sequel.
  • Biff himself definitely crosses it in Part II when he kills George and becomes Lorraine's abusive rapist husband after becoming rich through the Gray's Sports Almanac. Even though this is an alternate timeline that is later rectified, knowing that he even had the potential for it is enough. Thankfully, in the actual timeline he doesn't stoop to such lows.
• Batman Film Series:
  • In Batman (1989), it's not a question of whether The Joker crosses it, but when. Perhaps the most agreed crossing point is killing Thomas and Martha Wayne when he was younger, leaving behind a traumatized 8 year-old Bruce Wayne. It's the only Joker's murder that is played seriously, with no levity of retribution (like with the mobsters) or dark humor (like with the Smilex product poisoning). And once Batman realizes that the Joker is the man who killed his parents, he goes from seeing the Joker as a public menace he unwittingly created to the devil of his nightmares that needs to be killed.
  • In Batman Returns, the Penguin crossed the line after he had to ditch the mayoral campaign and decided to kidnap all of Gotham's firstborn children, including the babies, with the intention of drowning them in a deep puddle of Shreck's industrial byproducts.
    • The brilliance of Penguin's character in Returns is that he was already on the other side of the line from the start of the movie. His reemergence into society, his attempts to gather census data on the populace of Gotham, all done from the start so he could identify and kill the first born children of every wealthy family in the city. It is even implied that he's already murdered children back when he was the "bird boy" at the Red Triangle Circus's freak show.
  • Batman Forever has an In-Universe example. Fred Stickley decides Edward Nygma went over by using him as a guinea pig for his brain manipulation device thing. Despite being an overall awesome and funny villain, Nygma really went over later in the same scene by pushing Stickley out the window for firing him and trying to report him to the proper authorities. He cements it when he tampers with the security log to make it look like a suicide, without caring one whistle about the repercussions it would have for Stickley's loved ones.
  • In Batman & Robin, Poison Ivy crosses it with attempted murder via deactivating Nora's cryo pod out of pure jealousy. To further rub salt into the wound, she then lies to Mr. Freeze about Nora's fate. When Mr. Freeze finds out who really pulled the plug, to say he's not very happy would be putting it mildly.
    Poison Ivy: I never was too good with competition. Who needs a frigid wife anyway?
• In Ben-Hur (1959), Messala crosses it when, knowing that Judah Ben-Hur wasn't responsible for the death of the governor, he arrests him anyway, along with his family, on trumped-up charges simply to make an example of him and crush any potential rebellion by the Jews. To make things worse, one of his chief motivations was that Ben-Hur's ideals clashed with his. He even bans Ben-Hur from drinking with the rest of the slaves, with full intent to murder him by proxy before he even made it to the galleys—and yes, Ben-Hur would've died then and there if Christ Jesus hadn't shown up to give him some water. And all to subjugate the Jews.
• Big Tits Zombie: Maria crosses this the moment she decides to unleash a Zombie Apocalypse on the world and create The Necrocracy in humanity's stead.
• Bio-Dome: Because of the extreme degrees of annoyance that Bud and Doyle had demonstrated up to that point one can still find some sympathy for Faulkner when he abandons Bud and Doyle in the desert part of the dome to die, but when he decides to blow the dome sky-high with everybody inside, that's the moment he completely loses it.
• Black Rain has Sato's murder of Charlie.
• Black Friday (2021): Brian biting Ken to make him think he's infected. He tries to defend his actions and doesn't even seem to understand why the other survivors are infuriated with him.
• Black Sunday: Asa Vadja crosses it when she tries to trick The Hero into killing his own Love Interest, who looks exactly like her.
• Blade Runner 2049: If you thought Luv hadn't crossed it with her brutal murder of Lieutenant Joshi, then her crushing Joi's emitter to eliminate her will definitely do the trick. Her other acts of violence, while not morally justifiable, could at least be explained as aligning with her mission; this last one, however, appears to have been done for no other reason than pure, sadistic cruelty.
• In the Blade Trilogy:
  • Blade: Frost crosses this when he attacks Blade's mentor and father-figure Whistler and leaves him to die in agony. Whistler gets better though, but through becoming a vampire.
  • Blade: Trinity: Dracula crosses this when he tortures and crucifies one of the Nightstalkers and leaves her mutilated body for the heroes to find. Notable not just for the wanton cruelty of it, but also the fact that the Nightstalker in question was blind and so obviously had no way from defending herself.
• The men of Ward 3, in Blindness, have theirs when they demand that the other wards send the women to them in exchange for food. Their rape even kills one woman.
• Bloodshot (2020): Dalton crosses it in the final battle by letting his partner Tibbs fall to his death. He immediately gets his when Ray drops him to his own death with a punch for good measures.
• The Brain (1988): Dr. Blakely crosses it when he has a woman murder her husband with a chainsaw for not watching his show.
• Bridge to Terabithia: Scott and Gary cross it when they up their bullying of Jess following Leslie's death, Scott going as far as to taunt Jess about it in class, complete with a smug smile the whole time.

C

• Carlito's Way: Carlito Brigante (as narrator) provides the quote at the top of the page in reference to his lawyer, David Kleinfeld.
• Cinderella (2015) has the expected moment when Tremaine and her daughters wreak Cinderella's dress (more so for Tremaine than her daughters since here, she actually initiates the action.) Made especially strong given how it was her mothers's, and how it's the turning point when Tremaine's subtle pettiness turns into more severe cruelty. And then there's the scene later where Tremaine breaks Ella's glass slipper at the end of her Motive Rant. Ella by that point can't help but ask why Tremaine is as cruel as she's been.
• Children of the Night: Czakyr crossed the line in the 1980's when he killed a bunch of kids to make his Faking the Dead more believable. Or, in actuality, trapping then alive and conscious with him in his prison so that he can feed while he's in.
• Richard Detmer from Chronicle, constantly takes his anger and stress on his son Andrew by berating him and accusing him of being selfish. Even though Richard himself constantly spends money on alcohol instead of looking after his sick wife (Which he claims to love but spends time getting drunk). If there ever existed any shred of decency of Richard, it was long gone when he blames Andrew, (who's comatose mind you!) for his wife's death and tries punching him on the hospital bed, but Andrew suddenly catches his arm, followed by an explosion.
• Class of 1984: After the incident, Peter Stegman and his Neo-Nazis street gang crosses it when they tortures and rapes Ms. Norris, and then taunting her husband.
• In Cleopatra, Big Bad Octavian crosses this line when he has the title character's young son Caesarion murdered to secure his claim to the throne of Rome. This was a significant departure from history done to make Octavian seem eviler; the Real Life Caesarion was in his late teens at the time of his death (well into adulthood by the standards of the day) rather than the ten or twelve the film portrays him, and was killed after his mother's suicide, meaning the Tear Jerker scene where she realizes he is dead did not happen in reality, nor could it have.
• In A Clockwork Orange, as soon as Alex raped a woman in the Singing in the Rain scene, he was beyond redemption. This is partly why the twenty-first chapter of the novel was ommited from the film— Stanley Kubrick thought it's simply not in his character to suddenly reform.
• In Contagion (2011) Allan Krumwiede crosses it when he starts exploiting people’s fear of the virus by lying that forsynthia is a cure for the virus so that he can make money, and he then starts actively getting people to mistrust the authorities, who are desperately trying to stop the virus, and sabotage the doctors working on a cure so he can continue to make a quick buck.
• In the film Cracks Miss G crosses this when she molests a drunken Fiamma. She definitely crosses it when she refuses to give Fiamma her inhaler, allowing her to die
• The Craft has Nancy Downs and her Co-Dragons Bonnie and Rochelle trying to drive the protagonist Sarah to suicide, going as far as to make her hallucinate snakes, bugs and rats everywhere she looks.
  • In that same movie, after going on a date with Sarah, Chris Hooker spreads rumors that she puts out at school the next day.
• In Cube, Quentin grows steadily more hostile over the course of the film, but he doesn't make the full transition into becoming a genuine threat to the group until he kills Holloway by letting her fall to her death. It's not very surprising that our protagonists eventually try to get rid of him afterwards.

