Vince A. Liaguno
During the slasher’s golden age in the 1980s, the Final Girl at film’s end was left broken—think Janet Julian’s Sandy at the end of the dock on Dog Island staring forlornly into the horizon in Humongous; or Linda Blair’s Marti numbly limping away from the aftermath of the bloodbath at Garth Manor in Hell Night; or Cecile Bagdadi’s Courtney sobbing on the steps of the campus clock tower building, traumatized over the college carnage she’s just survived in Final Exam.
There was always an indication that these heroines—despite their determined survival—would never be the same again. Audiences were left to wonder what came next for Amy Steel’s Ginny, wheeled away on a stretcher, her questions about Paul going as unanswered as did ours about Muffy at the end of Friday the 13th, Part 2; or the psychological effects of Constance’s massacre-ending fist-down-the-throat maneuver in Just Before Dawn; or whether grandma Maude’s murderous dissociative identity crisis had any lasting emotional effects on Lesleh Donaldson’s teenage Heather after the events of Funeral Home. Even earlier than that, was there even the remotest of chances that Marilyn Burns’ Sally was left anything other than a permanently damaged shell of her former self after surviving her chainsaw massacre in Texas?
Broken, but alive, seemed to be the best fate we could anticipate for our Final Girls as the popularity of the slasher ebbed and flowed for the better part of a decade-plus. Then something really interesting happened. The genre, like its archetypal Final Girls, survived. What was old became new again. In 1998, John Carpenter’s seminal slasher, Halloween—credited with kicking the genre into high gear and inspiring myriad knockoffs—turned 20. That auspicious anniversary gave filmmakers—and audiences—their first chance to explore what came next for the Final Girl. Halloween: H20 gave us our first sustained taste of what life was like for the post-traumatic slasher heroine. Twenty years after that, the simply (albeit confusingly) titled Halloween in 2018 would attempt the same parlor trick again; for clarity purposes, I’ll refer to that film as H40.
Laurie, H20
In the first of two major revisions of the franchise’s own history, H20 would retcon the Jamie Lloyd story arc of the previous three installments, serving as a direct sequel to the first two films. In the film, a post-traumatic Laurie Strode has faked her own death and gone into hiding to evade her brother, Michael Myers. She’s now Keri Tate, headmistress at a swanky private (gated) boarding school somewhere in California and single mother to a teenage son with a bad haircut. H20 Laurie remains haunted by the events of Halloween night, 1978. Her PTSD manifests in an overprotectiveness of her son and a reliance on prescription medications and white wine to keep the nightmares at bay. H40 goes slightly further than H20 in terms of its revisionism, activating a retroactive continuity of all previous sequels and opting to erase the events of Haddonfield Memorial where the shared parentage between Laurie and Michael is first revealed in conversation between nurse Chambers and Dr. Loomis. In H40, Laurie is still Laurie, still living in Haddonfield, having never left after the traumatic events of the titular holiday forty years prior. Her PTSD manifests in a hypervigilance—a fortified compound deep in the woods, constant monitoring of Myers (who is revealed to have been recaptured just after the events of the ’78 film and remanded back to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium where he’s been institutionalized for the past forty years following his Haddonfield killing spree), a damaged relationship with an adult daughter who was taken from her at the age of 12, and continuous training for a final confrontation she knows on an instinctual level is inevitable. She’s drawn as the survivalist version of the crazy neighborhood cat lady—pitied and largely dismissed as the town eccentric.
H20 and H40 give us two differing versions of the aftermath of trauma—both engendering varying degrees of generational trauma in the process—with two victims who have found a way to continue on and achieve some semblance of freedom in their post-trauma lives. For one, there is an effort to move beyond her past and build a life for herself; for the other, there is no moving beyond her past and a consumption to prepare and protect herself and those she loves from a never-ending threat. For one, there is hope; for the other, there is only the necessity of vigilance.
Laurie, H40
Both have chosen the flight and fight responses—they just vary in terms of what they’re fleeing from and fighting for. H20 Laurie is fighting to return to a place of normalcy by (literally) fleeing from her past, whereas H40 Laurie is fighting for a physical survival she sees as forever threatened and (metaphorically) fleeing from her future by avoiding any pretense that her life could ever be normal again. But whereas the degree of freedom from the past H20 Laurie achieves through flight may seem more obvious and comforting to our own ideas of the concept, one could argue that H40 Laurie also finds her own version of freedom through her fight instinct. For her, the hypervigilance of her physical barricades, sharpshooting (complete with every leftover mannequin from the prop closet of Tourist Trap it seems), and methodical planning gives her reprieve from the feelings of helplessness she experienced during and after the events of Halloween night, 1978. She achieves a degree of freedom from what she’s come to regard as a weaker version of herself. Isn’t this also a personal evolution in the wake of trauma?
