Film, Horror
The Never-Ending Tedium of Survival
A Long-Form Essay on the Final Girls Who Struggle to Stay Alive Again and Again and Again
Horror movie franchises are often recognized by their iconic villains — Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, Ghostface, Pinhead, and many other often-masked and often-men baddies who are easily recognizable as a Halloween costume. However, they are not always the core of the series; more often, the heart and soul of a horror franchise is its survivor — the Final Girl (or Guy), who finds herself hunted all over again in the next film, who must learn to survive and survive again as she continuously stares down the ever-looming presence of the monster in the dark.
Bearing the wounds and scars granted by their roles as would-be-victims turned fighters, these Final Girls find themselves perpetually trapped in a limbo of trauma, dragging themselves through the mud and blood in the hopes of coming through the other side alive. This article will present an overview of a number of survivors, who have each appeared in at least three films within their franchise — and who each have their own journeys of coming to terms with their dark worlds.
Before I go any further, a heads up that I’m going to be talking about the endings for multiple films in each franchise discussed —
so, SPOILERS AHEAD.
Sidney Prescott, Scream
When Scream came out in 1996, it reinvigorated the horror genre — particularly slashers — through its self-referential humor and declaration of the rules of surviving a horror movie (something that’s been widely talked about before). The film also introduced audiences to Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell), who became an iconic scream queen, joining a long list of Final Girls and becoming one of the few to become the heart of their series. (Though technically, she is not the “final” survivor because a number of other side characters also survive the murder spree.)
When we meet Sidney in the first film, she is already haunted by her mother’s murder a year before. Because of the trauma of finding her mother’s mutilated body, she has closed herself off — particularly from her boyfriend Billy (Skeet Ulrich). Though she is trying to move on, the sudden, brutal murder of a classmate dredges up the past. She is confronted by reporter Gale Weathers (Courteney Cox), who claims that Sidney accused the wrong man of murdering her mother all those years before, falsely sending him to prison. In addition, she is violently attacked by Ghostface (as the costumed killer is dubbed) in her own home, further exacerbating her trauma and making her uncertain who she can fully trust.
After suspecting and accusing her boyfriend of being the murderer, she eventually comes back around to wanting to trust him as there seems to be little evidence against him. Talked into it by her best friend Tatum (Rose McGowan), Sidney joins her friends at a house party under the assumption that she will be safe with so many people around. She meets with Billy during the party, and talking leads to intimacy. Almost as a way of making up for her previous accusations and distrust, they have sex (a violation of rule number one of surviving a horror movie), but afterward, Sidney is clearly uncomfortable with her decision since she is still unsure of him.
Ghostface attacks, forcing Sidney to both fight and flee. Several chase sequences later — with Ghostface either attempting or successfully killing off a number of characters — it is revealed that Sidney’s gut feeling was accurate because Billy and Stuart (Matthew Lillard) were, in fact, the killers. Not only that, but they also murdered her mother the year before. And now they intend to kill her and blame the murders on her father.
Just in time, Gale arrives wielding a gun (which, unfortunately, has the safety on), and Sidney uses this distraction to slip away. Rather than just fleeing for safety, Sidney channels her terror into rage, using the voice box against the two killers and even donning the Ghostface costume when she drives the tip of an umbrella into Billy’s stomach. Together, Sidney and Gale successfully kill the killers — preventing them from doing further harm to anyone else.
As the credits roll, the feeling is triumphant. The murders are over, Sidney has survived, and so have a number of her friends, including Gale, Deputy Dwight ‘Dewey’ Riley (David Arquette), and Randy (Jamie Kennedy), and they can all move on with their lives — or so it seems.
We don’t see the full effect surviving these murders has on Sidney until the second film, Scream 2 (1997). Now, in university, she is trying to move on with her life. She has new friends, a boyfriend, and the starring role of Cassandra in a college production of Agamemnon. Despite her attempts to reshape her life, the trauma is clearly present, as one friend points out to Sidney, telling her she needs to come out of her “self-induced isolation.”