D

• The Dark Knight Trilogy:
  • In Batman Begins, the League of Shadows seems earlier on like a group that's dedicated to justice, even if their notion of what qualifies as justice seems rather warped. When they talk about how Gotham needs to be destroyed, that does not confirm that they mean it, given the nature of their training. Then you get to hear a bit more detail on how they plan to do it, but that still doesn't rule out that the option of talking them out of it before it's too late. Then you see Ducard switch on a microwave emitter, vapourizing the water supply that he apparently knew had been laced with Crane's drug, as a means of drugging the people of Gotham, including the innocent children, into mass panic. Not exactly justice...
    • He also does it in an incredibly callous way, accompanying the switch on (accomplished with a dainty flick of the wrist), with a fucking one-liner:
    Ra's Al Ghul: Gentlemen, it's time to spread the word... (*flick*) and the word is panic.
    • Carmine Falcone crosses it by hiring a hitwoman disguised as a reporter to ice Joe Chill, and when Bruce confronts him about it, he casually taunts him before eighty-sixing him.
    Carmine Falcone: Yeah, you got spirit, kid. I'll give you that. More than your old man, anyway. In the joint, Chill told me, uh, told me about the night he killed your parents. He said your father begged for mercy. Begged. Like a dog.
  • In The Dark Knight, the Joker's likely crossed the line well before the movie began (if he didn't, he crossed it when he killed Rachel and followed it up by driving Harvey to madness). It's implied most of the mobsters (with the exceptions of Sal Maroni and Gambol) crossed it when they hired the Joker in the first place.
    • Bruce sums it up pretty neatly after Judge Surrillo and Commissioner Loeb are killed: "Targeting me won't get them their money back. I knew the mob wouldn't go down without a fight, but this is different. They crossed a line." Alfred then tells him, "You crossed the line first, sir; you squeezed them, you hammered them to the point of desperation, and in their desperation they turned to a man they didn't fully understand." That line highlights Maroni's dilemma; he only let the Chechen hire the Joker because he thought it was the best way to keep the mob afloat; Maroni hates the Joker as much as the good guys, and he admits to Batman that the Joker was not the kind of guy you'd want to get in touch with when you want to get something done, to put it lightly.
      Sal Maroni: Friends? Have you met this guy?
    • In the novelization, Maroni decides the Joker went over when the informant he had hired to find out whatever he could about the Joker dies after drinking poisoned coffee. The Joker is so secretive, there's no line he won't cross to make sure nobody finds out who he really is.
  • In The Dark Knight Rises, if Bane doesn't cross it by snapping Batman's spine and leaving him in a prison pit, broken and helpless, then he crosses it shortly thereafter when he seals off Gotham City, turning it into an anarchist hell.
    • If you're to believe the novelization of the first film, Talia's plan to subject Gotham to nuclear holocaust in Rises goes beyond the pale even by her father's standards, as he would never have resorted to nuclear weapons (since he considers nukes to be powerful enough to make most of the Earth uninhabitable for most life forms, and since his goal was to save humanity from itself...); the fact that she's doing it in her father's name only makes it worse.
• Dawn of the Planet of the Apes: Koba has two possible crossing points.
  • The first is when he shoots his decade-long leader and friend Caesar, lies about his death and frames the humans for it along with setting fire to the apes' village, in order to manipulate his fellow apes into going to war with the humans. In the novelization, Koba himself seems to realize that if he does this there will be no going back, but does it anyway out of a belief that he is doing what's best for the apes by "removing their weak leader."
  • The second is when he executes the young Ash just for refusing to follow his orders to kill an unarmed man, showing that Koba has become a ruthless tyrant will do anything to stay in power.
• DC Extended Universe
  • Zod has a number of possible crossing points in Man of Steel:
    • Faora gives a breather to Lois, because humans can't breathe the Kryptonian atmosphere. When Superman starts coughing up blood and passes out, Zod explains that Superman can't quite breathe the Kryptonian atmosphere either after living on Earth for so long, and they were counting on it to de-power him. Meaning Zod was perfectly willing to kill Superman from the beginning.
    • He tries to threaten Superman's adoptive mother, almost killing her ... not really a smart move on Zod's part.
    • Not hesitating to destroy the human population just so the Kryptonians can thrive again — even though they already had the means to repopulate their race, possibly on another planet. They could repopulate on Earth without killing the native inhabitants in the terraforming process, it would just take some adaptation time, which is relatively simple to achieve as demonstrated by the few minutes it takes Zod himself to adapt, and maybe moreso since these new Kryptonians would've been born into the environment. So they were really just killing people for no reason, or for no reason greater than prejudice against "inferior bloodlines."
    • In-universe: the leaders of Krypton view Zod's failed rebellion as this trope, and sentence him and his followers to the Phantom Zone.
    • The alternate 2013 variant of Zod crossed it in The Flash (2023) when he killed the infant Kal-El before he made it to Earth, moments before harvesting the Codex from Supergirl.
  • Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice:
    • Anatoli Khanyzev crosses it in the warehouse fight scene; where he openly threatens to kill Martha Kent with a flamethrower in front of Batman. Batman then shoots his propane tank with a mobster's discarded gun and rescues Martha in the nick of time as the tank explodes.
    • Lex Luthor has several possible crossing points:
    • Orchestrating a coup in Africa, paying Khanyzev to destroy the evidence and killing CIA operative Jimmy Olsen in attempt to implicate Superman in the process.
    • Exploiting a man's Fantastic Racism to assassinate Senator Finch during Superman's trial with a bomb at the US capitol.
    • Kidnapping Martha Kent and forcing a Sadistic Choice against Superman to fight Batman in exchange for her life. Bruce is mortified at Clark's mention of "Martha" triggering the memory of his parents being murdered; and is convinced to rescue her instead.
    • Creating Doomsday and killing Superman. Also qualifies as one in-universe, as Lex is incarcerated for his crimes, further compounded by the Ultimate Edition revealing him to be in league with Steppenwolf.
  • Suicide Squad (2016):
    • The Joker crosses it before the events of the film, electrically torturing Doctor Harleen Quinzel before she became Harley Quinn and manipulating her love of him for criminal gain. Word of God also states that this continuity's Joker also killed the Jason Todd Robin and vandalized his costume to taunt Batman, referencing another crossing of the horizon.
    • Amanda Waller crosses it when she kills her staff after they object to her use of the meta-humans in the field. Possibly Rick Flagg as well when he does nothing to stop Waller's actions. Even the members of Task Force X call her out on this at the end of the film.
  • Wonder Woman (2017):
    • Ludendorff and Dr. Poison cross it in the waning days of the war, when they use the toxin they develop to kill their chain of command for wanting to sign an armistice with the other world nations.
    • Sir Patrick Morgan aka Ares crosses it with his role in the waning days of the war, manipulating parliament to keep the conflict going, failing that, tricking his own half-sister Diana into going rogue to send both sides of the war into chaos. Diana is furious in the film's final battle after finding out about this after killing Ludendorff.
  • Justice League (2017): Steppenwolf crossed the horizon before the film's events by using the Mother Boxes to try to bring about The End of the World as We Know It. In the film's timeline proper, his attack on Russia with the Mother Boxes is his second attempt; cemented when he sends an army of his Parademons after a defenseless civilian family.
    • He's even worse in Zack Snyder's Justice League, where the Mother Boxes reshape the planet to the user's homeworlds. While Steppenwolf initially plans to use them to regain his lost favor with Darkseid, he then decides to reshape Earth into Apokolips for himself.
  • SHAZAM! (2019): While Sivana's obsession caused him to skirt the edge with his callous disregard for the death of his head researcher, he definitely crosses the line when he enters the Sivana boardroom and murders his father and brother along with the twelve other people in the room who had nothing to do with Sivana's Dysfunctional Family issues.
  • Blue Beetle (2023): Victoria Kord crosses it when she has her mercenaries attack the Reyes' family home to get to Jaime and the Scarab, resulting in Jaime’s father Alberto, who had already suffered a heart attack earlier, having another, fatal heart attack.
• Dark Harvest: Elijah killing his pregnant wife to cover up his previous murders.
• Invoked by Frank Talby in Day Of Anger with a 10th lesson in gunfighting after the protagonist shoots and mortally wounds him in a gunfight.
  Frank Talby: Your last lesson, Scotty: when you start killing, you can't stop it.
• Dead Heat: [McNab] leaving Mortis to decay in the same spot as his dead girlfriend.
• Death Wish series:
  • Death Wish: The three unnamed thugs from the beginning rape Kersey's wife and daughter, killing the former.
  • Death Wish II: Nirvana and his gang rape and murder Kersey's daughter and maid.
• Hans Gruber of Die Hard crosses this when he kills Mr. Takagi simply because he refuses to tell him the password to the vault.
  • Die Hard 2 ramps it up with Colonel Stuart, who guides a plane full of innocent passengers into crashing into the runway. All because McClane had the audacity to kill the men they had stationed at the annex skywalk.
  • And then subverted in Die Hard with a Vengeance. The bomb planted in an elementary school turns out to be a dud.
  Simon: I'm a soldier, not a monster. Though I sometimes work for monsters.
• The Devil's Advocate: John Milton is initially presented as this charming, charismatic if shady lawyer. He defends a lot of unpleasant people, and drags Kevin into Machiavellian ways, but he is doing his job. Then he viciously rapes Mary Ann, all so Kevin can create the Anti-Christ and unleash Armageddon on the world.
• The Dead Lands: While it was not unusual for pre-colonial Maori to massacre entire tribes, the villain Wirepa crosses the moral event horizon by betraying and murdering his former allies.
• Diggstown: Boss Gillon is corrupt, but his intelligence, cordial demeanor, good relationship with his son, and treating Honey Roy as a Worthy Opponent initially make him seem Affably Evil at worst. Then it turns out that he drugged his own fighter, hometown hero Charles Macon Diggs, and bet against him, robbing his neighbors who bet on Diggs of their land and causing Diggs permanent brain damage. This might be executable by the fact that Caine implies that no one expected the drugged Diggs to last so long and take so much punishment. But any remaining sympathy Gillon has is thrown out the window when he threatens to murder Slim Busby unless his brother defeats Honey Roy after catching the two Throwing the Fight. He remorselessly carries out that promise when Hambone loses, even though Hambone tried his hardest to win.
• Dirty Harry:
  • Scorpio from the first movie starts out sniping out his victims for fun, which is already pretty nasty stuff, but it gets worse when he kidnaps a 14-year-old girl, hides her in a well with limited oxygen supply and sends the police a message (Along with her bra, a lock of hair, and a bloody tooth pulled out with pliers for additional depravity.) that if the ransom money doesn't drop in time, the girl will die. Scorpio then proceeds to tell Harry Callahan that he changed his mind and is going to let the girl die anyway. When the girl is found, she's dead — and it's strongly implied Scorpio repeatedly raped her. Owing to a technicality because of the way Harry handled the arrest and interrogation, he would've been a Karma Houdini had Harry not proceeded to go after his blood for the effort with full intent to spill it.
  • In the second movie Magnum Force, the deathsquad headed by Briggs cross the horizon when they kill Charlie McCoy when fleeing the scene of their most recent vigilante killing. That was after the corrupt cops had already killed innocent party-goers at the mobster's pool party and the harmless mooks at Guzman's place.
  • In Sudden Impact, Mick was already beyond this when raping Jennifer and her sister, but he went even further by killing Horace and Jennings.
• District 9: It hard to list the main characters who don't do this.
  • Wikus, who is ostensibly the "hero", goes over the horizon in the eyes of many when he kills unhatched prawns by burning them, while jokingly comparing the sounds to popping popcorn. It is ultimately subverted, as he grows to sympathize with prawns due to his gradual transformation into one and grows more and more horrified by MNU's policies.
  • Koobus Venter is a psychotic mercenary who claims "I like watching you prawns die", so it is hard to know when he's already crossed the line, but during the movie, it's somewhere between his casual murder of Christopher's already neutralized friend, and his torture and beating of Christopher. It's hard not to feel joy seeing the prawns give him his due.
  • Obesandjo is a crazed gangster who is notorious for his exploitation of the aliens, from gouging them on the price of cat food, to whoring them out, but it's his murder of a prawn he sold cat food to so he could eat him that is truly disgusting.
  • Of course, the true monster of the film could very well be Piet Smit, an MNU executive and Wikus' father-in-law. As an executive of MNU, he's probably responsible for the abuse the aliens endure, or he doesn't feel like changing the status quo. But he certainly crosses the line when he allows a mutuated Wikus to be dissected live, even after the poor guy begs him for help, and then remorselessly lies to his own daughter about what is happening to Wikus. You really hope that the exposure of MNU's crimes will the bring the heat on him.
• Django:
  • Major Jackson killing Django's wife.
  • Hugo Rodriguez cutting off a man's ear, Force Feeding it to him, then shooting him In the Back.
• We know that Calvin Candie of Django Unchained is bad news early on when we see him cheering on a mandingo fight, a cruel entertainment where slaves fight to the death, but the moment we get a true taste of how evil he is comes when he orders D'Artagnan, another mandingo fighter who wanted out of the business, to be torn apart by Mr. Stonesipher's dogs.
• Bartleby of Dogma hits this early when, upon entering the Despair Event Horizon, he realizes God would never love the Angels the same way he did the humans and decides to wipe them all out. Just to drive the point home, when he finally reaches the church that can allow him and Loki to go home, he decides to have a little fun and slaughter everyone there. Loki certainly wasn't kidding when he decided to live the rest of eternity in exile rather than assist Bartleby in his mad scheme.
• Don't Breathe, if the blind man did not lose all sympathy when he shot and killed Money despite the fact that he did not even come close to pulling the trigger when he pulled a gun on him, had already been disarmed, and was pleading for his life (which goes from self defense to manslaughter at least), he definitely lost it with the reveal that he kidnapped and forcefully impregnated a young woman to produce another child and intends to do the same to Rocky.
• Don't Look Up: Peter Isherwell crosses it when he fires Dr. Mindy's colleagues from his BEAD project for asking too many questions and lets the project go on without adequate review, dooming the entire planet to destruction. While his prior decision to abort the mission was already incredibly unconscionable, Isherwell could have potentially avoided crossing the MEH if his plan was reliable enough to work. However, his treatment of the scientists on the team as well as the existence of his Sleeper Ship show that he knew that his plan could fail, and any concern he had for humanity's survival took a backseat to his delusions of grandeur and the chance to possibly make money.
• Dollars Trilogy:
  • A Fistful of Dollars: Ramon Rojo (the Big Bad) is unquestionably evil. He forces a woman to live with him and threatens to kill her young son if she does not comply with his wishes. His most monstrous moment is massacring the entire Baxter family, including the matriarch, and laughing while he does it all. What makes it so monstrous? In doing so, he even frightens the living hell out of one of his own brothers.
  • For a Few Dollars More: El Indio crosses it when he forces the man who betrayed him to listen to his family being massacred. And then it turns out he crossed it even earlier, when he murdered a young man and raped his wife/lover (Mortimer's sister), which led to her suicide.
  • The Good, the Bad and the Ugly: If Angel Eyes didn't cross it by then, he definitely crosses it when he has Tuco tortured by Corporal Wallace for the name of the cemetery where the money is buried. This after he had been specifically instructed not to torture any of the POWs on the ailing camp warden's watch.
• In Doom, Sarge crosses it when he orders The Kid to kill the uninfected UAC personnel, and then shoots him when he refuses.
• Sylvia Ganush in Drag Me to Hell establishes how evil she is in her very first scene when she condemns someone to eternal torment for stealing a necklace that was quickly returned to her. Bad enough that she did something like that, but what makes this a MEH is that she did it to a 10-year-old boy.
  • Christine crosses it by sacrificing her pet cat, the only living creature for whom she had any respect, in an attempt to placate Ganush. It doesn't work.
  • Of course, Christine would never have even considered it had Ganush not put her in that position in the first place.
• Dumb and Dumber:
  • Sea Bass has crossed it when he attempts to rape Lloyd to death in the bathroom stall.
  • Nicholas Andre is revealed to have kidnapped Mary's husband in order to gain her heirloom, but he surely has crossed it once he shoots Harry without any regrets. Thankfully, Harry had a bulletproof vest the whole time and Andre (along with his accomplice, JP Shay) gets arrested for his crimes.
  • Mental has crossed the line when he murders Harry's parakeet in cold blood just to give him a message. It makes it fitting that he's the only villain in the movie to be killed off.]
• Dumb and Dumber To: Adele has not only been poisoning her husband to gain his wealth, but she then tries to shoot Penny, her foster daughter, and shoots Harry (once he takes the bullet meant for Penny) without remorse. It was definitely satisfying once Fraida (Penny's biological mother) punches her in the face during the climax.

