YMMV / Shocker

• Awesome Music: The movie's rock music songs mostly by Desmond Child basically has Evil Is Cool tattooed in each one, especially Pinker's Villain Songs.
• Complete Monster: Horace Pinker is a psychotic murderer in a near-constant violent frenzy who butchers families for fun. Pinker kills main character Jonathan Parker's mother, brother, and sister after his police detective father gets on Pinker's trail; kills a handful of cops who try to capture him in his lair; and murders Jonathan's girlfriend in her bathroom. Pinker mutilates two prison guards with his teeth as he's being led to the electric chair, where he reveals that Jonathan is in fact his own son and tried to stop him as Pinker murdered Jonathan's real mother when he was still a little kid. Pinker makes a Deal with the Devil to become an undead being of electricity. Pinker proceeds to possess person after person to continue trying to kill Jonathan, draining their life force completely before discarding his hosts, including a little girl. Pinker possesses people close to Jon so he will be forced to kill his loved ones.
• Evil Is Cool: Invoked by Wes Craven in regards to Horace Pinker, who is a copycat of another Craven villain who is also this trope, Freddy Krueger. Whether it worked is another matter, given that Pinker is an even bigger Jerkass than Krueger without much humor to offset it.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • Years later, the video game Persona 4 featured a Serial Killer obsessed with the TV.
  • Actors Mitch Pileggi and Michael Murphy would later both act in Batman media adaptations. Pileggi would guest star in an episode of Batman Beyond and voice The Commissioner Gordon in The Batman, while Murphy would play the mayor of Gotham City in Batman Returns, sequel to Batman (1989) which was released the same year as this movie.
• Ham and Cheese: Pinker takes Evil Is Hammy and Laughably Evil and runs with it as much as he can. And this makes his actor's performance all the more enjoyable.
• Retroactive Recognition:
  • Mitch Pileggi (Pinker) would later go on to play Walter Skinner in The X-Files.
  • Jonathan was played by future film director Peter Berg.
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic: Pinker is unable to possess Jonathan's friend Rhino because, according to him, said friend liked Jonathan too much to let him in. Later in the movie, he manages to possess Jonathan's father with no trouble at all, suggesting that his father apparently cares less about his son than his son's best friend did (though it could be Pinker may be messing with Jonathan just to Kick the Dog to make him more emotionally isolated then he already is by making him turn against his only family.