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Stalker With A Crush / Film

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Stalkers With A Crush in Film.

Animated

  • Gaston in Beauty and the Beast. Yes, he loves himself more than he'll ever love Belle, but pursuing a girl who hates you, threatening to chuck her father in the asylum, and murdering your rival surely counts. He loves himself so much that it's either incomprehensible or maddening to him that she does not, or just an intolerable affront to his towering ego.
    Gaston: "BELLE IS MINE!!!"
  • Frollo to Esmeralda in the Disney version of The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Frollo is willing to burn half of Paris down and murder dozens of Romani people just to get her. Also can’t forget Frollo trying to kill Quasimodo and Phoebus (both her love interests) and if Esmeralda refuses his offer to let her be his, Frollo will burn her alive. Honestly Frollo makes Gaston look tame in comparison.
  • Hal Stewart in Megamind. The nerdy cameraman has a big crush on his coworker, reporter Roxanne Ritchi. So when he becomes Tighten/Titan, his infatuation becomes a lot more dangerous.
    • Arguably, Megamind himself was initially this towards Roxanne since it's hinted the reason he keeps kidnapping Roxanne is because he has a crush on her (in his warped, socially awkward sort of way) and it's his way of being close to her. Unlike the above example, he does get better.
  • Sally is a relatively benign version of this in The Nightmare Before Christmas, following Jack Skellington around a few times and sending him small gifts. After Jack becomes obsessed with Christmas this turns to trying to protect him from himself, as Jack has the enthusiasm of a thousand passionate actors and the common sense of a wet cabbage.
  • In Resident Evil: Vendetta, the antagonist Glenn Arias becomes obsessed with Rebecca Chambers due to her uncanny resemblance to his dead wife, who was killed during his wedding. At one point, he orders his mooks to kill Chris and Leon but not to harm Rebecca in the slightest... all while watching Rebecca intently on the camera screen. It gets worse — when Arias succeeds in capturing Rebecca, he proposes to her, dresses up her as his bride, tries putting his dead wife's ring on her finger and injects his mutated blood into Rebecca when she refuses him. Luckily, Rebecca is saved by Chris and Leon.
  • Osanai in Paprika.
  • El Chupacabra toward Rochelle in Planes.
  • WALL•E. He stows away on a massive, ominous spaceship with no idea where it's going just so he doesn't have to be separated from EVE. His obsession is probably justified in that until EVE came along, he had no one to talk to except cockroaches for centuries. EVE was perfectly aware that WALL•E was stalking her due to his bumbling nature, but didn't seem to care, and she was armed with a laser-weapon that could blow holes through mountains. They fall in love with each other at the end. Granted, WALL•E's a robot and most likely doesn't understand how his behavior would look to others.

Live-Action

  • George Webber in 10 (1979) becomes this once he sees Jenny. He's willing to follow her and her newlywed husband to Mexico — their honeymoon destination — to try and hook up with her.
  • Watch how Xerxes acts around Leonidas in 300. Would he have been satisfied with just taking his sovereignty?
  • Sandra Bullock's character Mary towards the titular character in the movie All About Steve. Which is why, when receiving the Worst Couple award at the Razzies, Sandra said: "Again, if you had seen the film, seen it with your eyes, it's a film about a woman stalking a man. That doesn't really set up the premise for a loving couple. So giving us the worst couple award is kind of duh."
  • American Beauty—
    • Ricky. His social ineptitude makes him think filming a girl and spelling out her name on her lawn is appropriate wooing strategy. Jane herself is so screwed up it works.
    • Jane's dad Lester secretly lusts after her best friend Angela throughout the movie, listening in on her conversations in Jane's bedroom, calling her and hanging up!
    • And Ricky's dad toward Lester near the end of the film. When he can't have him, he goes as far as killing him.
  • In the Batman films.
    • The Joker in Batman (1989) is this to Vicki. After seeing a picture of her he immediately develops feelings for her. The Joker even goes as far to kill everyone in a museum just so that he can talk to her and attempts to kill Bruce her boyfriend when he finds the latter in her apartment. Near the end of the film, he manages to kidnap Vicki until Batman shows up to save her.