E

• In Eden Lake, Brett and his gang at first seem like the typical bunch of bullies, but suddenly their actions begin to be a lot more excessive as the movie goes on. But ït's just after Steve kills Brett's dog that make the teenagers go too far in their decisions.
• Edward Scissorhands:
  • Jim starts off as a normal Jerk Jock. Then, in the climax, he tries to gun Edward down and hits Kim when she tries to stop him.
  • Joyce tries to seduce Edward even though he clearly has no clue what's going on. If this wasn't bad enough, after he gets away from her, she proceeds to accuse him of trying to rape her.
• In 8mm, it's bad enough that The Machine did it simply because he wanted to, but let's not let the other villains off the hook either:
  • Mr. Christian crossed it by having the snuff film made simply because he has the money to do so.
  • Eddie Poole crossed it by attracting the victim to her death.
  • Dino Velvet for creating the film.
  • Daniel Longdale crossed by accepting the money to have the snuff film made.
• Elfie Hopkins: Cannibal Hunter: The Gammons killing Elfie's parents.
• Elysium:
  • Delacourt ordering Agent Kruger to shoot down three stolen shuttles, each containing elderly and sick immigrants from Earth. The council in Elysium wastes no time in condemning her for this. And she knows she's over the line, because after Kruger slits her throat, she refuses medical attention from Frey, because she knows she deserves to die for what she had done.
  • To say nothing of Kruger. He makes it crystal clear to Max that he's not a nice person when he sexually harassing Frey, stating how she would be the perfect excuse for him to "settle down." It's no wonder why Max blew his stack upon the shuttle's arrival in Elysium.
• In the Schwarzenegger action/horror film End of Days, Satan crosses the line in his very first scene to establish what a monstrous piece of work he is. He possesses a New York banker while the man is having dinner with some friends, then makes out with a woman in front of her husband and threatens him to shut up with a Death Glare. He doesn't stop there, as he promptly leaves the crowded restaurant and blows up the whole place for no reason at all, killing everyone inside.
• The Warden from Escape from Alcatraz is bent on systematically forcing his prisoners to walk the plank very slowly — and then jump into the Despair Event Horizon. He actually succeeds in doing so to Doc by inflicting Disproportionate Retribution over a simple painting of him. The poor guy then deliberately severs his own fingers afterward. That may have been cruel even by the Warden's standards, but he doesn't cross the MEH until he crushes one of Doc's chrysanthemums in front of the rest of the inmates, thus directly resulting in Litmus dying when he overexerts himself trying to retaliate on the spot. And then he adds insult to injury by reminding Frank Morris after Litmus's death that Alcatraz will very likely be his final resting place. Yep, we're talking Umbridge-level evil here. And what makes it all the worse is that unlike Umbridge, he only gets away with three unaccounted-for prisoners (including Morris), who he quickly decides had drowned in their escape attempt, never knowing what may have really happened that night.
• In Executive Decision, Hassan decides to continue the original plan and deploy a whole lot of Deadly Gas over the Eastern Seaboard (killing everybody on the plane and Heaven only knows how many people on the ground) even after the Americans release the terrorists' leader, in order to "teach the infidels a lesson". If that doesn't cross it, his immediate retaliation against another member of the terrorist crew that points out that the mission has been accomplished and there's no need to perform that action (which is to toss him against the plane's staircase and machine-gun him dead) definitely does.
• The Exterminators of the Year 3000: Crazy Bull's cult cross it when it's revealed the they have a stockpile of water stored away and are killing anybody who tries to get it, thus keeping the world the hellhole it is.

F

• In Face/Off, Castor Troy takes Archer's face, destroys the evidence that proves Archer's real identity, and burns everyone who know about it alive.
• Alex Forrest of Fatal Attraction loses all sympathy when she takes Dan's daughter's pet rabbit and boils it alive in the family's pressure cooker in a scene of pure horror that coined the term "bunny boiler" for Yandere types in the West, and has since become a staple usage of bunnies in horror lit (for example, R.L. Stine's books). It's not hard to see why this is the last straw for Dan.
• Peter Friedkin crosses it in Final Destination 5 when he takes Bludworth's warning to "kill or be killed" seriously by going after Molly; however, we only lose all sympathy for him when he kills Agent Block and goes after Molly anyway as a witness to the murder of a federal agent even though he doesn't need what was left of her own life anymore.
  • Unique in that the film essentially revolves around this trope for a side character who is only sporadically followed after the initial bridge accident. His crawl into the Moral Event Horizon is extremely slow and gradual due to his traumatized and panicked state, and is essentially the climax of the film until the Twist Ending. He is an obvious side-protagonist to begin with, good-natured and only wanting to help everyone survive. But throughout the film, he begins to slowly snap after the violent death of his girlfriend, which causes him a strikingly slow gravitation toward the Despair Event Horizon and a feeling of injustice that he is utterly confused about what to do, feels hopeless and helpless without being able to picture a future for himself now, and he's the only person in the group willing to take the advice of Bludworth. As his turn to die comes closer, he reasons that since Death itself is impartial, then he can be, too, and so anything he does is completely justified because it's not for him to determine who dies next. Throughout the film he gradually loses his status as protagonist, and crawls slowly into the Moral Event Horizon as the events in the movie unfold.
• Flash Gordon: Ming the Merciless leaving his daughter to be tortured by Klytus and Kala.
• The Flintstones: Cliff Vandercave was secretly planning to embezzle money and frame Fred Flintstone for it the entire time, but he ultimately crosses the line when he decides to have Bamm-Bamm and Pebbles murdered after Wilma and Betty agree to let him have the Dictabird so that he can cover his tracks.
• Frankenstein Must Be Destroyed: Dr. Frankenstein crosses it in this film with his rape of Anna. Yes, he's quite cruel in the first two films, but before that moment, he got to appear in a sympathetic light at times, most notably in the ironically named The Evil of Frankenstein, but after raping Anna, all sympathy for him goes out the window. Most notably, Peter Cushing was disgusted that the writers dared to add the scene because of how it cheapened his character and apologized to his co-star Veronica Carlson for having to do the scene against his wishes.
• Frontier(s): Karl Sr. crossed it decades ago when he kidnapped the daughter of couple he killed and made her his Sex Slave.

G

• The Galaxy Invader: Joe Montague chases his daughter down and shoots at her for slapping him.
• In Galaxy Quest, while Sarris already established himself as a cruel villain for his attacks on the Thermians (a race with no concept of fiction or deceit); even exploiting the titular TV series' cast as actors, he truly crosses the point of no return when he decides to personally murder Mathesar and have the rest of the Thermian crew members of the Protector suffocate in the vacuum of space in an open airlock.
• The Cobras destroying London in G.I. Joe: Retaliation. While in the previous movie an attempt to wreck Paris only destroyed the Eiffel Tower, this time a whole city goes away — and with government backing since Zartan was the acting US President.
• Gandhi: Reginald Dyer mowing down innocent people in The Amritsar Massacre. Before this point, Gandhi and his followers were protesting for Indian rights in the British Empire. After this point, Gandhi starts demanding full independence.
• In Ginger Snaps 2: Unleashed, it turns out that Brigitte's new friend Ghost had attempted to burn her grandmother alive, but failed to kill her. It also turns out Ghost plans on using Brigitte's lycanthropy to finish the job for her, so she locks Brigitte in the basement. That is just overkill and no good reason was given for her attempt on her grandmother's life.
• Subverted by Asher in The Giver when he's sent to kill Jonas mid-flight and he accepts the task only to merely pretend to do so by dropping him into a river, with the deception allowing Jonas to continue down to Elsewhere.
• Commodus from Gladiator arguably crosses this at several points in the film. Early on he murders his helpless and elderly father Marcus Aurelius via asphyxiation, but for most viewers, he crosses it when he orders Maximus' wife and child to be killed — it later turns out that his wife was gang-raped by the men and both of them were crucified alive, and this is revealed when Commodus uses this to mock Maximus. Just in case he didn't cross it for you there, he probably crosses it when he demands his sister become his sex slave and threatens to murder his nephew if she doesn't go along with it.
• Carlo Rizzi in The Godfather crosses the Moral Event Horizon when he cheats on Connie Corleone, only to physically and verbally abuse her when she calls him out on it, knowing that it will send Sonny into a furious rage and get him killed on orders from Barzini, who Carlo is secretly working for. Part II, meanwhile, was built around Michael Corleone's descent past the Horizon. He bottoms out when he has his brother Fredo killed. Interestingly, Tom Hagen averts this — he tells Frankie Pentageli to kill himself, but assures him that his family will be protected.
  • Michael at least makes an ultra-serious effort to redeem himself in Part III, but his past soon comes back to haunt him in the form of Vincent Mancini...
• Godzilla:
  • Godzilla Vs Spacegodzilla: Spacegodzilla crosses the line when he, upon making landfall on Earth, violently kidnaps Godzilla Jr. off of Infant Island out of nothing but spite, then proceeds to infect the Earth with his alien crystals in an effort to drain the planet's life force.
  • Godzilla vs. Megaguirus: Secretary Mugiura callously set off Godzilla's return by committing to an experiment using the very energy that attracts Godzilla, knowing full well the risks and thinking any gains he could make are more important than the lives that'll be lost to Godzilla.
  • Godzilla vs. Destoroyah: Destoroyah murders a lot of people upon making landfall, then he brutally kills Godzilla Jr. in front of Godzilla and proceeds to physically torture the grief-stricken Godzilla.
  • Godzilla: King of the Monsters (2019):
    • King Ghidorah in his very first scene takes one look at the soldiers shooting at him, immediately deduces they aren't much of a threat to him, and then he kills them anyway using all three of his gravity beams just for the heck of it, with his middle head unambiguously smirking at the evil act. Minutes later, he proceeds to attack and eat Dr. Graham when she's just trying to run to safety, traumatizing an onlooking Serizawa. If neither of those acts are enough to put Ghidorah over the line, then he's certainly over it when he calls the other kaiju around the world from their slumber and actively tries to kill the entire planet with his new army.
    • Alan Jonah, the ruthless eco-terrorist who awakens Ghidorah in the mistaken belief that the dragon will renew the world's ecosystems, toes the line in his very first scene where his men massacre a Monarch outpost, and Jonah approaches a surviving scientist who has his hands up in surrender, looks the scientist up and down, then calmly executes him with a point-blank headshot. Once Ghidorah begins leading the monsters towards killing all life on Earth instead of restoring it, Jonah passes the point of no return by choosing to let Ghidorah kill everything if it means he'll wipe out humanity once and for all, establishing Jonah as a Not-So-Well-Intentioned Extremist and a Misanthrope Supreme of the highest order, who'll put satisfying his genocidal hatred of mankind above everything else.
• Goodfellas:
  • Tommy crosses it when he kills Spider.
  • Jimmy crosses it when he has his conspirators in the heist murdered, rather than share money with them.
• The Good Son has Henry Evans crossing the line when he murders his infant brother over a toy.

