The Two Towers

The Best Background Characters: The Zombie/Vampire of Helm’s Deep

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Every story has a cast of characters that we follow and watch and come to love… but what about the background characters? The nameless masses who rarely get our attention? This column examines my favorite background characters who deserve a moment in the spotlight.

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The Movie:

‘The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers’

The Character:

A zombie! (Maybe)

The Scene:

Why He Deserves A Moment In The Spotlight

Despite having watched all three Lord of the Rings movies dozens of times over the years, I’m still finding little moments I never noticed before, and this one may be the weirdest of them all: at 0:10 in the clip above, we can see Rohan soldiers barricading the door to the keep of Helm’s Deep. But if you pause the video at the right moment, you can see what looks shockingly like the pale, emancipated hand of a zombie.

I know this isn’t a zombie, but it sure looks line one, doesn’t it? Alternately, considering how the fingernails almost look like claws, it may also be the hand of a vampire; compare the hand here to Nosferatu’s hand from the upcoming 2024 remake:

While this is certainly the hand of a random soldier that’s stained with Uruk blood and covered in bruises, it’s still fun to imagine that an undead creature of the night came to defend the Rohirrim from Saruman’s hordes, and subsequently went on fun adventures with its new horse-buddies while guzzling mead, camping out in Dunharrow, fighting on the Pelennor Fields, and finally duking it out with orcs at the Black Gates, while never gaining any glory or being remembered by the masses. But he was still there, just out of sight, helping erect barricades and doing his part to save Middle-Earth and its people from Sauron.

Perfect Moments: The Stories That Really Mattered…

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Once in a while, you come across a moment in a story that is so perfect that it stays in with you for years, or even a lifetime. These are moments that, in my opinion, are flawless; perfect gems of storytelling that cannot be improved in any way, and are a joy to treasure and revisit again and again.

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The Movie:

‘The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers’

The Scene:

Why it’s perfect:

There are so many wonderful moments in The Lord of the Rings film trilogy that picking just one above all others is nearly impossible. Would you take an action scenes, or a moment of drama? I don’t know what I’d pick… but one of the top contenders comes at the end of the second film, where Sam gives Frodo one of the greatest inspirational talks in the history of film.

This scene is so beautiful, and so timeless, because it sums up exactly what The Lord of the Rings – and what all great stories – is about: good people who, when faced with overwhelming, all-powerful evil, choose to keep going. They could give up at any time. They could lie down and die. They could go home and give in to despair… but they don’t. Even if they’re scared out of their minds, they choose to take another step, to go one more mile, to get through just one more day, because they believe that there are things in the world worth saving, no matter how bad things get.

This isn’t just syrupy sentiment on Sam’s part: In Tolkien’s universe, evil is very real, and it is powerful, and it can and does triumph. Heroes die, kingdoms fall, and innocent people suffer… But in the long run, evil cannot win. It can conquer entire races, it can enslave so many people, and it can destroy so much, but it can never destroy the desire of all good people to live in peace with one another, no matter where they come from or who they are. Some are great warriors and others are just ordinary, everyday people. But all of them resist, in ways both big and small, flashy and quiet, and when evil dies, whether it’s a year later, a decade, or even a century, those people are still there, still going, and proving that evil will always fail in its quest to achieve total victory over all that is good.