      • After she finds out Bruce is avoiding her, Vicki resorts to following him around, digging up files about his past, and spying on him to get to know him better.
    • The Penguin has a lot aspects of this towards Catwoman in Batman Returns, and is furious when she rejects him as he is a gross penguin man.
    Penguin: (to Batman) I saw her first... gotta fly!
    • The Riddler is re-imagined into this by Joel Schumacher in Batman Forever being a Loony Fan obsessed with Bruce Wayne and is heart broken when Bruce doesn't endorse his crazy Mind-Control Device, and thus becomes The Riddler to get back at him; he evens sends crazy letters to Bruce as clues. Later in the film he asked Bruce's Love Interest Chase Meridian to dance in some attempt to make Bruce jealous with his eyes never leaving Wayne.
      • Chase Meridian herself is obsessed with Batman/Bruce Wayne unlike Vicki though Chase borders on Ethical Slut, as she is completely enamored with Batman to point of building a shrine of him and exploiting the Bat-Signal so Batman would show up and she can feel him up. Meridian's interactions with Batman are pretty much sexual harassment but since she's attractive it's lightheartedly played off as Stalking is Love.
  • Main character Elliot from the remake of Bedazzled (2000) knows every intimate detail (likes, dislikes, relationship status, etc.) about his coworker Alison, who has no clue he's alive. He doesn't go so far as actually breaking and entering until Satan puts him up to it, but he bends pretty quickly—it doesn't hurt that he's invisible and intangible to do so while she's showering. Then there's the fact that every one of his seven wishes save the first and last one revolve around getting a woman he's never had more than a minute interaction with.
  • Subtle example in Blade Runner 2049 with Number Two Replicant Luv’s attitude towards Replicant protagonist and Chick Magnet K, as not only does Luv watch K and protect him from scavengers, with a Kill Sat but she also hunts him relentlessly in the latter half of the movie and her obsession seemly goes beyond even the orders of the Wallace Corporation at one point saying he’s “a good boy” to his superior Lieutenant Joshi. Luv even invokes Yandere when she meets K’s Hologram girlfriend Joi destroying her in front of K out of spite, and taken even further in the climax when Luv gives K a Forceful Kiss after stabbing him with a knife.
  • Played for laughs in Blades of Glory, with Nick Swardson stalking Jon Heder's character.
    "He likes food and dreams and whispers... his favorite movie is Short Circuit... and Fried Green Tomatoes. "
  • The plot of Francis Ford Coppola's Bram Stoker's Dracula, with the eponymous antagonist obsession with Mina unfortunately it's played off as Stalking is Love for a good percent of the movie. Dracula is also a murderously jealous of Jonathan (Mina’s fiancé) for this reason.
  • Brandon in Brightburn has a crush on a female classmate, and early in the film it appears that she might like him as well. But when he uses his newly discovered superpowers to show up in her bedroom unannounced, she is appropriately terrified.
  • An early example is Katharine Hepburn's character in Bringing Up Baby.
  • Broken Blossoms is about a man who loves an abused fifteen year old from afar. One day the two meet when the girl collapses in his store after being beaten by her father. It doesn't end well when her xenophobic father finds out that she stayed at a Chinese man's house.
  • Beau in the film Bus Stop, who falls in love with a beautiful singer named Cherie and stalks her for most of the film.
  • The Cable Guy has Chip Douglas who stalks his customers to be Just Friends.
  • Casper has the titular ghost stalking a live human girl in Kat.
  • The whole plot of The Crush starring Alicia Silverstone and Cary Elwes.
  • Crush: Chantal is really into Paige, who doesn't reciprocate, even trying to cast Wiccan love spells on her. In Real Life, this is frowned upon by the Wiccan community as it's non-consensual. However, it turns out that Chantal was trying to cast those spells to get Paige and AJ to fall in love.