H

• Hack-O-Lantern: Grandpa Drindle crossed it by raping his own daughter on her wedding day.
• In Rob Zombie's Halloween, Michael is made more sympathetic. However, Rob made sure to have him prove that he was still evil by killing Ismael Cruz, the one guard that actually showed him kindness. Up until that point, all of Michael's kills had been an Asshole Victim, here is where he proves that he is beyond redemption. Many others working on the film tried to have the scene cut due to how cruel it was, but Rob Zombie kept it in specifically to invoke this trope.
• Johnny Wong of Hard Boiled. He tops John Woo's other villains in terms of sheer nastiness with his conduct in the hospital sequence in the second half of the movie, with his willingness to gun down innocent patients that try to escape the hospital. His most despicable act was the massacre of a group of patients standing between him and Alan, which is only stopped when Mad Dog, his Dragon, blasts the Mini-Uzi right out of his hands and calls him on this psychotic move, which ultimately gets Mad Dog killed.
• Heat: The audience already knows that Waingro is an unstable and violent character after he shoots the first guard during the armored car robbery at point-blank range for no good reason, but the scene where he kills the prostitute, then the scene where Hanna visits the crime scene of another one of Waingro's victims, exists solely to push him into this in order to demonstrate how Neil and his friends, while still violent criminals, are much better people than him, even though Neil and his crew members use assault rifles during the bank robbery shootout and bring down several cops, and kill at least one detective. This also serves to make a distinction, however; Neil and his crew take no pleasure in killing, viewing it as an unpleasant but necessary possibility of what they do, while Waingro is nothing but a massive Hate Sink who actively takes pleasure in sadistic killings.
• In Hellboy II: The Golden Army, Prince Nuada starts off by unleashing a swarm of ravenous tooth fairies in a room full of people; the tooth fairies ate every last bit of everyone in that room till there was nothing left of them. There is absolutely no purpose to this either, as he already has what he came for. He does it to fuel his own sadism.
• In Highlander, the Kurgan starts out as a clearly deranged individual who has killed many immortals over the centuries but seems to leave mortals alone as a point of Pragmatic Villainy, and is focused purely on pursuit of the Prize. But then he lets Connor know what he did to poor Heather on that stormy night after he killed Ramirez... then all bets are off.
• Holidays: Heidi crosses this when she brings up Maxine's father's suicide and then mocks it.
• In Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, despite being comedy villains, Harry and Marv cross the line when they knowingly attempt to steal from a children's charity and later try to shoot Kevin in the face and kill him. When the pigeon lady intervenes, they try to shoot her. Worst of all, they tried to do this on Christmas Eve of all times.
  Harry: I never made it to the sixth grade, kid. And it doesn't look like you're gonna, either.
• Horrible Bosses: As the title of the movie indicates, the bosses of protagonists are pretty awful, but they end up doing things that drive them to go postal.
  • Harken tormented Nick, who worked his ass off for a promotion, and then gave it to himself, while taunting Nick about how he can ruin his career. And if that wasn't bad enough, he then straight up kills Bobby in a jealous rage.
  • Bobby is already a selfish junkie, but what pisses off Kurt is his willingness to engage in reckless waste disposal and endangering countless Bolivians, just for more cash.
  • Julia aggravates Dale with numerous acts of sexual harassment. But then it turns she raped Dale while she he was in a medical coma, and threatened to reveal the pictures to his fiancé if he didn't give it another go.

I

• Affably Evil gangster Sam in the The Infernal Affairs Trilogy has his MEH moment towards the end of the second (first in internal chronology) film, when he lets his Thai buddies massacre the non-active-gangster members of the Ngai family, including an old woman and a small child.
• Interstellar: Dr. Mann crosses it when he attempts to kill Cooper and when he outright kills Romily with a bomb.
• In the dark comedy, In the Company of Men, Villain Protagonist Chad ruins the lives of Howard and Christine by having the former betrayed and demoted and tricking the latter into sleeping with him simply because it was fun to him. The worst part is that he did it despite having a decent-paying job and a girlfriend who never left him. This was still not enough for him and he does horrible things out of boredom.
• It's hard to pinpoint exactly when Griffin crosses it in the film adaption of The Invisible Man. If he doesn't by assaulting the boarding house owner's wife, he clearly does by the time he causes over a hundred deaths by derailing a train. He's considered the deadliest Universal Monster for a reason.
• In Ip Man, Colonel Sato loses any chance of being sympathetic when he coldly guns down Master Liu. Even his superior, General Miura, doesn't take it well.
  • In the sequel, the Twister started off as a Jerkass already, but became irredeemable after pummeling Master Hung to death in a No-Holds-Barred Beatdown, and then in the single most honest and realistic portrayal of western contempt for Chinese warrior culture ever committed to film, happily loudly mouths off how he is going to murder every Chinese warrior in Hong Kong in the upcoming match held to clear his name.
• It (2017):
  • The titular IT (aka Pennywise) has already crossed the line many years ago, casually terrorizing Derry and murdering hundreds of children.
  • Beverly's father definitely crosses the line when he tries to rape his own daughter.
  • If Henry hadn't crossed it by carving Ben's stomach with a switchblade and trying to shoot an innocent cat for no reason, he definitely crosses it when he tries to shoot Mike during the climax. And none of this was in Pennywise's influence, either.
• Mr. Potter from It's a Wonderful Life does this by threatening to have George Bailey arrested for committing bank fraud, being short eight thousand dollars. This comes right after Mr. Potter accidentally comes into possession of this money, so he knows darn well what he's doing. Then, minutes later, George Bailey contemplates jumping off a bridge... If you think Mr. Potter has any chance of redemption after this, you've got some issues.
  "Why George... You're worth more dead than alive."
  • There was a scene filmed in which Potter dies, presumably from a sudden heart attack, just in case The Hays Code censors invoked the anti-Karma Houdini clause.

J

• Jack-O: Walter Machen both crosses it when he has his demonic automaton servant try to bury a child alive.
• Jack Reacher: Never Go Back: The Hunter crosses it by targeting Sam just to hurt Reacher, and later for the heck of it.
• James Bond:
  • Goldfinger: The titular Big Bad has a knack of crossing lines, such as poisoning an army barracks and the surrounding town — 60,000 people (he shrugs this off by saying that motorists kill as much in two years) — and then detonating a nuclear device in Fort Knox to trigger a major economic crisis for his own profit. Or when he kills his assistant Jill Masterson, who becomes a Bond Girl and costs him a rigged card game, by having her murdered with golden paint. Or when he kills Tilly Masterson for trying to avenge the murder of her sister Jill. Or when he kills the assembled mobsters who wanted to take part in Goldfinger's Evil Plan.
  • On Her Majesty's Secret Service: Perhaps by orchestrating the most notorious Kick the Dog moment of the franchise, Ernst Stavro Blofeld certainly proved to be a big Jerkass by attempting to kill 007 on his wedding day in retaliation for foiling his Evil Plan. Although 007 managed to survive the hit, his wife Tracy di Vicenzo wasn't so lucky.
  • In Diamonds Are Forever, Albert Wint and Charles Kidd are established very early on as dangerous killers, but the point where they cross it is when they murder Plenty O'Toole offscreen by drowning her in a pool in the backyard of a house where Tiffany Case had been instructed to await further instructions, mistaking her for Case, without even bothering to verify her identity. Tellingly, this is their one kill that doesn't have a Bond One-Liner attached to it (spoken by Bond himself whenever he survives any of their attempts on his life), and is played completely seriously in a film full of camp. At this point, James Bond blows his cover to Case and alerts her that the diamond smugglers are being assassinated for a reason whoever's running the operation wants kept secret.
  • In Octopussy, Kamal Khan and General Orlov cross it with their plan: to bomb a US Air Force base in Germany in order to trick the nations of Europe into instituting universal disarmament so that Russia can invade. While there's a circus going on. With civilians and children on the base. And General Orlov doesn't give a crap as long as the USSR retains its advantage.
  • A View to a Kill has probably the most famous crossing of the Horizon in the Bond canon, where, to make absolutely sure their plan to induce an artificial earthquake to destroy Silicon Valley is kept quiet, Max Zorin and Scarpine machine-gun all the lesser henchmen, several of whom (such as Bob Conley, Jenny Flex, and Pan Ho) we'd gotten to know somewhat throughout the film, while cackling like hyenas all the while.
  • Licence to Kill: Franz Sanchez has made a career of crossing lines, but his most notable one was having Felix Leiter's wife raped and killed by Dario, his Dragon, while feeding Leiter's legs to a shark.
  • GoldenEye:
    • Xenia Onatopp and Ourumov definitely cross it when they slaughter the entire staff at Severnaya without a hint of remorse... with Xenia clearly deriving sexual pleasure as she carries out the massacre, something that visibly disturbs even Ourumov.
    • Alec Trevelyan crossed it by betraying MI6, although who know how long he's been planning his revenge against the British government for the betrayal of his family, who were Lienz Cossacks. The Cossacks, who believed that they were under British protection near the end of the war, were instead sent back to Stalin, who promptly had them all shot. Trevelyan, needless to say, is pissed about this, and seeks to make the British government pay, as these events caused his father (a surviving Cossack) to kill Alec's mom then himself out of the shame of this.
  • In Tomorrow Never Dies, Elliot Carver crosses when he "schedules an appointment for his wife with the doctor" after she leaks info to Bond.
    • Another possible one is when Carver orders his henchman Stamper to mercilessly gun down several defenseless and unarmed sailors who had just barely survived the sinking of their ship.
  • Die Another Day: Big Bad Gustav Graves/Tan-Sun Moon crossed it by killing his father near the climax.
  • Casino Royale (2006): Le Chiffre is a terrorist financier for many criminal gangs, such as Al Qaeda and the Lord's Resistance Army, which implies that he, and by extension Quantum, may have been involved in the 9/11 attacks in a bid to manipulate world politics.
  • Quantum of Solace: From Camille's backstory, one can say that General Medrano has made crossing this into a career. He's already a murderer, a torturer, an arsonist, and a rapist by backstory, so after he tries to rape the hostess, there's really no way his Karmic Death can be too harsh.
  • In Skyfall, before we even knew who Raoul Silva is, he already crossed it when he blows up the MI6 HQ.
  • Franz Oberhauser/Ernst Stavro Blofeld was revealed to have crossed it 20 years before the events of Spectre, when he committed Patricide because he hated the attention that Bond received after Franz's father took him in. He only got worse from there by staging all the tragedies Bond faced since Casino Royale (2006) to the point of rubbing it in his face and trying to kidnap Madeleine Swann in the climax of Spectre as part of his plan to psychologically weaken Bond's morale.
    • In the same film, if betraying the British government and joining Spectre wasn't enough, then C staging terrorist attacks at countries who won't join the "Nine Eyes" intelligence program on behalf of Blofeld, who is bankrolling the project so it'll enable Spectre to permanently stay ahead of their enemies, certainly counts.
• Dewey from Jason Bourne crosses this when he ordered the death of Jason's father because he intended to blab. He just got worse from there.
• In Joe Dirt, when it was revealed that Joe's Parents left him on the Grand Canyon, and they knew, but never bothered to pick him up. The only reason they wanted to see their son again was because he got famous! While it's true that most of the people in the film were typical assholes towards Joe, this was the first time that he fell into despair.
• John Wick:
  • John Wick 1:
    • Iosef crosses it when he kills John's puppy in cold blood just because he was annoyed by her barking during an attack on him that he originally led in order to steal the car he wanted and that John wouldn't sell to him. Even worse, the puppy was a gift from John's late wife. This appropriately sets off John's Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
    • Ms. Perkins crosses it when she murders her associate Harry. This establishes that she cares nothing about the rules of the Continental, and ultimately seals her fate when the management of the Continental learn about it.
    • Viggo initially presents himself as somewhat reasonable, if corrupt, but he loses all sympathy when he murders Marcus just to get back at John for killing his asshole son.
  • John Wick: Chapter 2: Santino burns down John's house after the latter refuses to be affiliated with him, but he truly crosses it when he orders his own sister to be murdered.
• Joker (2019):
  • When exactly Arthur crosses this line is a matter of interpretation. He certainly seems to view murdering his hospitalized mother as this, as it's after this point that he drops any delusion of a normal, happy life and starts "celebrating" by transforming himself into the new Joker persona. His murder of his longtime idol Murray on live television could also qualify, but if he hasn't crossed it by then he certainly does at the end, when he (presumably) kills the therapist who has done nothing whatsoever to hurt him, unlike his other murders previously.
  • The Wall Street Three cross it when they attempt to beat Arthur to death simply for laughing.
• Jug Face:
  • Loriss burning Ada's thigh with a cigarette for refusing to submit to a virginity test.
  • Sustin whipping Ada so badly that she miscarries.