This is difficult to do, however, because the past will not stay dead. First, Gale Weathers digs up the past by bringing Cotton Weary (Liev Schreiber), the man Sidney wrongly accused and sent to prison, for a face-to-face interview with Sidney in a surprise confrontation. He wants public vindication (quite fairly), but Sidney just wants to be left alone.
Then, a new round of brutal murders begins to occur, with Ghostface killing the people close to Sidney — a confirmation of all her fears. Her response upon learning about the first murder is simple, “I knew this wasn’t over.” Naturally, she spins back into distrusting most of the people around her, particularly her boyfriend, which is understandable considering her past experience.
In the final confrontation with the killers, she once again triumphs with the help of Gale, Dewey, and Cotton. As the slew of cops and ambulances swoop in to clean up the mess, she takes a moment to give Cotton the vindication he desires by pointing the media to him as the hero.
Unlike the first film, this final moment does not feel triumphant. Her boyfriend and college friends are all dead. Her trauma is not resolved. As Sidney walks away from everyone and everything she knows, the camera zooms into a high aerial view, revealing that she is truly going into the world alone.
This isolation continues into the start of Scream 3 (2000), with Sidney living in an undisclosed location surrounded by a security fence in the middle of nowhere. She lives under a false name and locks up her door every time she returns home, clicking in place a series of strong deadbolts and locks. The only person who knows how to contact her is Dewey, and the only person she meets in person is her father, who questions her isolation, stating, “It’s as if you don’t exist.” To which she responds, “That’s the idea.” The never-ending string of violence has made it seem safer to erase herself from the world than to exist within it.
But Ghostface wants to eliminate her on his own terms and begins to leave a string of bodies in Hollywood in an attempt to draw her out. In Sidney’s absence, Gale and Dewey are left to investigate the truth. The investigation leads to information about Sidney’s mom, who lived in Hollywood when she was younger, and there are hints about the killer’s connection to her mother.
Eventually, Sidney realizes that she can’t avoid the past forever and comes out of hiding. She joins her friends in the search for the killer, who she discovers is actually Roman Bridger (Scott Foley), her older half-brother, who was born and abandoned when their mother was younger and then later rejected when he found his mother as an adult. Sidney has the life that he always wanted—and he reveals that he is the architect of everything that happened, instigating the murder of Sidney’s mother and all the killings that came after in an act of revenge.
When he is ultimately defeated and killed, it feels like the closing of a circle. The past can finally rest, and Sidney and her fellow survivors can live their lives. This is symbolized in the closing scene. Sidney returns home, but this time, she is not alone. Surrounded by the laughter of friends, she glances back to see the front door has been left unlocked and stands open. She looks at the open door and smiles, finally allowing herself to be open to the world — a satisfying conclusion to her story.
But the franchise lives on, and, therefore, Sidney cannot be left in peace.
When Scream 4 (2011) begins, Sidney is in a good place. She has written a memoir, Out of Darkness, in which she shares her experiences of surviving multiple killing sprees and finding her way back into the world. She returns to Woodsboro as part of her book tour and is staying with family, including her niece Jill Roberts (played by Emma Roberts). Almost immediately, everything goes wrong, with a new Ghostface appearing to threaten Sidney’s family. Although this killer is mostly focused on Jill and her friends, a new generation of teenagers to terrorize.
In the end, the killings are not focused on past tragedies but on the question of who gets to wear the crown of Final Girl. Jill herself has instigated the killings and has been murdering all her friends with the aim of becoming the sole survivor. “I don’t need friends, I need fans,” she tells Sidney in the final showdown before killing her accomplice, telling him, “What the media really loves, baby, is a sole survivor.”
Jill stabs Sidney in the gut, who collapses onto the floor unconscious. Then, Jill proceeds to enact a series of injuries upon herself, such as stabbing herself in the shoulder, slamming her face into a picture frame, and falling backward onto a glass table before collapsing beside Sidney, mimicking her position exactly. Two Final Girls side by side—with only one left alive.