  • Knox Overstreet in Dead Poets Society when it comes to Chris, is a variation, but still disturbing. He shows up at her cheerleading practice wearing dark glasses though. He then grabs her boob at a party and then follows her to her school and rambles at her disturbing assumptions.
  • Rose McGowan's character Debbie in the movie Devil in the Flesh.
  • Darla (Lucy Punch), from the film Dinner for Schmucks is a particularly terrifying example of this.
  • Jed Parry of Enduring Love and the novel upon which it was based.
  • In The Double, the protagonist, Simon, goes out of his way to talk to Hannah at work, follows her as she goes home, and has a telescope pointed at her apartment.
  • Entre Nous (2021): Simon refuses to take "no" for an answer following him having sex with Laetitia, convinced they're meant to be together. Upon learning she's pregnant with his child, he only intensifies, harassing her until Laetitia submits to a "relationship" with him.
  • Ever After: Monsieur le Peu is implied to be something like this to Danielle, judging by his behavior toward her in the marketplace and then later when he owns her.
  • The 1981 movie The Fan is about an actress named Sally Ross who is being stalked by an obsessed fan named Douglas Breen. He starts with constant letters and requests for pictures and then moves on to murdering everyone she knows.
  • Alex Forrest of Fatal Attraction turns into this after having a one-night-stand with married man Dan Gallagher. As Dan tries to distance himself from her for the sake of his marriage, Alex's actions get increasingly violent, culminating in the infamous "bunny boiler" scene that has her killing and boiling his daughter's pet rabbit.
  • In The Firechasers, the arsonist is obsessed with Toby and is starting the fires so she will have hot story to report on.
  • In The Fisher King, Parry (Robin Williams) stalks Lydia (Amanda Plummer). He is as mad as a hatter, so this is one of the more normal aspects of his character.
  • Ghostbusters
    • Louis Tully is this in the original Ghostbusters. He apparently sits just inside his apartment door all day, just waiting for Dana Barrett to walk by so he can come out and ask her on a date. It's never made explicit, but the fact that he's destined to be the Keymaster to Dana's Gatekeeper probably isn't helping matters.
    • Janosz Poha in Ghostbusters II is even worse. At least Louis had a saving touch of geeky awkwardness about him; Janosz is actually creepy about it, especially when Vigo "helps" him.
  • Ghost in the Machine: The killer chooses his primary victims because he's attracted to them. When he focuses his attention on Terri, one of his first acts is to send her lingerie with creepy notes. He proceeds to kill off all her friends one by one and makes harassing phone calls.
  • Green Lantern (2011): Hammond. He starts off with merely an infatuation, but by the time Carol gives him a hug and he smells her hair, it's gotten pretty twisted.
  • Hannibal turns the title character into one of these. While in The Silence of the Lambs he simply seems to enjoy being creepy for creepiness' sake, the sequel turns it into a kind of weird romantic love for Clarice Starling, with him sneaking into her house and watched her sleep (while touching her face and hair). In a deleted scene, he breaks into her car and licks the steering wheel to get the taste of her. Plus the part where she's talking to him on a cell phone trying to find him, and it turns out he was behind her touching her hair. The weird thing is that it's actually meant to be romantic.
  • The Haunted Mansion (2003): Gracey to Sara. Subverted as it's revealed that he merely thought she was his old lover Elizabeth.
  • Used rather cleverly in He Loves Me... He Loves Me Not. The first half of the movie sets up that a girl named Angélique is the lover of a doctor and nearly commits suicide upon learning that he will not be leaving his wife to marry her. The second half reveals that this is all in her head - he only knew her vaguely because she house-sat for his neighbor, and it is also implied that she hit his wife with a motorcycle to cause her to miscarry as well as built a shrine to him out of garbage. While the girl is given medical help at the end, it is revealed that she was not taking her medication - instead using it to make a mosaic of the doctor.