K

• In Kazaam, Malik crosses it by Malik pushing Max down the elevator shaft, killing him.
• In Kick-Ass, D'Amico is most firmly established as a complete psycho-ass when he murders both some guy unfortunate enough to be wearing a Kick-Ass costume and an innocent witness to said murder. He did believe it was the real Kick-Ass and that he'd been killing D'Amico's men. He really crosses the line when he finds out Kick-Ass had nothing to do with it but still insisted on him being beaten and executed on a live webcast. The sheer look of sadistic pleasure on his face and the disgusted look Chris gives him when they're both watching it said volumes about what a bastard he was.
  • Actually, there was a brutal logic to Frank ordering Kick-Ass' death. As he explained to Chris, no one knew who Big Daddy was, while everyone knew Kick-Ass. Hence, killing Kick-Ass alongside BD would send a far more powerful message to any would-be costumed vigilantes. Still doesn't take away the fact that it was also For the Evulz.
  • In Kick-Ass 2, Ralph D'Amico crosses it when kills Javier, who was Chris's Morality Pet and Parental Substitute, causing him to Jump Off The Slippery Slope.
• Kickboxer's Tong Po, no matter how much of a badass he may be, definitively crosses this line with his physical and sexual brutalization of Mylee, Kurt Sloane's Love Interest, his way of reminding the viewers how much of a bastard he is and why one should root for Kurt to win the upcoming match with him.
  • They would actually use Tong Po's MEH to write off Jean Claude Van-Damme's character in the sequel. Tong Po kills him differently after losing the tournament, setting up the revenge story for the last remaining brother.
• Sam from Kidulthood. He bullies the lonely Katie and instigates the "tough" girls into brutally beating her in front of the class (in the sequel Adulthood, it's stated that the bullying has gone on for years). After Sam harasses the broken Katie and promises to kill her the next day, Katie goes home and commits suicide. In the end of the film, he takes a baseball bat to a party and kills the protagonist Trife in front of his pregnant girlfriend.
• The Killer (1989): Wong Hoi crosses this when he betrays Ah Jong, just because the latter is spotted by the police during the hit against his nephew. And if that wasn't enough, later on in the film, he savagely beats Fung Sei, Ah Jong's handler, and takes Jenny hostage in the ending after killing the priest trying to bring her out of the church.
• Killers of the Flower Moon:
  • You can argue Ernest Burkhart crossed it at the beginning of the film when he starts robbing the Osage people, but by the time he poisons his own wife, he is completely irredeemable. Mollie's utter contempt for him in their last scene together shows she knows this.
  • William King Hale's introduction places him as a greedy Gold Digger already, but his plan to kill Mollie's family one by one, ending with her, all to get their oil money is what truly makes him beyond redemption. To add fuel to the fire, he later does such outrageous acts like grieving at the funerals of the people whose deaths he arranged.
• Near the end of Killshot, Richie and Blackbird are about to leave Richie's Woobieish girlfriend Donna's home to settle the score with Carmen and Wayne, the husband and wife they were pursuing for most of the movie. Donna fell in love with the dangerous but kind Blackbird while the violent Richie just used and abused her. Realizing this, Richie stops the car and walks back inside to murder Donna in a jealous rage as Blackbird stares blankly ahead with a broken expression on his face. It's so pointlessly cruel that the filmmakers were clearly trying to make Richie irredeemable in the audience's eyes compared to the more sympathetic Blackbird, who's so pissed off that he finally murders Richie himself later on.
• The bullies (especially the male ones, particularly their leader Anders, Paul, and a few others) and, by extension, almost the entire class from the Estonian film Klass. They were protrayed as good-for-nothing assholes who bullied Joseph and Kaspar to no end. But putting the blame on Joesph in spite of the fact that they started the bullying in the first place and forcing Kaspar to fellate Joseph at the beach while being held at knife point and photographing said sexual act without showing the knife might catapult them over the line. The only one who stays out of this line is is the goth girl Kerli, who is disgusted with the class' treatment of them. In a Laser-Guided Karma fashion, Joseph and Kaspar go to Joesph's house to steal the guns from Joseph's father and take them into the school with them. They allow Kerli to leave the cafeteria before killing the bullies to avenge themselves. While the ending is terrifying, the class can be seen as having their deaths coming because of choosing to treat the main characters like they did for no apparent reason, and those who escape the shooting will still have to deal with the fact that the people they cruelly bullied almost killed them.

L

• Law Abiding Citizen: Clarence Darby crosses this in the the first two minutes of the movie, raping Clyde's wife and killing both her and their daughter.
  • Initially, we can sympathize with Clyde Shelton's desire to kill Clarence as vengeance for killing his wife and daughter. But then there's how he goes about it: paralyzing his body, taking him to his lab, and chopping of his limbs with a chainsaw, making a video of this, and sending the video to Nick Rice.
    • He definitely crosses it when he murders his cellmate for no other reason then to advance The Plan. Although there are many different views, this is the most widely cited.
• Legion of the Dead: Aneh-Tet ordering her mummy warriors to massacre a motel to get ahold of a Virgin Sacrifice.
• Lethal Weapon:
  • Joshua in the first movie crosses it when he kidnaps Rianne.
  • Vorstedt in the second movie crosses it when he drowns Rika, and later reveals that he was the one who killed Riggs's wife.
  • Travis in the third movie crosses it by either drowning one of his men in cement or when he kills a rookie cop in a shootout at the subway, on his birthday nonetheless.
  • Wah Sing Ku in the fourth movie crosses it when he strangles Hong to get his uncle to cooperate. Then he kills his uncle after the counterfeit plates are completed and Uncle Benny for revealing too much information.
• Limitless: NZT is a drug that gives you Super-Intelligence. Another secondary effect of NZT is to let the user ignore the Moral Event Horizon:
  • When Lindy takes NZT to escape from an assassin, she uses a little girl as an Improvised Weapon. When she is free of the effects, she doesn’t want anything to do with NZT or Eddie.
  • Any other user hooked on NZT is willing enough to torture or kill for another dose of the stuff.
• A Little Princess (1995): Miss Minchin comes very close to this line by abusing and mistreating Sara and then calling the police to get her arrested for theft, but the moment when she finally crosses it is when, despite clearly recognizing the amnesiac Captain Crewe, she promptly lies and continues to claim that Sara has no father, allowing the tearful girl to be dragged away by the police on false charges. Up until this point, as horrible as Miss Minchin was, she had genuinely believed the Captain to be dead.^note Interestingly, shortly before her MEH crossing, she has an Even Evil Has Standards moment of being visibly horrified when Sara nearly falls to her death and relieved when she makes it over to the other building... before sending the police to apprehend her.
• Lock Up:
  • Warden Drumgoole crosses it by transferring Frank Leone into his prison and trying to keep him locked up beyond his sentence for the sole purpose of getting back at him for humiliating him all those years ago. Drumgoole is only motivated by petty revenge, and if that motivation alone isn't enough for you, then wait until you see what methods he uses to try to provoke and abjectly humiliate Leone...
  • Chink Weber crosses it after many petty torments of Frank Leone when he murders First Base on the Warden's orders. Until that point Leone had been avoiding active resistance, but this pushes him over the edge to personally fight Weber in the prison yard.