When Jill is in the hospital, she is confident of her victory and ready to claim her place as the final survivor — except, it turns out Sidney has survived the attack (always the fighter) and is in surgery. The true final showdown occurs in the hospital, with Jill ultimately being defeated. Sidney lies on the floor exhausted and glances over at her fallen niece and says one final quip, “You forgot the first rule of remakes, Jill: Don’t fuck with the originals.”
In the fifth film in 2022 (confusingly titled just Scream), Sidney plays a more minor role since a new group of teenagers in Woodsboro act as the focus of the killings, with sisters Sam (Melissa Barrera) and Tara Carpenter (Jenna Ortega) at the center. When the killings start to take place, these teens look to Dewey for answers, and he sends a message to Sidney and Gale that the killings have started again.
Sidney is pushing a stroller when the call arrives, a sign that she has not lapsed into her previous isolation but has begun to build a family life with Mark (presumably the same Mark from Scream 3). Nevertheless, she returns to Woodsboro, along with Gale, to help put an end to this new Ghostface. They are quickly met with tragedy, however, when Dewey is killed. Heading into the final showdown, they jointly decide that, if they survive, neither of them will write a book about this or speak to the media in the hopes that the story will die and the cycle of killings will stop.
Although they are helpful in stopping the two Ghostface killers, it is ultimately Sam and Tara who deliver the final blows, with the duo taking over the role of the Final Girls of the franchise. Afterward, Sam, who has looked to Sidney almost as a mentor, asks if she’s going to be okay. Sidney knows all too well what likely lies ahead for Sam and simply says, “Eventually.”
Scream (2022) really feels like a passing of the torch, with new survivors taking up the mantle of the franchise. And when Scream VI (2023) rolls around a year later, Sidney stays clear of the killings, opting instead to take her husband and children away into hiding. She is — it would seem — finally free of the burden of facing death.
Addendum: Gale Weathers and Dwight ‘Dewey’ Riley
Although Sidney is the heart of the Scream series and more comfortably falls into the classic Final Girl trope, it seems wrong not to discuss Gale and Dewey. Their journey is less about dealing with their trauma as survivors and more about their relationship to each other, with Gale in particular being caught between her personal drive for success as a reporter and her attraction and eventual love for Dewey and her friends.
Starting out, Gale is a sharp-witted and highly determined reporter who is solely focused on getting the story and who will ruthlessly run over anyone in her drive to become famous, while Dewey is an innocent and a little bit dopey deputy sheriff with no great ambition beyond doing his job. Despite their differences, they have a near-instant attraction to each other.
Over the next several films, their relationship bounces back and forth as Gale’s ambition has a tendency to drive a wedge between them. However, she grows as the series progresses. While her ambition and passion for investigative reporting never really goes away, she begins to see the people around her as more important. This growth allows for Gale and Dewey to fully commit to each other, with them being (mostly) happily married in Scream 4.
However, the fifth film reveals that there has been a turn in their relationship. Dewey is broken down and living in a filthy trailer due to his guilt at leaving Gale without a word after he didn’t know how to deal with her success. On her return after the start of the murders, she’s angry at him for not contacting her sooner. There is no sign of the old Gale here — no cameras, no recording devices, just concern for the people she loves.
She is eventually left bereft when Dewey is murdered after their reconciliation. The loss causes her to return to some of her callous steamrolling ways in Scream VI, writing a book about the new Woodsboro murders despite her promise not to do so and shoving a microphone in Sam and Tara’s face only to get clocked by Tara (in an echo of the first film). However, when faced with the possible deaths of those around her, she turns off the cameras and steps up to help. When she’s separated from the group and left on her own, she is attacked in her penthouse. Despite using her wits to fight off the killer, she is stabbed. Before passing out, she says to Sam, “Tell Sidney he didn’t get me,” hoping to keep Sidney out of danger.