  • John Ryder from The Hitcher (1986). After Jim Halsey manages to thwart his attempt at murdering him, Ryder becomes obsessed with either killing Halsey or being killed by Halsey. He stalks him throughout the entire movie, framing Jim for crimes he committed (but rescuing him when the police are about to kill him) and killing Jim's only female love interest violently. In one very disturbing scene, he holds Jim's hands, and Jim spits in his face. After Jim leaves, he is seen rubbing the spit onto his lips, smiling.
  • Holidays: In Valentine's Day, appropriately enough. Maxine has a thing for her coach. Once he gives her a Valentine, she decides to reward him with Alpha Bitch Heidi's heart, since he needed a transplant.
  • Pete Sheppard in It Should Happen to You; Pete finds out where Gladys Glover lives, and moves in to her apartment building pretty quickly.
  • In I Wake Up Screaming, that the victim had a man stalking her turns out to be an important clue.
  • Jagged Mind: Alex was subjecting Billie to time loops even before they officially met, due to her obsession with her. She won't let anyone get in her way of having Billie as hers alone, even murdering people for it.
  • Kayako Saeki in Ju-on was obsessed in life with her son's teacher, Kobayashi-sensei in the Japanese films and Peter in the American remakes, and kept journals detailing every interaction with him and describing her vehement jealousy when he found someone else in college. Her yangire, Ax-Crazy husband finding out about her true feelings and killing the entire family in a fit of rage is what leads to her becoming the quintessential Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl of the franchise.
  • Alec Baldwin's character, Teacher, from The Juror (1996) is a textbook example of this. He bugs Annie Laird's house so he can listen to her every move, copies and enlarges photos of her and kisses them, and sneaks a bouquet of flowers into her house without her knowledge. When it looks like she won't listen to his orders, he threatens to run her son over with his car, and sleeps with her best friend (promptly killing her afterwards).
  • Samantha James from the 2005 movie Just Friends.
  • Kiss of the Tarantula: Susan's uncle, Walter, is increasingly inappropriate with and obsessed with her. This culminates in Walter murdering a girl who was accusing Susan of murdering her friends (Which she pretty much did), thinking this would "prove his love for her (Susan.)" Did we mention the film opens with Walter carrying on an affair with Susan's mother and plotting her father's murder?
  • Goblin King Jareth for Sarah in Labyrinth.
  • In The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, creepy, Snape-like Evil Chancellor Grima Wormtongue "haunts" the steps of the beautiful princess Eowyn, even being promised by Saruman to have her for himself once he wins as a reward.
  • Love Actually—
    • Mark verges on this, no matter what the fans say. You're telling me it's not creepy to film a wedding with extreme close ups of the bride throughout? The time he shows up at their house is odd too.
    • At least in his case he knows that his feelings are wrong and that he shouldn't have done that (since he tries to keep them from seeing the film). He also deliberately tries to avoid her out of loyalty to his best friend/her husband, which she interprets as him disliking her.
  • Mostly Played for Laughs in the film version of Love and Death on Long Island, which generally presents the whole thing in a more benevolent light than the book.
  • Mad Love stars Peter Lorre as Dr. Gogol— a man obsessed enough with a beautiful actress to keep a wax dummy of her in his house to talk to. Slightly averted in that he knows she's happily married and tries to save her pianist husband's career when he loses his hands in a railway accident (he performs a successful transplant)— but he performs the surgery to endear himself to her, and when the husband start to think his hands have a mind of their own, Gogol has no problem trying to drive the husband crazier.
  • Malevolent (2002): Oliver has been stalking a stripper named Jessica, even pretending to be her ex-boyfriend. This proves to be a vital clue to tracking him down. His obsession with Detective Jack Lucas also has some homo-erotic undertones.
  • Used to a very creepy effect in Manon des Sources (Manon of the Spring). Ugolin, an ugly man in his 30s, spies on the teenage Manon as she is bathing. He then proceeds to spend days silently following her around as she herds goats, going so far as to fill her traps with game, but never allowing her to see him. The extent of his crush is revealed when he finds the bit of cloth she used to tie her hair back — he takes it home and sews it onto his naked chest.
  • Annie Wilkes in Misery, except she doesn't need to stalk — she gets home delivery!