M

• The Mad Magician:
  • Ross Ormond crosses it in his first scene when he disrupts Don Gallico's premiere performance, using a previous contract as his excuse. As Gallico and Lieutenant Bruce try to fight the C&D in a court of law, Ormond cements it when he marries Gallico's wife, triggering Gallico's Start of Darkness.
  • Gallico is a subversion, as he's only committing murders because he's compelled to by a variety of circumstances; however, it becomes clear by the end of the film (and Lieutenant Bruce even admits as much) that he's losing his mind. As for the four murder attempts he makes (three of which are successful):
    • He beheads Ormond with his buzzsaw illusion after the whole "wife theft" thing is revealed to him. It would've ended there, except:
    • His wife starts to figure out the truth about what had happened to Ormond, having started to become as much of a bitch as he was in life, so Gallico, disguised as Ormond, asphyxiates her and pins it on Ormond.
    • Then his archrival, the Great Rinaldi, puts two and two together, using what he knew about his employer, and blackmails Gallico into letting him use his new illusion, which involves a fiery furnace, for his own show. It works just as well for the conceited bastard as you would expect.
    • The closest Gallico gets to the MEH is when he tries to burn Bruce alive in the furnace. At this point, he admits that he just can't stop killing and that he would rather be electrocuted for his crimes than locked up in an insane asylum. This is especially shocking because Bruce is his only intended victim who hasn't wronged him in any way, except by trying to get his fingerprints.
• The People Eater from Mad Max: Fury Road has one in the Final Battle when he runs over Valkyrie while chuckling to himself. In quite a few theatres, Max killing him by using him as a Bulletproof Human Shield and blowing up his truck led to deafening cheers.
  • Good luck guessing which of Immortan Joe's many evil deeds helps him cross it.
• The Mad Monster: Dr. Cameron crosses it when he deems his lycanthropy experiments a success after his werewolf murders a child.
• Bogue crosses it at the beginning of The Magnificent Seven (2016) when he kills Matthew and several others for opposing him followed by him burning down the church.
• Stefan crosses it in Maleficent when he betrays and mutilates the woman who loved him so he could take the throne.
• Discussed at length in Man of Tai Chi, with Donaka Mark (Keanu Reeves) selling his audience on the chance to watch a fundamentally good person (protagonist Tiger Chen), descend into immorality, with the execution of defeated fighter Uri Romanoff serving as the MEH. Tiger refuses to kill Uri, so Donaka tries again, forcing Tiger into a battle first with an Indonesian martial artist, and finally himself, in the hopes of making Tiger kill and thus ruining him. In the end Donaka forces Tiger to kill him, but fails to actually destroy the other man's life. As for Donaka himself, he crosses the MEH when he knifes one of his other fighters to death over his refusal to kill.
• In Lucio Fulci's Massacre Time, Scott Jr. crosses it when he kills his father after Scott Sr. gave everything to the protagonist, his long-lost son, and denounced Junior as crazy.
• The Villain Protagonist from Woody Allen's Match Point, who has an affair with his friend's (soon-to-be-ex) lover while being engaged to the friend's sister and continues the affair well into the marriage. After he gets his mistress pregnant and she confronts him about it, he murders her and her unborn child in cold blood and in an elaborate scheme that makes it seem like a robbery gone wrong.
  • Match Point recycles its plot point from Crimes and Misdemeanors, with Judah (Martin Landau). His evilness is so cleverly hidden it takes you a while to realize what he is, sometimes requiring a second viewing.
• Cypher steps over the line in The Matrix with his betrayal of the Resistance. In exchange for permanent re-insertion into the Matrix, he tips off the Agents to the group's location and, after Morpheus is beaten up and captured by Smith, he fries Dozer and Tank. Following that, he pulls the plug on Switch and Apoc, killing them right before Trinity and Neo's eyes. The worst part is how much he visibly relishes it, gloating and taunting Trinity over the phone as he does it. He's finally taken down when Tank, who is Not Quite Dead, fries Cypher just as he's about to pull Neo's plug as well.
• The Maze Runner: Gally wanting Thomas to answer for his actions? Acceptable. Gally wanting to feed him to the Grievers with no way to defend himself? Not so much.
• He Ying, the villainess of the military-action film Mercenaries from Hong Kong crosses the line when she kidnapped one of the deceased mercenaries' Delicate and Sickly daughter as a hostage, before having the child shot when things doesn't go her way.
• The villainess, Ruolan, from The Mermaid crosses it at the end of the film when she orders her private army to massacre the mermaid population for getting into the way of her developmental project.
• In Missing in Action 2: The Beginning, Colonel Yin loses virtually all respect when he reveals with a headshot to one prisoner that he only used empty guns in previous "executions" to bluff the others into thinking he's bluffing when he tells a prisoner he'll kill him for crimes against Vietnam. The worst part about it is, by the time that poor guy's head gets blown off, all the prisoners were completely fooled. He loses what little respect he has left some time later when he betrays Braddock's trust by convincing him to confess his guilt against Vietnam so he can administer some medicine to Franklin only to poison him, and when Franklin's all but dead Yin burns him alive on a funeral pyre as Braddock watches helplessly and yells for him to stop it.
• The Big Bad of Braddock: Missing in Action III, General Quoc, immediately crosses it when he shoots and kills Braddock's wife.
• The Monster Squad: Dracula crosses the line by either throwing a stick of dynamite into a treehouse in order to try and kill a group of children or by threatening to snap a 6-year-old girl's neck.
• Mulan: Rise of a Warrior: Mengdu crosses it when he kills his own father to keep a war going.
• Mystery Men subverts this trope by having the protagonists accidentally commit the act that would solidify Casanova Frankenstein's status as evil by frying Captain Amazing with the psychofrakulator. Casanova still indirectly crosses the horizon when you understand that he plans to unleash the terrible device on all of Champion City.

N

• In Natural Born Killers, Ed forcibly had sex with Mallory (her own daughter) and impregnated her.
• In New Jack City, drug lord Nino Brown was already a bastard, but during a hit on his life at a wedding, he used a little girl as a human shield.
• The New Mutants: If Dr. Cecelia Reyes didn’t cross it by holding the young mutants captive with the intention of turning them into weapons, then she definitely does when she attempts to euthanize Dani simply because her superiors believe she is too powerful to be allowed to live.
• In The Night of the Hunter, Harry Powell, a serial killer and self-appointed preacher, gets out of prison and marries a bank robber's widow, believing her children know where the stolen money is hidden. When she overhears him asking the children about the money, he slits her throat as she lies in bed.
• Ninja: Masazuka crosses this when he slaughters most of his former school, including his master, to try and get their sacred weapons.
• The corruption of Arthur Tressler from Now You See Me was evident since the first movie, but at least in that movie, his retaliation for losing such a massive sum of money to the Horsemen only went as far as him personally offering $10 million to Thaddeus Bradley to expose and humiliate the Horsemen. However, whatever hope the audience might have had left of Tressler redeeming himself or at least becoming more sympathetic is officially crushed in Now You See Me 2, where he not only resurfaces as a main antagonist and part of (or at least complicit in) his son's scheme to effectively take over the world via cyberwarfare, but also resorts to attempted murder on two separate occasions, first by attempting to drown Dylan in a sadistic reenactment of the trick that killed Dylan's father, and then later by having all of the Horsemen thrown off of a plane that was several thousand feet in the air (or so he thought; in reality, the plane had never taken off to begin with). The fact that Tressler shows absolutely no remorse and even casually drinks tea and champagne with his son during and after both murder attempts cements his irredeemable status all the more. Couple that with him disowning his own son in the end (who was the closest thing Tressler had to a Morality Pet in the movie) and that leaves Tressler with absolutely no sympathetic qualities left to speak of.

O

• Oblivion (1994): Redeye killing Butou's family and tying him down to be eaten by nightscorps.
• Willy Bank of Ocean's Thirteen was bad enough when he conned Reuben into using his connections to benefit the hotel/casino, and worse when he threatened to have Reuben tossed off a roof if he didn't sign his partnership away. But when Reuben tells him "We've been around long enough, we both shook Sinatra's hand!" and Bank replies "Screw Sinatra's hand!", we know he deserves everything Danny and his crew are going to do to him for violating the code of honor among men that shook Sinatra's hand.
• In Odd Girl Out, Nikki and Tiffany cross it when they laugh at a video of Vanessa being hospitalized as a result of her suicide attempt, calling her a "druggie" and a "pathetic loser".
• Once Upon a Time in the West: Frank crosses this in his first (and more famous) scene, killing a family and saving their youngest son for last.
• In On Deadly Ground, Big Bad Jennings crosses when he has an elderly employee, Hugh, tortured to death for whistleblowing on him.
• Oz the Great and Powerful: Evanora crosses it by turning her sister into the Wicked Witch of The West.

P

• In Paddington (2014), Millicent crosses it right off the bat with her desire to kill and stuff an obviously sentient animal. She takes it even further right at the end when she is completely willing to kill the entire Brown family in order to get to Paddington, commenting that she "never stuffed a human before."
• It's obvious from his first appearance that Captain Vidal of Pan's Labyrinth is a very unpleasant man. At first, it almost seems a little too obvious. But there might have been a softer side lurking there somewhere. But after he crushed the skull of an innocent boy with a bottle and shot both him and his father with a mixture of boredom and vague pleasure, it was made clear how evil he was. Though they were brought to him as suspected rebels, but shortly after killing them, Vidal himself verifies their innocence when he searches through their stuff; his only reaction is tell his men to "search these assholes properly before you come bothering me." And this is just when he crossed the horizon. He kept right on going.
• In Paths of Glory, General Mireau crosses it when he orders his artillery to fire on B company in order to force them out of the trenches.
• The Patriot (2000): If Col. Tavington didn't cross it already by ordering the execution of wounded soldiers or killing Benjamin's son in front of him and his other children, he certainly did with three words: "Burn the church."
• Sean Miller from Patriot Games crosses the Horizon when he shoots up the car Ryan's wife and daughter are in while on the freeway and causes them to crash, injuring and hospitalizing them. His response? "They're gone."
• Perfect Assassins: Greely crossed it in the backstory, when he started his Skinner box experiments on a young Ben Carroway, then framed Ben's mom when he's caught.
• In The Phantom (1996), the Big Bad, Xander Drax, seems to be Affably Evil at first (being played by Treat Williams helps), but slides into Faux Affably Evil territory in the scene where he punishes a librarian who unwittingly leaked the research he was doing for Drax to a reporter. Drax has the hapless man examine something under a microscope...which has retractable blades hidden in the eyepieces. As the victim screams piteously in agony, Drax laughs, snaps his glasses in half, and says, "Well, won't be needing these anymore!"
• There are two potential crossing points for Johns in Pitch Black, although which one is the true MEH is up for debate. The first is when he steals the morphine from the crashed spaceship — he's a junkie — so Fry's friend has to die in screaming agony. The second is when he suggests Riddick kill Jack and drag her behind to put the creatures off them — he offers to keep the others off Riddick's back in exchange.
• General Chase crosses this mere minutes into Plunkett & Macleane. Likely to remove all sympathy for a man hunting outlaws, he proceeds to torture a dying man. Complete with Eye Scream.
• In Pokémon Detective Pikachu, Howard Clifford crosses this not only by being responsible for Harry Goodman's disappearance and presumed death two months prior to the film's events, but by kidnapping and merging with Mewtwo in an attempt to forcibly merge humans with Pokémon by causing chaos at the Pokémon Carnival using the poisonous R gas. Worse still, he used his condition as a front for his real plan.
  • If Ms. Norman aka Ditto crossed it by assuming Roger Clifford's identity and trying to kill Tim Goodman in the finale should do it.
• The Big Bad of The Postman Fights Back is a Sixth Ranger Traitor and Gratitious Ninja with plenty of cool weapons and gadgets at his disposal, giving him plenty of Evil Is Cool factors to like... until he uses a heavy machine-gun to massacre two dozen prisoners strung up in torture racks, then kills one of the main characters he blackmailed by abducting his sisters using the same weapon. Oh, and he shot both the little girls he was previously using as leverage too. Horizon crossed!
• Precious:
  • Mary practically lives on the other side of the line the way some people live on the other side of the train tracks. Dishonorable mentions include:
    • Standing in an open doorway to watch Carl raping Precious.
    • Attacking her with an iron skillet.
    • Throwing a television set down from the upper level of a stairwell to try and hit Precious over the head.
    • Asking to hold Abdul, then literally throwing him to the floor, followed by chucking a flower pot at the back of Precious' head, then after further physcial abuse, throws another item at the back of her head as she hightails it out of there with Abdul in tow.
    • The brutal emotional and physical abuse in the staircase scene.
  • Carl rapes his own daughter.
• In The Princess Bride, Prince Humperdinck crosses when he cranks the Life Drain machine up to 50 to torture his romantic rival Westley to death. Even Count Rugen, who invented the machine in the first place, thought that was a bit much.
  Humperdinck: You truly love each other, and so you might have been truly happy. Not one couple in a century has that chance, no matter what the storybooks say... And so I think no man in a century will suffer as greatly as you will.
• Prisoners of the Lost Universe: Klael leaving Carrie Madison to starve in a cage until she agrees to become his Sex Slave.
• The Professional: Norman Stansfield and his goons kill Mathilda's entire family. While Mathilda's parents were abusive assholes and could be argued to have deserved what they got, the same cannot be said of Mathilda's little brother, who did absolutely nothing to them and was killed just for the hell of it.
• In The Proposition
  • It's bad enough that Arthur murdered the Hopkins family (although deleted scenes show that Patrick survived), but when we learn that he committed double murder and child murder at the same time by raping a pregnant woman, we accept that yes, he's got to die, Affably Evil or not:
  Cpt. Morris Stanley: "Arthur Burns is a monster. An abomination. You were right to break company with him; what happened at the Hopkins' place was unforgivable. Did you know that that poor woman had a child in her belly?"
  • Similarly, Eden Fletcher decides to flog young Mikey to death. For the record, Mikey is a retarded 14-year old who is barely aware of his crime.

