Why are the victims in most horror films

I feel like a lot of horror movies are like that. Like any of the EC comics type movies that are about bad people getting a comeuppance. Like a lot of the Creepshow stuff, and a lot of anthology TV segments. Maybe this is more common in short form story telling now that I say that, but my first but I feel like there are plenty of features like that too. My first thought was I Know What You Did Last Summer. Those characters may not be evil really, but the basis of the story is that they did a terrible thing. I'm sure there are better examples though.

That's basically all the old westerns.

True, the rape/revenge movies do this in a little sub genre of their own, and there are a bunch of movies where bullies get a comeuppance, like Slaughter High or Don't Go to the Reunion. In some of the movies where the victims are not good people the main protagonist still is, like how Hellraiser is populated with awful backstabbing evil bastards except for the main girl. But many of the latter Hellraiser movies deal with a heavily flawed protagonist who gets sucked into the realm of the cenobites because of their sins. Then there are the movies like Saw and all of the shitty sequels where the people at the center of things are not necessarily evil, but all involved as some sort of punishment for past mistake or otherwise bad action. It's also a staple of ghost stories that one would be haunted by something they'd done in their past.

Then there are also movies like Don't Breath where the main characters are doing something wrong on purpose, but you can sort of sympathize with the position they are in, and while you might not condone it you can probably understand it. That movie sort of cops out by making it clear that the antagonist is ultimately worse than they are, but even he has something of an understandable motivation because he was wronged as well, but his actions go waaaaaay farther into the territory of evil. Interestingly enough for this discussion though, the most common complaint that I heard about that movie was that people didn't care for the main characters because they were criminals, which might be why the felt the need to reveal the Stephen Lang character to be so ridiculously awful in the end so that you could root for the main girl without reservation.

The premise of "se7en" was that the killer went after people who had violated one of the seven cardinal sins, a premise I could not get all that excited about. (To be honest, I thought it was a ridiculous film.)