Not every survivor of a traumatic event comes out the other side intact or with the ability to heal. Some victims of trauma are left broken. The H40 version of Laurie opts to explore that. One could argue that the H40 Laurie may ultimately fare better than H20 Laurie because the former chooses to confront the reality of the present-day embodiment of her past in contrast to the latter who chooses to run, hide, and create a new reality through avoidance of the past. One stands ready, prepared to confront and—ultimately, hopefully—defeat the past; the other playacts through a façade that barely achieves a sustainable false sense of security. One is looking right through the barrel of a shotgun; the other is looking over her shoulder. In the end, though, when confronted with their shared past, both versions of Laurie make the decision to face it and fight.
In both films, Laurie reaches a breaking point—one from frustration, the other from anticipation. In H20, Laurie has cobbled together a longer stretch of seeming normalcy with vials of pills and long swigs of Chardonnay; her breaking point comes when she realizes that normalcy is a façade that she’s constructed through avoidance. When she grabs that axe and starts up the hill bellowing “Michael!” like she means business, it’s because she’s reached a point in her evolution where she recognizes she’s been deluding herself. There simply is no normality in this pretext of a life she’s created and tries so desperately to maintain. The only way out is through.
In H40, Laurie has eschewed all pretense of normality in anticipation of a final confrontation that she sees as an inevitability versus a possibility. She’s a woman lying in wait, confident in her intuition that Myers will come for her again—even if everyone else from the local townsfolk to her own family have come to discount such certitude as the ravings of a damaged woman. That sense of certainty drives her, blinding her to the harm she causes those around her and to herself. When she goes into lockdown mode at the onset of H40’s climatic battle, her anticipation has reached its boiling point. This is a movie about a victim weary of being a casualty of her shared history with her aggressor. Laurie has painstakingly prepared and patiently waited for forty years—at great personal sacrifice—to reclaim her narrative. Curtis’ performance reflects that well-worn resolve—particularly in the scene where she waits outside the sanitarium in her pick-up truck, gun in one hand, booze in another, and watches until Myers is loaded onto a bus and pulls away. Her face conveys everything the character has suffered and lost—pain, rage, vulnerability.
In her article “2018’s Big Horror Film Trend: Inherited Trauma,” writer Britt Hayes summarizes: “If anything, Halloween acknowledges a dark truth that many trauma survivors are forced to live with every day, and that those privileged enough to have never experienced violent trauma dismiss as paranoid lunacy: It can happen again. Through these painful tragedies we (and specifically women) learn a particular set of skills to avoid living through that hell again. Where Carpenter’s Halloween makes Laurie a victim, Green’s Halloween turns her into a survivor.”
Adrienne King
Prior to H20, audiences were afforded an occasional glimpse into the post-traumatic life of a Final Girl or two, albeit with little to no substantive value in the larger discussion of post-trauma response. There was the momentary sequel glance into the post-Camp Crystal Lake massacre life of Adrienne King’s Alice from Friday the 13th—strained relationships, insomnia, jumpiness. Sadly, the filmmaker’s budget constraints dovetailed with safety concerns over King’s ill-timed real-life stalker at the time and derailed an expanded role in the franchise’s first sequel, prompting the filmmakers to unceremoniously have Alice become Jason Voorhees’ first on-screen victim during the film’s prologue—much to author Grady Hendrix’s ongoing consternation today. As Hendrix explains, “The movie opens with Alice Hardy, the Final Girl from Part 1, standing around her depressing kitchen talking to her mom on the phone…and then Jason kills her. The casual cruelty of this blew my mind: she’d seen all her friends die, decapitated the killer and survived, but she still couldn’t let her guard down. She probably didn’t even know she was in a sequel, she just thought it was another Thursday night. But it’s never just another Thursday night for a Final Girl. Franchises are relentless, and if you survive one movie, don’t stop. Keep running. The sequel’s already on its way.”
To a lesser and more tenuous degree, there was also the character of Courtney Bates—one of three sorority girls who survive The Slumber Party Massacre—who returns for the sequel (albeit portrayed by a different actress) and suffers nightmares and violent visions before being committed to a psychiatric hospital where she’s left screaming at film’s end. There were also sequel appearances by the Final Girls of the supernatural slashers The Boogeyman (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), but neither took opportunity to delve into the post-traumatic lives of either character to any degree worthy of merit or inclusion here beyond mention. Finally, discussion of Scream’s Sidney Prescott is being intentionally omitted since the franchise didn’t begin to meaningfully explore the character’s post-traumatic stress response until the third film in 2000, two years after Halloween: H20.
Both Halloween movie milestones provided unique opportunities to explore post-traumatic stress in the Final Girl, allowing audiences to go on a journey with the same character and her original portrayer over the course of literal decades. That at least one had the cultural good fortune to coincide with the real-life #MeToo movement only bolstered its strong messaging about the effects of traumatic stress disorder in women. What the creative forces behind both films did—intentionally or not—are notable cinematic achievements that will only grow in appreciation over the next few decades and beyond.
Works Cited
Hayes, Britt. “2018’s Big Horror Film Trend: Inherited Trauma.” ScreenCrush, 23 October 2018.
Hendrix, Grady. “How Friday the 13th Icon Adrienne King Came to Narrate The Final Girl Support Group Audiobook.” Penguin Random House Audio Blog, 13 August 2021.