R

• Rambo:
  • In First Blood, Art Galt crosses it when he recklessly shoots at Rambo without giving a shit about his own safety or that of the rest of the police department and actually threatens to kill the chopper pilot if he doesn't fly the chopper right. Coupled with his Police Brutality towards Rambo back in jail, this cements Galt to be a definite Dirty Cop, perhaps more so then Teasle.
  • Murdock from Rambo: First Blood Part II crosses it when he orders the mission aborted and convinces Erickson to threaten Colonel Trautman with a shotgun if he has him press any further with his chopper.
  • Zaysen from Rambo III most likely crossed it with the Afghanistan village massacre. What's worse is that it's implied he does this on a regular basis.
  • Major Pa Pee Tint and the Burmese military from Rambo IV were ruthless already, when they were shown forcing civilians to walk through mine-infested marshes as part of a sick betting game, but the biggest atrocity they committed was when they burn down an entire village, slaughtering many men, women, and children in the process, and kidnapping the missionaries, including Sarah. They get worse from there.
  • Hugo from Rambo: Last Blood crossed it by vowing to abuse and drug Gabriela out of spite against Rambo after having his men beat Rambo to near death and fulfilling that vow.
• Griffin from Red Zone Cuba crosses it when, in a scene omitted from the Mystery Science Theater 3000 version, he rapes a blind girl after throwing her father down a well and killing him.
• Bad Rain crosses it in Resident Evil: Retribution when she kills Luther West. This is after Alice breaks Jill free from her Face Heel Brainwashing at the hands of the Red Queen and Jill starts to remember whose side she's supposed to be on, so Bad Rain has no excuse for her actions, unlike Jill. Then again, she is the Rain clone who serves the Red Queen, and given how willingly she does so, she really lives up to her moniker.
• R.I.P.D.: Bobby Hayes crosses it in the beginning when he murders Nick.
• Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves: The Sheriff of Nottingham crosses this when he tries to rape Maid Marian when Robin comes to interrupt their forced marriage.
• Robocop:
  • The first film sees Dick Jones cross it not only when he pays Clarence Boddicker to kill Morton, but also for installing the fourth directive that prevents Alex Murphy/RoboCop from arresting him or any OCP executive. He may have crossed it even earlier when his ED-209 malfunctioned and killed young executive Kinney; Jones was hardly shaken by the death and simply said that ED-209 merely had a glitch that could be fixed.
    • Clarence Boddicker has definitely crossed it, what with his record of being a notorious and sadistic Cop Killer. But we are verified of how far he's crossed it when he and his top goons brutally pepper Murphy to a pulp with gunfire, before Clarence himself puts a bullet in Murphy's head.
  • In Robocop 2, Cain crosses it when he kills his informant Duffy solely for failing to resist Murphy's interrogation and revealing their location. Even Cain's lover Angie and his henchman Hob are visibly disturbed by this.
  • In Robocop 3, Paul McDaggett crosses it when he kills Murphy's partner, Ann Lewis.
• In The Rock, Frye and Darrow were bad enough Psychos for Hire already, but their moment was defined when they provoke a gunfight with the Navy SEALs in the shower room and kill all of them. And in case you thought they did it by accident (although they enjoyed it), there is the scene later on when they decide to carry on with the missile attack after Hummel decides to call it off (revealing that he was bluffing all along). As put by Darrow, they are mercenaries now, so if they want to get paid, they need to make sure the government sees that they weren't weak.
• The Running Man:
  • The government massacred dozens of people and pinned it on a guy who refused to fire on innocent people.
  • Killian was already a bastard, lying about the contestant's past, verbally abusing his employees, sending people off to die in a brutal death battle, but what sent him over the horizon was lying about the supposed winners of the Running Man, claiming that had been given a pardon, when in reality they had been burned alive off camera. His audience turns against him after that.

S

• Kazim from Sahara (2005) crosses this when he personally kills Frank.
• If Detective Hoffman didn't cross this by making one of Jigsaw's games a public display in Saw 3D, he did so when he killed Jill Tuck in cold blood.
• Tony Montana from Scarface (1983) may have crossed either this or the Despair Event Horizon when he gunned down Manny Ribera for getting too friendly with Tony's sister Gina, though he does subliminally regret the action toward the end of the film. Sosa's hitman, however, does cross the line unambiguously by insisting on blowing up Gutierrez's wife and kids with him when they get into the same car he's driving. Tony takes offense.'
• Scream:
  • Scream 3:
    • Roman had crossed it prior to the first film when he ordered Billy and Stu to murder Maureen simply because the latter didn't accept him as her son.
    • John Milton had crossed it in the past when he gang-raped Maureen, resulting in Roman. Of course, this makes him an unsympathetic target of Roman himself.
  • In Scream 4, Jill soars gazelle-like over the MEH when she kills her own mother as part of the latest Woodsboro massacre just so she can be famous a la Sidney Prescott.
• Amon Goeth from Schindler's List crosses this line within the first hour of the movie, and he's definitely crossed it later on when he shoots prisoners for sport with a sniper rifle.
• In Shaun of the Dead, David eventually proves that sometimes The Apocalypse Brings Out The Worst In People. When it is revealed that Shaun's mother Barbara has been bitten and is about to turn, he goes over the deep end and demands that Shaun shoot her without remorse, and then while all his friends are consoling him, he coldly comments "I think we can all agree you did the right thing." Shaun turns around and punches him and sends him spiralling down to the floor, and then he levels the rifle at Shaun and pulls the trigger... and there's a click. Everyone present is mortified: if that rifle had been loaded, he would have killed Shaun in cold blood. He dies moments later without redeeming himself when the zombies break through the window behind him and drag him outside to his gory death.
• The Shawshank Redemption:
  • Warden Samuel Norton is cold and corrupt, but not generally unreasonable. He even becomes somewhat chummy with hero Andy Dufresne after he begins doing financial work for the prison. But when he orders the death of Tommy Williams to ensure that Andy will never have his name cleared — even in the original novella, he settled for having Tommy transferred to another, less strict prison — he crosses the point of no return.
  • Also, Captain Byron T. Hadley crossed this when he threatened to throw Andy off the roof and pretend Andy fell off. Beating up the emotionally-overwhelmed inmate at the start of the film could be excused by claiming he did it to stop other prisoners from making noise during the night, but his later threat has no excuse.
  • Bogs Diamond and The Sisters cross the line when they rape and brutalize Andy Dufresne over the period of two years.
• At first, Professor Moriarty from Sherlock Holmes: A Game of Shadows comes across as an Affably Evil Worthy Opponent to Holmes, but any possible claim to playing fair is utterly destroyed when he announces his intent to make Watson collateral damage for no other reason than to hurt Holmes, and in the same breath reveals that he has already poisoned Irene Adler because she outlived her usefulness. And that's just the beginning; he speeds joyfully deeper throughout the course of the movie. Disturbingly brutal torture is involved.
• If he hadn't crossed it already, Paul Giamatti's character in Shoot 'Em Up running over what he believes to be the baby that Smith is protecting.
• Sleepy Hollow (1999):
  • Ichabod's father killing his mother for witchcraft.
  • Lady van Tassel sending the Horseman to kill the Killian family, including their young son.
• Smiley has the reveal that "Smiley" was a prank being held by a group of students to spread the urban legend. They spend the film terrorizing the protagonist, Ashley, until they think they drove her to suicide, and celebrate it.
• Brick Top in Snatch. torments the main characters throughout the entire film, but crosses the horizon when he decides to burn the caravan belonging to Mickey's mother with her in it.
• This happens in The Sound of Music when Liesl's boyfriend Rolfe joins the Third Reich. He threatens to shoot the von Trapps when he catches them trying to escape, but the Captain confiscates the gun and then says:
  Captain von Trapp: You'll never be one of them.
  (beat)
  Rolfe: (yelling out) LIEUTENANT! LIEUTENANT, THEY'RE HERE! THEY'RE HERE, LIEUTENANT! (blows whistle)
• Space Mutiny: Elijah Kalgan crosses it when he reveals his plan to sell the majority of the population of the Generation Ship he's on into slavery after he takes over.
• The Spider-Man Trilogy have various villains cross this.
  • The robber from the first movie crosses it when he tries to shoot Peter Parker, the same guy who, earlier on, deliberately got out of the way to let him get to the elevator to run from the cops.
  • Green Goblin crosses it when he drops Spidey's girlfriend and a cable car full of children from over a bridge, trying to make Spidey choose to save one or the other. And he knows he crossed it, so in his last moments he asks Peter not to tell Harry about his double life. Peter obliges, but Harry's butler finds out and tells him anyway later on, which brings Harry back to his senses just as he himself is standing close to the edge.
  • Venom crosses it when he stabs Harry Osborn with his own glider. He was attempting to kill Peter at the time, but it's still enough to send him over the edge.
• In The Spirit, The Octopus crosses the line with what he does to that kitten.
• In The Star Chamber, the secret court reaches this point when they won't stop the hit, even after it's made clear the targeted criminals are innocent.
• Stitches (2001): Albright disguises herself as a housemate and hits on another housemate, tricking him into an Attempted Rape of the housemate she disguised herself as.
• Stitches (2012): Most of Stitches' actions can be justified, or at least made understandable by his Roaring Rampage of Revenge against the people who accidentally killed him, he crosses the line when he beats a cat to death for playing with his nose.
• Straight Time: Max crosses it when he murders his supposed best friend Willy for the failed jewelry store heist, which was his own fault in the first place.
• The Strange Thing About the Johnsons
  • Isaiah was shown to be over the line after sexually abusing his father for the past 14 years, to the point where his father commits suicide in order to escape the abuse. Not only that, but he later tries to murder his mother by shoving her in the fireplace just because she knows his secret.
  • Joan burning up her husband's Cocoon Man manuscript, disrespecting his legacy revolving around the abuse from the hands of his son, just because she wants to take no blame for callously ignoring her husband's situation for the past 14 years. In fact, one time she actually hears her husband's blood-curdling screams as he's getting brutally assaulted by Isaiah, and she turns up the volume to TV to block out his screams.
• Sucker Punch:
  • After Babydoll's mother dies, her wicked stepfather tries to rape her, and when she resists, he attempts to do the same to her sister who accidentally gets killed by Babydoll, and then has Babydoll institutionalized... in a Bedlam House run by a crooked orderly who has a lobotomist coming in five days from the date of committal. Oh, and he forges signatures.
  • Other than Blue agreeing to arrange a lobotomy for a patient who he knows shouldn't be in the asylum and does not need a lobotomy in exchange for a lengthy amount of bribed cash, he shoots Amber and Blondie, and then tries to rape Babydoll twice.
• Supersonic Man: Dr. Gulik crosses it when he threatens to completely annihilate all of New York City to get Supersonic to bend to his will.
• Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street:
  • Judge Turpin, who is established as a dog-kicking machine after he has Benjamin Barker, who would become Sweeney Todd, Sentenced to Down Under on a false charge so that he could have Lucy for himself, crosses the Moral Event Horizon during the "Poor Thing" sequence where he has the Beadle take Lucy to the Judge's place, where he has a masked ball in progress, and then proceeds to rape her once she's cornered and at his mercy. Then, as if that wasn't enough to make us hate him, we get a scene later on in the movie that has Turpin sentencing a little boy to death — which was actually a stand-in for a much squickier scene that involves him getting...rather worked up over his sixteen-year-old ward Johanna, who he eventually decides to marry. And then, when Johanna won't go along with this and wants to marry Anthony? He has her thrown into a madhouse to spend some time among mad people.
  • Mrs. Lovett gets hers when she locks poor Toby into the evil basement where she and Sweeney have been conducting the uglier parts of her business prior to joining Sweeney in trying to kill him for suspecting too much, as well as a retroactive crossing when it turns out that she lied to Sweeney about his wife being dead, which meant that Sweeney didn't recognize her as the Beggar Woman until it was too late.
  • Sweeney himself reaches the point of no return, both morally and mentally, during Epiphany when he decides that revenge against the Beadle and Judge (whom he failed to kill moments earlier) is not enough and decides to kill practically everyone who comes in for a shave. He can hardly be blamed, however, since the Judge's actions against him had an impact on his life.
• Gabriel Shear in Swordfish crosses when he murders Ginger, despite having promised to spare her earlier. Subverted in the film's final scene, when it turns out Ginger was Gabriel's partner and her death was faked.
• Fang Shih-hsiung from The Sword of Swords, already a bully and a disrespectful jerkass before he's revealed to be a power-hungry martial artist, crosses the horizon when he blinds the hero Lin Jen-Shiau... and then tricks the blinded Lin into slaughtering a village of innocent civilians without a single hint of remorse.

