Harry Warden

In the original My Bloody Valentine, Harry first appears inside a mine shaft, with a female miner that performs a strip tease and fondles with his breathing tube. Harry brutally kills her with a mining pick. When the town's police chief Jake Newby receives an anonymous box of Valentine chocolates containing a human heart and a note warning that murders will begin if the dance proceeds, he checks the mental institution where Harry Warden was incarcerated, but they have no record of him. It is later revealed that the murders were done by the young miner Axel who witnessed his father (one of the supervisors) being murdered by Harry Warden when he was a child and was since traumatized by the event ever since while Harry Warden died five years before the events of the film.

In My Bloody Valentine 3D, on Valentine's Day 1997, a cave-in on the north side of the Hanninger mine trapped six miners. Several days later, rescue teams found five dead miners and Harry Warden, who survived by killing the other miners with a pickaxe, allowing himself to breathe. Exactly one year later, Warden wakes from his coma in the hospital, and goes on a murderous rampage. Soon after, Sheriff Burke arrives, finding multiple mutilated bodies and the heart of a nurse inside a candy box. Meanwhile, a party is thrown at the abandoned mine shaft that was the site of the disaster where Warden appears. After murdering several of the partygoers, and before he can murder Tom (the last person in the mine), Warden is shot by Burke. Warden escapes by going deeper into the mine and going through an escape hatch. Sheriff Burke and the other townsfolk find him at the same escape hatch bleeding out and shoot him dead, then buried him in the woods claiming it was a more proper burial than he deserved. Ten years later, murders begin again leading to speculation that Warden is back. It is revealed that Tom is the killer after developing a split personality from his encounter with Warden.

He is depicted as a once normal man who descended into madness when his bosses weren't paying attention to their workers, which led to the disaster and subsequently Warden's insanity. He is depicted similar to Michael Myers and Jason Voorhees in that he is a deranged silent killer who lurks in the shadows. In Canadian Cinema Since the 1980s: At the Heart of the World, Mihalka stated, "Harry Warden [the original Valentine's Day killer] wasn't born evil; he was a hardworking guy who went insane when the bosses neglected the people that worked for them, causing a disaster. I really insisted on the subtext. Okay, it's not exactly a treatise on Das Kapita, but at the same time, that's who the character is."[3]