Although she’s not seen again after this, it’s revealed that Gale survived her wounds. It will be interesting to see if she will return in subsequent films, unable to keep away because, as Tara states, she’s afraid that without Ghostface, she’ll just fade away. Or maybe she take all the lessons she’s learned and finally move on with her life. Time will tell.
Ellen Ripley, Alien
In Alien (1979), the crew of the spaceship Nostromo are awoken from hyper-sleep by the ship’s computer systems in response to a signal in the void. Obligated to respond and investigate the signal (otherwise, they won’t get paid), the crew lands on a strange planet and discovers leathery eggs that release a face-hugger that wraps itself around the head of a crew member named Kane (John Hurt).
From the start, Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver), acting as warrant officer on the crew, is intelligent and practical in her responses to the emergency situation. When Captain Dallas (Tom Skerritt) attempts to return to the ship with the contaminated crew member, Ripley keeps the doors locked, noting that quarantine protocol requires 24 hours for contamination. As she explains later, “By breaking quarantine, we risk everybody’s life.”
However, her decision is overridden, and the crewmembers return to the ship, where the alien creature (xenomorph) grows inside Kane and eventually bursts from his chest, running loose through the ship. What happens next is no less than a massacre as the xenomorph kills each crew member one by one.
Throughout these events, Ripley keeps her wits about her, presenting an outward calm even if she’s internally terrified. She even takes the lead when Dallas is killed, creating the plan most likely to keep them all alive. Despite her best efforts, however, everyone except for the cat is lost. Ripley is left to face the alien alone and manages to self-destruct the ship while escaping in a shuttle. Before she can slip into hyper-sleep with the cat, however, the alien reveals itself, having snuck aboard the shuttle. Using quick thinking, she dons a space suit and ejects the creature into space, finally burning it up with the ship’s engines.
Exhausted and alone, she gives one final report to the computer, flatly reading off the names of the crew—too exhausted and worn down to express her feelings about the loss. “This is Ripley,” she concludes, “last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.”
When her escape pod is found 57 years later in Aliens (1986), she is questioned about the events that led up to the destruction of the ship (with the company worried about the cost). Much to her frustration, no one believes her when she tells them about the xenomorph, and she is painted by the company as mentally unstable. According to them, a terraforming colony has been living on the planet the Nostromo visited with no problems.
But when it’s revealed that the colony has gone silent, Ripley is asked is join a group of US Colonial Marines sent to the plant to investigate. At first, she refuses. But she continues to be bombarded by nightmares since her return, which brings her to a decision: if the team intends to destroy the alien creatures, then she is willing to participate. She wants to wipe them out so they are no longer a threat to humanity.
Arriving at the planet, she takes up her advisory roles, explaining what these creatures are and the danger they present. “Just one of those things managed to wipe out my entire crew in just 24 hours,” she explains, but the marines are hardened and unimpressed by her warnings, certain they can handle anything thrown their way.
It is quickly proven that they cannot, however, when they stumble upon a nest of eggs and are attacked by a large number of xenomorphs. The majority of the marines are killed within minutes. In the face of this threat, Ripley once again keeps her cool and quickly comes up with solutions to address each new challenge. When the team first enters the facility, Ripley is the one who remembers that if the team fires their weapons, they could rupture the cooling system. When the team falls into trouble, she takes control of a transport to rescue them. When they find a small child survivor called Newt (Carrie Henn), she approaches her with calm and compassion. When the aliens drag the child away to be implanted, Ripley rescues her from the heart of the nest and dons an exoskeleton (described in the film script as “medieval armor with the power of a bulldozer”) to fight the Alien Queen in a kind of hand-to-hand combat.
Through Ripley’s actions, she is once again able to escape from the plant, but this time she is not alone. With her are fellow survivors Newt, Corporal Hicks (Michael Biehn), and Bishop (Lance Henriksen). They slip into hyper-sleep, hopeful of returning home — only to have that hope immediately ripped away from them in the subsequent Alien 3 (1992).
