The Horror
It goes something like this: man snaps, kills family but escapes unscathed, remarries, and repeats the process. It’s up to the new family members to discover their stepfather’s horrible secret.
There are two competing elements at work in a plot like this. The first is the stranger who is ingratiating himself with the family. This psychopath his hiding a dark secret and it’s only a matter of time before he unravels and begins killing again. The competing timeline is the history of the killer’s past murders catching up to him; friends, family, and police are all on the lookout for the killer for his past crimes. These two timelines inevitably intersect in a mass orgy of killing as the stepfather snaps from the stress of being caught, tries to kill his family, and flee again.
There’s an interesting coda to the Stepfather series of films. They were based on John Lister, who murdered his own family, escaped for over a decade, and remarried. The deeply religious Lister had just lost his job, his wife had dementia from syphilis (from another man) and a pot-smoking wiccan daughter. With no way out to save face, he decided he would “send them to heaven” by executing them all.
The key to this kind of villain is his ability to disguise himself. This is taken to extremes in the Stepfather sequels, when the titular character’s disguise abilities verged on shapeshifting – and even, in the last installment, plastic surgery without anesthetics.
The other element that’s critical is a home life. Player characters rarely have fleshed-out domestic lives, but it’s certainly feasible that a non-player character sister might marry some new fellow that just seems a little off. Introducing a family peripherally is a great way to make a character feel vulnerable without fully domesticating him.
Because the killer hides in plain sight, his weapons of choice are almost always improvised. Butcher knives are a favorite, but power tools are a close second, and ties used as garrotes will do in a pinch – basically, anything you might buy a dad for Father’s Day could be turned into a murder weapon.
For a real twist, the player character could marry into an insane family of possessed/cannibal/cultists, which means he’s the sane one. It’s a bit like Marilyn Munster of The Munsters.
Your Turn: Have you ever injected an insane spouse into your characters happy family?
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