  • In The Most Assassinated Woman in the World, Paula receives frequent gifts and cards from an admirer who loves the way she dies on the stage, and hopes to make it happen off-stage...
  • Moulin Rouge!: "Satine will be mine! It's not that I'm a jealous man! I just don't like other people touching my things."
    • Made even more obvious when he orders a hit on his love rival.
  • In Night of the Eagle, Margaret Abbott has an obsessive crush on her psychology professor Norman Taylor. After Norman destroys all of the magical protections his wife Tansy had placed over him, Margaret attempts to seduce him. When that fails, she then accuses him of rape, but is ultimately forced to admit is was a lie.
  • Bobby (played by Fred Savage) in the TV movie No One Would Tell.
  • Obsessed is all about this trope; it features Ali Larter's character Lisa, er, pining over her boss Derek, going so far as to get into a fight with Derek's wife Sharon. The fight ends with Lisa dangling from a hole in the ceiling, about to plummet onto the glass table below her—Sharon tries to pull her back up, but Lisa attempts to drag her down as well, and ends up falling and being crushed by a broken chandelier.
  • Robin Williams' character in One Hour Photo has a crush on an entire family because they're so picture perfect. Using the information he's gotten from their photos, he fantasizes about visiting their house and being an Honorary Uncle. When he discovers that the husband has been having an affair he becomes enraged at him for squandering his "perfect" family and gets his revenge by catching him and his lover and forcing them to take sexually explicit photos, repeating the instructions his parents gave him as a child ("stop crying, you're supposed to be happy!").
  • Thomas in P2. He kidnaps Angela and holds her as a Captive Date. When he triggers her Berserk Button, and she Takes a Level in Badass, he veers into Ax-Crazy territory.
  • Miles Haley from Perfect Stranger. He sneaks into Rowena's house and watches her make out with her boyfriend, tries to flirt with her in instant messaging by posing as someone else, and has a freaky shrine dedicated to her in his house.
  • In Phantom of the Mall: Eric's Revenge, Eric's love for Melody has transformed into obsession. He uses the cameras at the mall to watch her every move, breaks into her locker to leave her orchids (her favourite flowers), and breaks into her car to leave her the purple dress she had admired earlier.
  • Evelyn Draper from Play Misty for Me. Possibly the Trope Codifier. You know it's bad when the stalker is scaring Clint Eastwood.
  • The premise of the Prom Night (2008) remake.
  • Ratter: It's made uncomfortably clear that the hacker lusts over Emma, as he's shown taking snapshots of her feet and watching her as she showers, exercises, sleeps... and pleasures herself.
  • Quite possibly Jackson Rippner in Red Eye. It's never explicitly stated but the character does seem a little fascinated by the girl he's been stalking ("When this is over, I may have to steal you.")
    • Confirmed by Word of God; Jackson did develop feelings for Lisa over the eight weeks he had to watch her. Not nice feelings, but feelings nevertheless.
      • In the commentary during the restroom scene, when Lisa revealed that she had been raped, Wes Craven notes, "He looks jealous." He sounded sort of creeped out as he said it. Let me repeat: Wes Craven was creeped out. That's Cillian Murphy for you.
  • Jacob, the Jerkass T.A. in Road Trip is this to Beth. Despite her insistence that they are not, nor ever will be a couple, he acts as though they are and tells Josh that she's "spoken for".
  • In The Science of Sleep Stéphane does break into Stéphanie's house to steal something of hers to make it into a gift. She does catch him the second time and tell him to get out — this is put down to his lack of social understanding (thinking he was doing something nice for her). When she learns what his gift was ( making her childhood toy horse robotic enough to gallop - which she said she dreamt about as a child) she apologised for getting angry but does say that breaking into people's houses is wrong.
  • This happens to all parties in the Love Triangle in Scott Pilgrim vs. The World. Knives was this to Scott, though it could be her way of showing affection. And when Scott broke up with her, she got worse. Then Scott followed Ramona around during the party. And Ramona admits that she did this to Gideon.