The third film is the bleakest in the franchise. It opens with their ship crash landing on the planet Fiorina 161, with Ripley being the only survivor of the crash. Immediately, she is suspicious of how the crash happened, and evidence of acidic xenomorph blood leads her to witness the brutal and traumatizing autopsy of Newt to verify that the girl had not been infected with an alien parasite. Although Newt was not infected, Ripley is nevertheless convinced that an alien must have survived. She investigates by waking the android Bishop and learns that an alien did indeed make it onto the planet — not that she can convince anyone to believe her.
When the creature bursts into the medical facility, it kills two men and knocks Ripley against the wall. Having nothing to fight back with, she is helpless as the alien leans in close, teeth and double mouths inches from her face — but it doesn’t kill her (as pictured at the start of this section). This moment leads Ripley to the terrifying revelation that she is carrying a parasite for an Alien Queen.
Ever practical, Ripley uses this apparent immunity from attack to help the prisoners fight against the alien creatures. Together, they trick it into a pit and pour molten metal onto it, then drop water upon the creature to quickly cool it, causing it to explode.
Shortly after, a rescue team from the Weyland-Yutani Corporation arrives. They tell Ripley that they can safely remove the alien from her body, but she knows that nothing good can come from giving the corporation access to research the alien. So, she opts out, instead jumping into the pit of molten metal, letting herself and the Alien Queen inside her burn up to nothing.
Technically, this is the end of Ellen Ripley’s story — as we know her.
Two centuries after her death, the corporation manages to successfully clone Ripley and the Alien Queen from a sample of blood drawn on the prison planet. Due to the way the alien species incubate within the host, their DNA has become crossed. Therefore, during the cloning process, Ripley 8 (as the clone is called) became a little bit alien, and the new Alien Queen a little bit human. Ripley 8 is stronger, faster, and has slightly acidic blood. Although she contains some of her memories of being Ripley, she is not the same. She is colder, a bit disconnected from her humanity, but she does side with the humans on the ship. She warns the scientists that the Queen will eventually escape and kill them — which they don’t believe, thinking they have everything under-control.
The Alien Queen does indeed escape and begins breeding more aliens, including a terrifying human-alien crossbreed. Ultimately, Ripley and a small part of the crew destroy the aliens and escape, making it back to Earth. When asked what she plans to do now, Ripley 8 answers, “I don’t know. I’m a stranger here myself.” Although she is not the same Ripley, we have come to know and love, she at least has an opportunity to shape a life for herself without the constant threat of alien attack.
Alice, Resident Evil
Only loosely based on the popular survival horror game franchise, the Resident Evil films that first kicked off in 2002 are ranked among the highest-grossing horror movie franchises of all time. While the movies borrow a few key elements, such as the evil Umbrella Corporation and the exposure of the T-Virus that causes the dead to rise along with other even more deadly mutations, they chart their own path in terms of overall narrative — first, with the notable introduction of the lead character Alice (played by Milla Jovovich).
At the start of 2002’s Resident Evil, Alice awakens on the floor of a shower with no memory of who she is or what has happened. The mansion in which she finds herself provides few clues, but the commando team that crashes through the windows informs her that she is an operative of the Umbrella Corporation and that her amnesia is a temporary effect of defenses unleashed when the Red Queen, an artificial intelligence system, locked down the secret underground research facility known as the Hive and killed everyone inside.
Dragged along with the team, Alice and the commandos are confronted by two enemies — the Red Queen and the hundreds of zombies loose within the facility. The fight quickly becomes desperate, and members of the commando team meet a series of gruesome deaths. In the struggle to survive, Alice begins to regain knowledge of her hand-to-hand combat and weapons skills, as well as memories of her desire to take down the Umbrella Corporation.
Though Alice and one other survivor make it out of the Hive (mostly) intact, their relief is short-lived. A team of Umbrella Corporation men in hazmat suits burst into the room, taking them both captive. Later, Alice wakes on an examination table with a tangle of tubes and wires protruding from her body. When she inevitably escapes outside, she is confronted with the aftermath of these events. She grabs a shotgun out of an abandoned cop car and — in one of my personal favorite horror endings — the camera zooms out, revealing a city utterly wrought with destruction.
