The Cherub(Valentine)

## Poster

**Jeremy Melton**, also known as **The Cherub**, **Killer**, and **Adam Carr**, is the main slasher villain of the 2001 slasher film, *Valentine*.

He is played by **David Boreanaz** while young Jeremy Melton is played by **Joel Palmer** and The Cherub is played by an uncredited actor, **Marshall Virtue**.

## Personality

As a kid, Jeremy is awkward kid who always gets nervous around girls. However, he is shown to be vengeful when he’s framed for things he hasn’t done and will come come up with a master plan to enact his vengeance. He is only caring for people who are actually nice to him as he lets Kate live since she was the only one out of her friends to be nice to him.

## Background

At 1988, during a Valentines dance at Robert F. Kennedy Middle School, a young boy named Jeremy Melton asked three girls, Shelley, Lily, and Paige, for a dance only for the girls to rudely turn him down and insult him. After asking Kate, who kindly turned him down, he asked Dorothy, who was sitting alone on the bleachers. While hesitant at first, Dorothy decided to join him and the two started making out underneath the bleachers. However, four of the school’s bullies discover them and Dorothy, not being able to bare that Jeremy was the only guy who approached her, lies and says that Jeremy attacked her, calling him a pervert. The bullies than humiliate Jeremy by pouring the bowl of punch all over him, strip him down to his underwear, and beat him up in front of the entire dance with everyone cheering. During all this, Jeremy gets a nosebleed. After being framed for attacking Dorothy, Jeremy gets sent to a reform school.

A year later after reform school, Jeremy lands in juvenile hall. Six months after, he is placed in a State-Run Mental Hospital. It’s also mentioned that his parents died in a fire which is ruled as an accident.

## Biography

13 years later, Jeremy changes his name to Adam Carr and starts going out Kate, where she’s unaware that he’s Jeremy, where they both also work for the newspaper. However, they put their relationship on hold as Adam tries to overcome his alcoholism.

After a bad date, Shelley practices for her Med School by working a cadaver in the morgue, where she covers the face while starting to work on it, late at night as the last student, Jason Marquette, leaves. She later discovers a red envelope Jeremy left on her locker containing a Valentines card that says, “The Journey of love is an arduous trek. My love grows for you as you bleed from your neck.”, and holds artwork for a man slitting a woman’s throat. Put off by the Valentines card, Shelley returns to work on her cadaver only to find it breathing, shocking her. She finds the real cadaver in the closet and discovers the body on the table as suddenly disappeared, making her realize an intruder is in the building with her. Arming herself with a scalpel, she looks around the room and finds that one of the doors is open. She was about look through the door until an arm reach out from behind a curtain and grabs her. Shelley stabs the assailant with the scalpel and runs off, with the assailant, revealed to be Jeremy wearing black clothes and a Cupid mask that was worn from the school dance, chasing after her. As she runs, Shelley finds each door is locked until she finds the room with the corpses kept in body bags. With the room a dead end, Shelley hides in one of the body bags before Jeremy arrives. Catching on that she’s hiding in one of the bags, Jeremy unzips two of the body bags and stabs five of the body bags he passes by until he finds the one Shelley is in. Once unzipping it, Shelley tries to escape only for Jeremy to keep her inside the bag and slits her throat with his knife, killing her and zipping her back up inside as his nose bleeds. Jeremy then walks out of the room as Shelley’s blood drips out of a tube and into a tray.

Jeremy, as Adam, heads to Shelley’s funeral with Kate and leaves after talking with her about their relationship. Just then, a detective named Leon Vaughn asks Kate and the rest of her friends of Shelley and reveals that Jason, who was the last person she was with the night she was murdered, is now missing.

Jeremy then sends two more Valentine gifts to Dorothy and Lily. Dorothy receives a Valentines card of her own that says, “Rose are Red, Violets are Blue, They’ll need dental records to identify you!”, while Lily receives a rose, card that says “Tis a well known fact that beauty is skin deep, savor the taste… You are what you eat.”, and candy chocolate filled with maggots. He also left behind another Cupid mask at an elevator at Kate’s apartment for her to find, where she gets hit on by her neighbor, Gary.

During a cultural event, girls start to talk about Jeremy Melton as the cards had his initials on them and connect him to the Cupid mask Kate found at her apartment. As the girls separate to look at the video art, Lily makes out of the with the artist, Max, until she finds out that he was planning a three-way with another girl named Amy. Disgusted, Lily gets away from and starts walking around the event until she gets lost. Suddenly, Jeremy appears and shoots an arrow at her stomach, impaling her. Jeremy shoots her out of the building with a second arrow and shoots a third one just as his nose bleeds some more. Once struck by the third arrow, Lily falls off a stairway and falls stories down into a dumpster, killing her. However, the rest of the girls believe she went to L.A. as she had a planned trip.

Jeremy, as Adam again, meets up Kate at a bar where she tells him that he needs to wait a little more. Later, Kate the rest of her friends meet with with Detective Vaughn who shows them a remembrance card Jeremy sent to Shelley’s parents that says, “Too Bad, So Sad…”, and has his full name written on it. After telling Detective Vaughn about Jeremy Melton, Dorothy reveals to Kate and Paige about her lie about Jeremy attacking her.

Jeremy, as Adam, then walks Kate to the police department so she can meet up with Detective Vaughn where she talks about what’s going on with her friends and how her neighbor, Gary, has been creeping her out and how she’s been missing some underwear.

