The Fate of the OG Final Girl
By Beanie Aurora White
Laurie Strode. There were others before her and many more have followed in her footsteps, but she is the definitive final girl. Her journey in Halloween (1978) takes her from caring cable-knit sweetheart to knife-wielding badass all in the space of a single fateful Halloween night. David Gordon Green’s direct canonical sequels, Halloween (2018), and Halloween Kills (2021) eradicate any former iterations of Laurie and allow us to become reacquainted with the final girl who just won’t stop fighting.
A 17-year-old Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) first sets eyes on Michael Myers, or ‘The Shape’ from a classroom window as her teacher delivers a lecture on the immovability of fate and destiny which begs the question;at what point does Laurie secure her fate? Is it in the moment that Michael sees her delivering a key to the Myers house? Or as he watches her skipping away innocently singing “I wish I had you all alone, just the two of us,” a hint of future Laurie’s plans for Michael.
Michael’s victims on that Halloween night further bind him to Laurie, but their fates are far easier to decipher with our knowledge of the traditional horror movie female victim pattern. Annie and Lynda display promiscuity and a lack of enthusiasm for academia, they encourage Laurie to smoke and attempt to set her up with boys. They are sexualised, even in death. Lynda dies post-sexual encounter, her chest still exposed in much the same way as Judith Myers, Michael’s first kill. Then, we are to believe that Laurie - a bookworm, the perfect babysitter, a gal with her cream stockings pulled up to hide every inch of skin – will be safe. That her fate is to walk away with a few scratches, never to be heard of again. She defines the formula of a perfect final girl in all her nerdy, sweet virginal glory. Kimberly Ballard argues that this latent sexuality makes Laurie “Myers’ first challenge,” hence why their fates become seemingly intertwined.
This theory of fate and sexuality fits neatly into the context of Laurie’s character in the 1978 original movie, however, the Laurie that we meet in David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018) has become obsessed with her own idea of fate. This is to the detriment of her familial relationships and her mental wellbeing. She exists behind physical and metaphorical fences and she boxes herself into a compound of her own construction to lie in wait for Michael. She is convinced that “the boogeyman” of her younger years has a personal vendetta against her and that she has to be the one to end him, as Allyson (Andi Matichak), Laurie’s estranged granddaughter states, “it defines her life.”
There is a great preoccupation with fate and destiny amongst the other characters that Laurie encounters in this sequel. Two fame-hungry reporters implore Laurie to sit down with Michael and free herself from trauma through their Pulitzer pipe dream of a redemptive conversation. Sartain, Michael’s doctor, is obsessed with understanding evil and believes that he can achieve this enlightenment by reuniting Michael with his fate: his original final girl. Interestingly enough, these characters eventually become Michael’s victims. Their passive glamorization of Laurie and Michael’s joint destiny shoves them into the path of an entity that they will never be able to understand. Laurie herself never tries to comprehend Michael’s crimes, she tells the reporters, “There is nothing to learn.” She understands him in a way that others cannot, she has fought him and has gazed upon what remains of the human behind the mask. Only she has the right to connect her fate to Michael.
In fact, the only time we encounter a visually humanised Michael Myers is during two separate encounters with our OG final girl. The first occurs in 1978 after Laurie has lunged from the wardrobe and attacked him with his own weapon of choice. He lies on the floor, small and unmoving, bested by a teenage girl. She later tears his mask off to reveal a confused and possibly even frightened individual, intent on destroying the girl who has unmasked him. The second moment comes in 2018 when Laurie drops the flare into the basement, condemning Michael to a fiery grave in the trap she has painstakingly created for him. The flames catch in his eyes and it seems as though he has resigned himself to a fate that Laurie has been plotting for 40 years.
Laurie’s concept of fate becomes an heirloom, she hands it down to her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) through rigorous weapons training and intense paranoia. Throughout the course of the narrative Laurie and Karen eventually pass it on to Allyson who becomes equally as obsessed with the idea of finding Michael, with little to no regard for her own mortality. The closing shot of Halloween (2018) denotes this with a striking shot of the three generations of Strode women huddled together for comfort, with Allyson clutching one of Michael’s signature kitchen knives, presumably ready to pursue her own fate of vengeance against the killer who has plagued her family for so many years. We are even treated to an echo of Laurie’s classroom sighting of Michael from the original, except this time it’s Allyson staring out of the window as her teacher ponders the meaning of fate, and it is Laurie stood in Michael’s place as a symbol of Allyson’s destiny.
Halloween Kills (2021) throws a curveball at these theories regarding Laurie and Michael’s joint fate. Whilst Laurie believes that Michael was drawn out to her compound explicitly to find her and kill her, Officer Hawkins dispels this theory by delivering the blow that, actually, it was Dr Sartain and his obsession that had brought Laurie and Michael together once more. In theory, this revelation should have been shocking to Laurie. After all, she has spent her entire adult life morphing into the ultimate final girl: a vengeful, resourceful, rifle-toting survival machine. Although Hawkins essentially shatters her fateful link to Michael, Laurie still believes that she has to be the one to “kill it.” For her own sake, for the sake of her family and for the sake of the friends she lost on that Halloween night back in 1978.
Laurie’s fate is partly her own creation and partly a product of the trauma she suffers as a survivor of Michael’s first killing spree. She feels connected to him and she fuels this feeling into her quest to destroy him. Michael might not be looking for Laurie but Laurie is sure as hell looking for Michael. A final girl that chooses her own fate is a formidable foe indeed. Good luck Michael, you’re going to need it.
Beanie Aurora White is a prose and short fiction writer based in London. She has recently graduated from Royal Holloway University with an MA in Creative Writing. She has writing in The Ghastling and is working on a YA horror/fantasy series and an anthology of short fiction looking at women and trauma under the guise of surrealist based horror. She currently works as a writer for a comic book studio.
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