I went to see the new Halloween movie last night and I loved it. I had a feeling I would love it, featuring an older Laurie Strode and completely ignoring the previous sequels. But what I loved most about the film is the focus on Laurie’s family and how her character has transformed over 40 years.
I’m afraid I will be talking about the film in a great deal of detail so if you haven’t seen the film please do not carry on reading this. You have been warned. Spoilers will be imminent!
****Spoilerrrrrss Ahoy*******
The original Halloween was one of the most iconic slasher films ever made, it inspired so many that followed it and launched Jamie Lee Curtis’ career, crowning her as the ‘Scream Queen’. Jamie Lee Curtis’s character, Laurie Strode, is the epitome of what scholar Carol Clover called the ‘final girl’ which she described as:
” The one who encounters the mutilated bodies of her friends and perceives the full extent of the preceding horror and of her own peril; who is chased, cornered, wounded; whom we see scream, stagger, fall, rise, and scream again. She is abject terror personified. If her friends knew they were about to die only seconds before the
event, the Final Girl lives with the knowledge for long minutes or hours. She alone
looks death in the face; but she alone also finds the strength either to stay the
killer long enough to be rescued (ending A) or to kill him herself (ending B). She
is inevitably female” (Clover, 201).
Subsequently, after Halloween Curtis played a similar role in Prom Night (1980), but the trope has lived on in many slasher films including Friday the 13th (1980), Scream (1996), I Know What You Did Last Summer (1997). It is one of those tropes that is arguably a fantastic thing for representation of women in film, as all of these women are the stars of the movie (aside from the killer), but at the same time, as Clover suggests, are subjects of the male gaze. A troubling trope in which the pure virgin is saved from death, whilst the other promiscuous women are punished. However, the latest Halloween film takes the trope in a whole new direction…
Continuing her role as the final girl, Jamie Lee Curtis revived her role as Laurie in Halloween II (1981), Halloween H20 (1998) and Halloween Ressurection (2002). However, the new film has completely erased any remakes or sequels to the original film, carrying on 40 years later after the events of 1978. In which we find an isolated and distinctly disturbed Laurie Strode living out her life in a heavily guarded house in the middle of nowhere.
During the shaky start to the film, we discover after a short-lived interview with investigative journalists, that Laurie’s daughter, Karen, was taken away from her at the age of 12 due to her obsession with teaching her daughter self-defence. We see Karen living out her life in a very normal domestic setting with a husband and daughter (Allyson). Laurie has gone full Sarah Connor in this film, obsessed with the danger of her past that she knows will return to haunt her. There is a point in the film where we genuinely feel so sorry for her as everyone around her (aside from her granddaughter) seems to think she is mad.
However, everything Laurie has prepared herself and her daughter for did not go to waste, as inevitably Michael Myers escapes as he is being transferred to a new facility. Michael goes on a full killing rampage, not really caring about who he kills until he is forced to face off against Laurie and her extremely well-prepared house.
Throughout these sequences, the two are equally both hunted and hunter, Laurie is equally as prepared as Michael is, there is even a fantastic moment where she falls seemingly to her death, only for Michael to look away, look back and find her gone. It is a wonderful take on the tropes we are so used to seeing in slasher films.
But what made me most ecstatic about this film was seeing three generations of badass women fighting this evil mass murderer. At first, it seems that Laurie’s daughter has completely erased all memory of her training, looking wholly uncomfortable as Laurie reveals her gun cabinet and choosing to hide in the hidden basement area while her mother takes charge in killing Myers.
Clover suggests that all final girls in most popular slasher films are usually completely defenceless, to begin with, but eventually fight back out of necessity and sometimes luck, she suggests however that, ” The grittiest of the Final Girls is Nancy of Nightmare on Elm Street I. Aware in advance that the killer will be paying her a visit, she plans an elaborate defence” (Clover, 202). Laurie goes from the more traditional final girl to the completely badass one, as does her daughter.
Her granddaughter, on the other hand, is more typical of the final girl trope seen in the 1978 film. This does not diminish her character in any way, it just shows three women who are very diverse in their survival tactics, all having a part to play in Myers’ final demise, Laurie traps him, and her daughter and granddaughter both injure him enough for them all to escape. Therefore all three of them survive, the final girl is no longer alone.
I’m not saying that Halloween is revolutionary in turning the final girl trope on its head. Scream actively acknowledges the notion that if you have sex you are in danger of being murdered. Sydney is painted as the virginal girl, to begin with, and even after having sex, she is the one who conquers over Ghostface in the end, and in the sequels is in some way prepared for the danger she may encounter, which again and again, leads her to survive the many copycat killers that turn up in the three sequels.
But what I loved about Halloween (2018) is that the women work together, they all have strengths and weaknesses, it is all about protecting each other rather than just themselves, and it was so refreshing to have these relationships represented in this manner, as the final women, not just the final girl.
By Siobhan Eardley.
Works Referenced:
Clover, Carol J. “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film.” Representations, vol. 20, no. 1, 1987, pp. 187–228
Siobhan of the Dead 