T

• Taken 2: Murad threw away any sympathy audiences might have had for him as an avenging Papa Wolf when he tried to make Bryan's wife bleed out and promised to complete his son's attempt to sell Kim into sex slavery.
• Teenagers from Outer Space: Thor starts off the movie by disintegrating a puppy, seemingly For the Evulz.
• Terminator 2: Judgment Day: If murdering John Connor's foster parents didn't send the T-1000 over, then torturing Sarah Connor as bait for John did. The T-1000 is a special case, because unlike other Terminators, the T-1000 is a fast-learning model both sentient and fully capable of human emotion, to the point where even Skynet was scared away from mass-producing it.
• That's My Boy: Ms. McGarricle crosses it by willingly having sexual contact with an underaged Donny. Even though Donny was a willing participant, he had neither the mental or emotional maturity to fully process and handle what was going on and could have done irreparable long term damage to his psyche. Appropriately, she gets sentenced to 30 years in prison and charged with statutory rape.
• In There Will Be Blood, Daniel is never portrayed as a particularly good guy, coming off even to his financial backers as being cold and brutal, to the point that when his son is deafened by an oil rig explosion, Daniel has him sent away in the most Parental Abandonment-tacular way possible, so as not to interfere with business. We later learn that H.W. was sent to a school for the deaf, which is fine, but did Daniel really need to be so heartless about it? It's not until the end of the film that he crosses the line, when — as his son tries to make amends so their family isn't irrevocably split, Daniel brutally and cruelly tells him I Have No Son! — for no other reason than to spitefully make the split irrevocable.
• These Final Hours: Much of the human population decided that with the news that the world was coming to an end, any moral boundaries they might have once had should be thrown out with it. In the final hours of mankind’s existence, Australia (now mankind’s last refuge, and even it will be destroyed in just a few hours) is full of kidnappers, murderers, machete-wielding madmen, and crazed wackos. Also, who knows what those kidnappers would have done to 12-year-old Rose if James didn’t come to her rescue…
• In The Third Man, there's Harry Lime's sale of watered-down (and therefore, highly damaging) penicillin to sick and dying Austrian children.
• This Is the End:
  • If Danny McBride doesn't cross it when he tries to shoot the guys in the house, then he does when he becomes leader of a group of cannibals who also enslave people and eats James Franco alive.
  • Jonah Hill after wishing death upon Jay Baruchel. The act of praying to God for the death of his friend is basically treated as an official MEH by the rules of the movie's universe, warranting his demon rape and possession along with his eventual death.
• Titanic (1997):
  • Cal Hockley crosses it when he decides to frame Jack for stealing the Heart of the Ocean. This was around the time the Titanic hit the iceberg too, and so Jack would have drowned in the brig if it weren't for Rose saving him. When Cal tries to redeem himself (in Rose's eye's at least), it is still shown he wishes to leave Jack to die. When Rose ultimately refuses to leave the boat without Jack, Cal attempts to shoot them both, in public no less. Not Good with Rejection much?
  • Cal's bodyguard Lovejoy crosses it in a similar manner when he volunteers to watch a handcuffed Jack in the master-at-arms' office. Lovejoy punches Jack in the gut and says, "Compliments of Mr. Caledon Hockley." at which point he leaves but not before pocketing the key to the handcuffs while Jack recuperates. He also attempts to shoot Rose in a deleted scene before Jack stops him.
• In Tombstone, Sherman McMasters, a member of "The Cowboys" outlaw group quits in disgust, enlisting the aid of Texas Jack Vermilion and Turkey Creek Jack Johnson, and tells Wyatt Earp that if he needs help, they're on his side. McMasters decided that Curly Bill and Johnny Ringo, the leaders of the Cowboys, have crossed the Moral Event Horizon by ordering a (failed) hit on the Earps' wives.
• Vilos Cohaagen from Total Recall (1990) crosses it when Douglas Quaid desperately begs him to turn the oxygen fans of the Mars colony back on as the hundreds of innocent people are suffocating. Cohaagen's response? "Fuck them."
• Trading Places: The bathroom conversation is one for the Duke Brothers. For the whole movie, we've seen them pretty much destroy Winthorpe — a loyal and competent employee and elevating Valentine's life to solve the Nature Versus Nurture question and a one dollar bet. Not only are they going to leave Winthorpe in the poor house, they are going to take away everything they gave to Valentine because he's black, meaning they don't even believe in "nurture over nature". After this point, you're hoping that the main characters will destroy them. And they do.
• Trancers: Whistler ordering his goons to open fire on a hobo camp after they gave him what he wanted.
• Les Grossman from Tropic Thunder crosses it by willingly allowing Tugg Speedman to be killed by Flaming Dragon so he can earn some insurance claims.
• Ten Murder Island: Minnie crosses it when she tells a silently crying, near-hysterical Meg "Before I met you, I didn't need meds. You did this to me."

U-Z

• Jon in Ulvesommer reaches this after being a Toxic Friend Influence to two other farmers through out most of the movie in his Revenge Before Reason hunt of wolves, he starts tracks Kim whith a GPS chip in her shoe to hunt the wolves she befriended. He reaches this when he throws a grenade down into the wolf lair Kim and the wolves are hiding in, burying them alive, she survives but he takes her hostage when the border police arrives and tries to kill her. And, no, this is not an teen or older movie with a Kid Hero, it is a family movie, even though he gets really terrifying.
• Uncharted (2022): In their first few scenes, Moncada and Braddock don't seem too bad. Moncada is an arrogant man who threatens his rivals, but he is just trying to get back treasure that did belong to his family in the past and is honestly bidding for the key to the treasure. Braddock also seems like a potential Punch-Clock Villain, and the audience only has the word of an Unreliable Expositor for her worst actions. Then they calmly murder Moncada's father so he won't give the family fortune to charity, and eliminate the financing for the treasure hunt.
• Uncut Gems:
  • On Howard's part, the reveal that he paid the Ethiopian miners $100,000 for the black opal (at most, a mere tenth of what he thought it was worth), and the callous way he dismisses Kevin Garnett pointing this out to him, seems meant to drive home to the viewer that he's not just a flawed Anti-Hero, but a truly amoral scumbag who cares most about himself and the high he gets from gambling with other peoples' money.
  • Phil crosses it when he coldly shoots Howard dead after the latter wins his ultimate bet and kills his boss Arno for objecting.
• Viktor in Underworld: Rise of the Lycans shows just how firm his anti-Lycan fundamentalism is when he votes "aye" to his own daughter's execution, thus sealing the unanimous vote against her. Though he does it remorsefully, he cements it by blaming it all on Lucian for impregnating her, rather than himself for dealing out the punishment.
• Utøya: July 22, a reenactment of the Breivik Massacre (which happened on the island Utøya on 22. July 2011) from the perspective of the victims. If the whole plot of shooting defenseless teenagers doesn't qualify, the killing of a preteen boy definitely does.
• The Vampire Bat: Dr. von Neimann crosses it when he orders his maid, the only person he showed any care for, murdered
• Vamps: Cisserus is an unrepentant killer, but she initially seems Laughably Evil rather than cruel. She also shows signs of having Hidden Depths when she becomes enamored with a human singer and vows to win his heart without hypnosis. Then, after failing to seduce the man, she apparently kills him, drains a restaurant full of innocent people as a vampiric form of Drowning My Sorrows, tries to make Goody and Stacy kill the Sole Survivor, and mocks them when they refuse.
• Venom (2018):
  • As if the unethical treatments he approved and his threat towards Dr. Skirth's family didn't cross the line, Drake murdering Skirth with a Symbiote should do it.
  • If possessing and killing multiple innocents like an elderly woman and a little girl didn't confirm that Riot is too far gone, then his immediate decision to kill Venom upon discovering his Heel–Face Turn puts the nail in the coffin.
• War of the Worlds (2005):
  • The aliens cross this by massacring a crowd of innocent civilians and going on a planet-wide genocide.
  • Ogilvy crosses this either when he drags Ray and Rachel into his fight with the aliens, or when he hits Ray with a shovel for begging him to stop making noise that will attract the aliens, then explicitly wishes death on him and Rachel (a 10-year old girl). While he's out of his mind, Ray loses all sympathy for him at this point and he kills him to protect Rachel.
• The Wedding Singer: Glenn reveals that he plans to cheat on Julia when they're married.
• Went the Day Well?: Wilson and the German paratroopers are initially just soldiers on a mission, however ruthless they are, but their attempt to execute five children to punish an escape attempt is utterly beyond the pale.
• We're No Angels::
  • In the 1955 version, Paul may be an Upper-Class Twit, but he seems more weak-willed than actively malicious (with his And There Was Much Rejoicing reaction to Andre dying being justified by how rotten Andre is), right up until he burns a will leaving half of the family fortune to Felix.
  • In the 1989 film, Bobby is an abrasive Trigger-Happy death row inmate who shoots his way out of jail, but given how Wardens Are Evil, but in the final act, he threatens to rat out the other convicts and blame the killings on them unless they help him, and he then proceeds to take a little kid hostage.
• When Darkness Falls: Because they think that she had contact with boys, Nina is murdered by her family making it look like suicice. Later, they even try to kill Nina's sister Leyla because she reported her family to the police.
• Willy's Wonderland:
  • Jerry Robert Willis had crossed the line in the past when he murdered countless children and families who came to his restaurant.
  • Sheriff Lund had also crossed the line when she sacrificed many innocent people to the killer animatronics.
• X-Men Film Series
  • The Wolverine: If Mariko's comments are anything to go by, Yashida crosses it by faking his death and working with Viper to further the plot of the film through such means as forcefully removing Logan's Wolverine powers (at one point, he even goes so far as to cause chaos at his own funeral!).
  • In X-Men: First Class, any semblance of sympathy you had for Klaus Schmidt (alias Sebastian Shaw) was gassed and incinerated when he killed Magneto's mother before his first scene was over.
  • X-Men: Days of Future Past: The deaths of the original Emma Frost, Angel, Azazel, and especially Banshee end up pushing Trask over the MEH when it's revealed that he murdered them and studied their remains to further his research on the Sentinels. Also, this movie's entire plot is a quest to prevent Mystique from committing her first murder and thus crossing her own MEH.
  • Ajax from Deadpool (2016) was already a sadist who took pleasure in inflicting Cold-Blooded Torture on his victims and selling them to bidding, but he goes right up to monster territory when he closes the asphyxiation tank on Wade For the Evulz and leaves him to burn to ashes in the collapsing building. His death by Wade's last bullet is well-deserved.
  • The Orphanage Headmaster from Deadpool 2 is above the line when it's shown that he ruthlessly tortures the mutant children in his care out of sheer prejudice. Even worse, it's even implied that he also sexually harasses them. His death by Dopinder's taxi is totally deserved.

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