Behind the Couch

Aaron Duenas recently asked me to write about my favourite heroines from horror cinema for his Women in Horror month at  The Death Rattle . As much as I love Laurie, Ripley, Alice, and Nancy et al, I thought it might be more interesting to take a look at a few other characters who perhaps broaden the (generally held) concept of what it is to be a 'Final Girl'.  The various characters I’ve chosen might not necessarily fit the conventional definition of ‘Final Girl’, but they still represent the strong spirit she is renowned for. Of course, many of the characters Aaron and I have cited obviously owe a huge debt to Laurie, Ripley, Alice, Nancy and co – whose essences pervade this month over at The Death Rattle . 

2002 Dir. Rick Rosenthal Four years after mistakenly killing a man she thought to be her brother (really, Dimension Films? Really ?), long-suffering Laurie Strode is eventually hunted down by her actual not-really-dead brother, the murderous Michael Myers. Making his way back home to Haddonfield, Myers discovers the crew of an online reality show has taken over his house (!) to broadcast a Halloween special featuring a group of teenagers dared to spend the night in the infamous house. Naturally he goes on yet another killing spree. And it's all caught on camera and broadcast online for all to see. Yes, all of this actually really happens. It really fucking happens. The silent stalker of the original Halloween is a distant memory - Myers is now the reluctant star of an internet reality show.  Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later did not warrant a sequel. It was initially intended as a twentieth anniversary celebration of John Carpenter's classic chiller . It also broug...

1998 Dir. Steve Miner With a new name and life in California, Laurie Strode still can’t escape the ghosts of her past and is haunted by the memories of her bloody ordeal 20 years ago, when her deranged brother Michael Myers tried to kill her. Working as the headmistress of an exclusive boarding school, she spends her days ostracising her son John, and her nights swilling booze and tranquilizers in an effort to forget her traumatic past. Since she faked her own death and went into hiding to escape her maniacal brother, she lives in constant fear of him ever finding her. It’s now Halloween 1998, and the waiting is finally over… With the twentieth anniversary of John Carpenter’s classic slasher movie approaching, and Michael Myers AWOL amidst a dirge of increasingly cumbersome sequels involving druids, curses and constellations (oh my!), it was left to actress Jamie Lee Curtis to pitch the idea of an anniversary film to both Dimension Films and the director who she credits for ...

1995 Dir. Joe Chappelle Six years after she and her psychotic uncle Michael Myers were abducted from the Haddonfield police station by the mysterious Man in Black, Jamie Lloyd and her newborn baby go on the run again with Myers’ in hot pursuit. Meanwhile, relatives of the family that adopted Laurie Strode have moved into the old Myers house and befriended Tommy Doyle, whose obsession with Myers’ leads to the discovery of a family curse that drives the killer to violently eradicate his bloodline – which is bad news for the Strodes. Teaming up with Dr. Loomis, they set out to stop Myers and the cult that protects him once and for all. With Miramax having purchased the distribution rights to the Halloween franchise, it was their intention to give the flailing series something of a reboot and to release further instalments through its newly established genre arm, Dimension Films. Following in the wake of the leaden Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers - complete with its amb...

1989 Dir. Dominique Othenin-Girard One year after surviving her blood-drenched ordeal at the hands of her murderous uncle, psychotic killer Michael Myers, young Jamie has been committed to the Haddonfield Children’s Clinic, rendered mute from her traumatic experiences. The presumed dead, though actually just comatose Myers, awakens and returns to finish what he started. Meanwhile, Jamie develops a strange psychic link with him, which her psychiatrist, Dr Loomis, plans to exploit in a bid to stop Myers once and for all. But wait! Who is that mysterious man in black who also stalks the streets of Haddonfield? And why is he so seemingly interested in Jamie and her uncle? Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers was successful enough to lead producer Moustapha Akkad to believe it warranted a follow up. Initial drafts of Halloween 5’s script dutifully acknowledged the ending of Part 4 in which Jamie was established as Michael Myers’ murderous successor, however producers rejected ...

1988 Dir. Dwight H. Little Ten years after his bloody killing spree and attempts to murder his sister Laurie Strode, a comatose Michael Myers awakens and returns to Haddonfield to kill Laurie’s daughter, seven-year-old Jamie, on Halloween. Dr Loomis, who also survived the explosion in the hospital thought to have finished Myers’ off, once again sets out to stop his former patient once and for all. After the commercial failure of Halloween III: Season of the Witch , producers realised that fans of the burgeoning series were baying for more of Michael Myers’ psychotic exploits. With the original Halloween instigating a boom of slasher movies that continued well throughout the Eighties, Moustapha Akkad decided the time was right to bring the brutal serial killer back. As a result, John Carpenter and Debra Hill, who had hoped to develop the series as an anthology with a new Halloween-season related plot in every sequel, backed away from the series and had nothing more to do with i...

1981 Dir. Rick Rosenthal Laurie Strode is rushed to the hospital after surviving her bloody ordeal at the hands of demented killer Michael Myers. Meanwhile, Dr Loomis discovers that Myers isn’t really dead and sets out to track him down with Sheriff Brackett. Discovering Laurie’s whereabouts at the hospital, Myers makes his less than suspenseful way there, leaving a bloody trail of bodies in his wake… After the runaway success of John Carpenter’s Halloween , and the slew of stalk and slash films it inspired, it came as a surprise to few that a sequel charting the increasingly gory antics of Michael Myers would be released. Halloween producers Irwin Yablans and Moustapha Akkad approached John Carpenter and Debra Hill to pen the script for Halloween II and they initially planned to set the sequel a few years after the events depicted in the first film, with Myers tracking Laurie to her new life and home in a high-rise apartment building. The decision was then made to set the fi...