They meet up with Detective Vaughn again at the police department where he looks up on what happened to Jeremy after Reform School. Unfortunately, with no recent photos, they can only go by altered pictures of Jeremy when he was young to get an idea on how he now looks after 10 years. He then asks about their boyfriends with the possibility that one of them could be Jeremy

Meanwhile, Jeremy, upset the Kate is creeped out by her neighbor, Gary, wears his Cupid mask and black clothes and catches him stealing Kate’s underwear in her apartment. Using a hot iron, Jeremy strikes Gary with it, burns his face, and beats him to death for unnerving Kate.

The next day, during Valentines Day, Jeremy, as Adam once again, meets up with Kate and tells her how he talked with Detective Vaughn. The two then plan a date at Dorothy’s party. At Dorothy’s place, her boyfriend, Campbell, lights up the water heater in the basement where Jeremy appears and use the basement’s axe to hack Campbell in the back, killing him so he wouldn’t make it to Dorothy’s party and she’ll believe he dumped her.

That night at Dorothy’s party, Jeremy, as Adam, meets up with Kate just as she’s talking with Dorothy where she’s upset about Campbell’s absence. During the party, a woman named Ruthie Walker arrives to confront Dorothy and reveals that Campbell was only with her for her money only. Kate is then approached by Max who reveals that Lily is not at L.A. as she never came to her office.

Later, Ruthie takes the watch that Dorothy gave to Campbell for herself and heads downstairs where she discovers Jeremy, wearing his Cupid mask and black clothes again, dragging the corpse of Dorothy’s maid. With Ruthie discovering the body, Jeremy takes out his knife and chases after her. Ruthie hides in a sauna, behind the chairs, where she discovers Campbell’s dead body. After a while, she believes Jeremy is gone now and starts heading for the way upstairs, only for Jeremy to ambush her and throw her into the shower where she crashes through the glass door. Jeremy then grabs her as she’s laying on the floor and stabs the bottom of her head on the glass shards still attached to the bottom of the shattered glass door.

After killing Ruthie, Jeremy gets back to the party as Adam again where he starts drinking again, much to Kate’s outrage. With Kate now mad at him for drinking alcohol again, Jeremy gets back into his costume and goes after Paige as she’s lounging in Dorothy’s hot tub. After leaving her a rose, Jeremy grabs Paige by the throat, throws her into the hot tub, and locks inside by shutting the lid down on it. With Paige trapped, Jeremy uses an electric drill to bore through he lid and to stab Paige. After a few unsuccessful stabs, Jeremy manages to stab Paige in the right shoulder and he then opens up the lid and throws the electric drill in the hot tub, electrocuting Paige to death. Paige’s electrocution causes a blackout in Dorothy’s house, resulting in everyone leaving the party.

As Kate and Dorothy talk to each other, Dorothy suggests the possibility of Adam being Jeremy, which Kate denies. This leads to the two arguing with each other that ends with Dorothy pointing out how she was always the “fat one” out of their friends and storms away.

Afterwards, Kate tries to call Detective Vaughn only to hear his cellphone not too far away. She finds his cell by Dorothy’s pond and is shocked to discover his decapitated head rising out of the water. Kate calls out to Dorothy and Paige, unaware that Paige has died, but instead finds Jeremy, as Adam once again, all alone in the dark house. He asks her for a dance as Kate starts suspect that he is Jeremy. Kate knees him in the groin and runs around the house where she discovers Paige’s dead body in the hot tub and Ruthie’s dead body in the shower. Kate tries to call for help only to find the phone line is busy, so she breaks into Dorothy’s father’s Gun cabinet to arm herself.

As Kate looks for Adam, she walks back upstairs where she gets ambushed by The Cherub and the two fall down the stairs. As Kate recovers, The Cherub gets up, only to get shot by Jeremy with the gun, making her think he was innocent all along. He then pulls off the mask, revealing Dorothy underneath the Cupid mask, much to Kate’s shock.

After calling the police, Jeremy tells Kate that sometimes loneliness can eat away at a person until one day they’ll do something about it and that sometimes friends aren’t enough. After the two declare their love for each other, Kate lays herself on Jeremy as they wait for the police until she falls asleep. As she sleeps, Jeremy’s nose bleeds again over her as he smiles, now with his vengeance over Dorothy fulfilled as he has framed her just as she framed him.

## Murder Objects

### Handheld Weapons

* Knife
* Bow and Arrows
* Hot Iron
* Axe
* Electric Drill
* Gun

## Kills

* **Shelley Fisher**: Throat slit with a knife while hiding inside a body bag.
* **Lily Voight**: Impaled in the stomach by three arrows shot with a bow and falls down into a dumpster.
* **Gary Taylor**: Face bludgeoned by a hot iron, left side of face burned when the hot iron is pressed against the face, and is beaten to death by the hot iron being swung by its cord.
* **Campbell Morris**: Hacked in the back with an axe.
* **Maid**: Found stabbed in the stomach while being dragged by Jeremy. (Off-screen)
* **Ruthie Walker**: Thrown into a glass shower door, shattering it and disfiguring her face from the shards, and stabbed in the bottom of the head with the bottom shards of the shattered glass door.
* **Paige Prescott**: Locked in a closed hot tub and gets stabbed in the shoulder by an electric drill. Then gets electrocuted when the electric drill is thrown in the hot tub.
* **Detective Leon Vaughn**: Decapitated head found rising out of a pond. (Off-screen)
* **Dorothy Wheeler**: Shot multiple times with a gun.