The first movie is certainly the strongest. After this point, the narrative grows increasingly convoluted as the series goes on. Having been experimented on by the Umbrella Corporation, Alice begins to display an expanding array of powerful abilities, including increased speed and strength, the ability to heal, and telekinesis, which are then taken away from her at the start of the fourth movie (Afterlife, 2010) — not that it in any way stops her from being a badass that can survive a plane exploding into a mountain and other impossibilities — but not to worry, her humbling is short-lived because her abilities are then returned to her at the end of the next movie (Retribution, 2012), but not really because for some reason she doesn’t seem to have the full extent of her powers in the sixth and final flick (The Final Chapter, 2016).
Meanwhile, throughout all of this, the Umbrella Corporation allows Alice to escape their research facility for some reason, only to desperately try to hunt her down and get her back again — and despite the fact that they’ve managed to nearly annihilate humanity, they really want to continue their research and experimentation projects because reasons, I guess? These movies not only have zombies and mutated monsters, but they also have clones and mind control and underground city simulations — and let’s face it, it’s a lot.
Don’t get me wrong, I love the Resident Evil series for all the muchness that it contains. These movies are full of slick and stylish action set pieces with giant explosions, boss fights with giant and seemingly unstoppable monsters, lots of gore, and plenty of jump scares. They are, for the most part, fun.
However, at no point do they even pretend to evoke any deep emotional context for any of the characters. Alice constantly watches her comrades and companions meet horrifying deaths at the hands and teeth of the undead — but the movies are too busy moving from action sequence to exposition to action sequence to allow her (or anyone else) space to contemplate these losses. Nor is she given a moment to come to terms with seeing her friends resurrected as enemy clones before immediately entering into a gunfight with them.
Alice is a badass action hero through and through. She is a creature of blazing guns, acrobatic leaps, and quick quips. She doesn’t have time for trauma or even feelings, really. She fights and survives and moves forward to the next battle. In the final moments of the last film, Alice rides a motorcycle down a desolate road while the zombies and other infected slowly begin to die around her thanks to an airborne anti-virus. As a flying mutation swoops down behind her, she smiles at the battles ahead and the work to be done.
Ash Williams, Evil Dead
The Evil Dead was instrumental in popularizing the cabin in the woods horror sub-genre due to its success at the box office when it was released in 1981. The story follows a common formula — a group of young people decide to vacation at a creepy cabin in the woods and accidentally awaken something evil that leads to their deaths — in this case, playing the recording of a strange professor reading from the Necronomicon Ex-Mortis, a book with the power to raise the dead.
Among the group of young adults introduced in this first movie is Ashley ‘Ash’ J. Williams (Bruce Campbell). At the time, it was not obvious that Ash would become the iconic horror icon that he is today. His character is not terribly interesting, though he is sweet with his girlfriend Linda (Betsy Baker). He also jumps to the aid of his other friends. When Cheryl (Ellen Sandweiss) demands to leave after being attacked by the trees in the woods, he agrees to take her back into town, regardless of his personal misgivings about her story (though his efforts are in vain because the bridge has been washed out).
However, once the situation begins to escalate and his friends are possessed by evil spirits/demons, Ash becomes somewhat useless. For example, he is the only one who listens to the recording further and learns that the only way to stop the dead is dismemberment — a fact he shares with no one. He also freezes up and fails to take action, even when it could save a friend’s life. Some of this inaction is understandable since these are people he cares about, and his hesitation is less about fear than about being unable to bring himself to chop up his friends with an axe.
One by one, his friends and girlfriend are claimed by the deadites (as they will be called in the second movie), and Ash is left alone to be continually tormented by the dead. Eventually, he has no choice but to take action, shooting, chopping, and fighting against his former companions turned deadites. As the night goes on, the camera tilt becomes more significant, reflecting his degrading mental state.
