I have struggled with vengeful thoughts & feeling in my life. Whether you want to admit it or not, at some point on your own timeline, you’ll rub up against your own darkness. Be it the personal, political or something else, the desire to crush someone for a verbal slight or an all out attack on your personhood is a strong emotion.

The original Cape Fear source material is taken from the novel The Executioners. In the film, Gregory Peck plays a lawyer who testified again a violent rapist named Max Cady. The Cady role Robert Mitchum inhabits with an amazing combination of swagger & laid back menace. He’s a cool daddy-o with a slow burn desire to get back at the man who helped lock him up for eight years. And burn he does indeed. Mitchum has the physicality of a prowling puma (which Robert De Noir sort of emulates in the Cape Fear remake). He slinks with the self-confident power of someone who has hurt people and will do it again if he doesn’t get what he wants. And what is that exactly? Pure revenge for someone who dared take his life offline so he couldn’t do whatever he wanted. He’s a relatable monster, but that doesn’t mean you’d want him over for dinner.

But monstrous or not, we humans are not very different from each other. In our struggle to get what we want (or think we want), emotions are the common factor. Greed can turn to envy and metastasize into hate and a taste for revenge. Maybe it’s based on your personality or astrological chart (if you’re into that sort of thing). Or it can be a masochistic bent, taking things out on ourselves. Sadness to depression to addiction becoming slow or fast suicide. Mileage will vary depending on personality, circumstance or how desperate or deranged you are as a person. Yes, I’m no therapist so I will name call.