Harry Warden

In My Bloody Valentine (1981), Warden first appears inside a mine shaft, with a female miner that performs a striptease 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 (2009), on Valentine's Day 1997, Warden and several other miners are trapped in a cave-in; Warden murders the other miners with a pickaxe to conserve air. Warden is rescued, albeit in a coma; he wakes up 1 year later, he murders several hospital staff and patients, before heading back to the mines. Warden breaks into a party held at the mines and kills multiple partygoers, only to be shot by Sheriff Burke when he attempts to murder Tom, the last person still in the mine. Warden escapes from Burke and his posse by going deeper into the mines and using an escape hatch, but Burke and his posse discover him. In an act of vigilantism, they fatally shoot Warden and bury his body in the woods. Ten years later, murders begin again leading to speculation that Warden is back. Though Warden’s gear and body disappear, it is eventually revealed Tom had become the killer after suffering a psychotic break and developing a split personality based on Harry.

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 similarly 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 man 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."[5]

Writer Alexandra Heller-Nicholas notes that Warden's attire, the gas mask and mining gear, aren't exclusively worn by him throughout the film as it is set in a working-class town but that this adds to the enigma of the character's identity as multiple people are seen in the same equipment throughout the film. She describes the close-ups of the mask during the killings as to what makes the figure frightening. She asserts that this also pertains to the gas masks connection to modern warfare and environmental disasters.[6]