  • The Seduction, starring Morgan Fairchild as a newscaster who becomes the obsession of a creepy and increasingly dangerous male loner.
  • Hedy from Single White Female is a Psycho Lesbian version of this towards her roommate Allie.
  • Annie in Sleepless in Seattle. Not only does she follow Sam around, she even hires a private detective to spy on him. How romantic...
  • Snapshot (1979): Daryl, who clearly hasn't gotten over Angela, begins to stalk her.
  • There's a subtle hint of this with Eddie Brock in Spider-Man 3; he's always going on and on about how Gwen Stacy is "the girl I intend to marry" and tells her father that he's her boyfriend... and then, the first and only time we actually see them together, she reminds him that they've only ever had coffee once, in a fashion that indicates that she's really not that into him and that more than a bit of their relationship only exists in his own head.
  • The Borg Queen of Star Trek: First Contact is this to Captain Picard, a rare case of a galactic overlord (or lady) chasing after someone, an inversion of the Loony Fan if there ever was one.
  • Star Wars:
  • Stoker: Charlie quite impressively manages to pull this trope off with his niece India, despite the fact that they live in the same house. Okay, frequently bumping into her around the family home is understandable enough, but following her to and from school? And while she's on a date? And then you find out that before the movie began, he sent her dozens of letters from an asylum, since she was a child, in spite of never receiving a reply, or even having met her in person. (India's father understandably never gave the letters to her.)
  • The eponymous Adele Hugo in The Story of Adèle H, who is so obsessed with her Old Flame that she follows him for years and does everything in her power to get him to marry her, including sabotaging his relationships with other women. Truth in Television due to Adele's schizophrenia and erotomania.
  • Madison turns it up to eleven with her crush on Ben in the 2002 movie Swimfan, killing two police officers and nearly killing Ben's girlfriend before she's finally stopped.
  • Ted: Donny and Robert have a shrine of Ted in their house, stalk, and kidnap him for the purpose of getting Ted to be Robert's toy.
  • Played for laughs in There's Something About Mary, in which the title character has several stalkers who are infatuated with her.
  • In the Spanish Tesis, we find out that Chema, the protagonist's friend, was spying on her and filming her, and Angela's attraction for Bosco is also on the obsessive side.
  • Philippe from Une histoire sans importance (1980) turns into this after his rejection by Claude.
  • Vicki: Both Vicki's actual murderer, Harry Williams, and Lt. Ed Cornell, who covers up the crime for him, were in love with, and totally obsessed with, her.
  • In the movie The Watcher, Keanu Reeves' character David Allen Griffin is a Stalker with a Crush. Not surprising, considering the title. Apparently the thing going on between him and Joel was so strong that he became obsessed with getting Joel to continue their Mind Games. He follows Joel all the way to Chicago, watches his every move (lamenting that Joel keeps going to the same terrible Vietnamese restaurant every night), sends him flowers and a card saying he missed him, kidnaps and tries to kill his female psychologist, and kidnaps him to try to get him to realize that they need each other. It's revealed later on that Joel's ex-lover was killed by David due to his being jealous that Joel was going to retire to be with her.
  • Gloria from the 2005 film Wedding Crashers.
  • In Welcome Home (2018) Federico is a voyeur that records young couples who rent his Italian villa. He's normally content to just watch, but falls in love with Cassie and starts stalking her throughout the movie.
  • In the movie When in Rome, Beth takes coins from a magic fountain, making the men who tossed in those coins turn into Stalker with a Crush. They all feel they are in love with her due to the magic fountain. Naturally, the main love interest, Nick, tries to contact her. Hilarity Ensues.
  • In Written on the Wind, Kyle and Marylee both take this approach to winning the affections of Lucy and Mitch, respectively. Kyle is successful, Marylee is not.
  • The Wrong Cheerleader: As the creepy stalker's obsession with cheerleader protagonist Becky intensifies he shows up everywhere: her home, around school, and at her cheerleading practice. This is one guy who wants her and won't let anyone else stand in the way.

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