Finally, he manages to burn the book, and the deadites begin to rapidly decay. As the sun rises, he exits the cabin, lifting his arms to the brightening sky. He believes for a moment that he has made it through — only for something to come flying out of the woods, and we see Ash screaming into the camera (the implication being his death).
There is some debate as the whether Evil Dead II (1987) is actually a sequel or a requel (though Campbell himself has called it a requel). The beginning of Evil Dead II quickly recaps the first movie with some factual differences. Most notably, it only shows Ash and his girlfriend traveling to the cabin, awakening the dead, and Ash left fighting the dead. (My personal headcanon is that the first movie is how events actually played out, while the second movie is how Ash tells it since it shows him being more decisive).
The story continues with Ash being briefly possessed, with the possession seeming to burn off in the sunlight. Once again, he attempts to leave, only to find himself trapped by the collapsed bridge and being forced to return to the cabin. Upon returning, he begins to disassociate. He stares into his own reflection repeating, “I’m fine… I’m fine,” only to have his reflection reach through and grab him by the head, stating, “I don’t think so. We just cut up our girlfriend with a chainsaw.”
At this point, his girlfriend resurrects and reassembles herself. She violently attacks him, and her detached head bites his hand — which causes his hand to become infected. His own hand turns against him and tries to kill him. In desperation, he does the only thing he can think of — grabbing the chainsaw and removing his own hand. Covered in blood and gore, he begins to laugh maniacally while the head of a deer and other objects within the room laugh along with him. It’s not entirely clear whether this laughter of the objects around him is all in his own head or if it is the deadites finding new ways to torment him.
The laughter is cut abruptly short when he hears a sudden noise and — without hesitation — fires his shotgun at the door. It is not, as he assumes, more of the dead but another group of people who stand on the other side. They take one look at this wild-eyed man with a shotgun, and the evidence of blood and destruction spread around the cabin and, understandably, assume that Ash must have murdered the former occupants, Prof. Knowby (the voice of John Peakes on the recording) and his wife Henrietta (played by Lou Hancock when she’s herself and Ted Raimi when she’s possessed).
So, they lock him in the basement, where another deadite in the form of Henrietta awakens, and when she attacks, they release Ash, who attempts (and fails) to save them. More chaos, blood, gore, and death ensue — with all of the group except Ash and Annie Knowby (Sarah Berry) being killed. Together, the two final survivors attempt to use pages from the Necronomicon to open a portal to expel the deadites and send them through time and space.
Although Annie dies in the process, the spell works, and the evil is sucked away. The only problem is that the portal sucks up Ash as well, casting him into the spiraling vortex.
In Army of Darkness (1992), Ash finds himself trapped in the 1300s. Confused for a member of an opposing army, he is treated as a prisoner of war and cast into a pit to his death. When he manages to defeat the two deadites housed within the pit using his chainsaw and shotgun, he gains the respect of the local people — who call him The Promised One, the one who recovers the Book of the Dead and saves them all.
At this point, however, Ash is entirely cold to the concerns of others. Shutting down his emotions in the wake of ongoing trauma, he reverts to being quippy, arrogant, selfish, and cowardly. He doesn’t care about anyone else, and it is only when they promise that going on this quest will make it possible to send him back to his own time that he agrees to go on the journey.
He builds himself a magical robotic prosthesis for his missing hand, arms himself with his trusty chainsaw and shotgun, and heads on his way — experiencing a number of hilarious challenges, including an army of tiny Ashes that emerge from the broken mirror and his doppelganger that he kills with a shotgun and buries alive (or undead, rather).
When he reaches the cemetery that houses the Book of the Dead, he flubs the process of saying the three words required to safely remove the book — mostly because he could not be bothered to remember the words correctly when the wise men told them to him back in the village. This act awakens the army of the dead, and Ash rides back to the village, demanding to be returned to his own time, despite the fact that his oblivious actions have doomed all of these people to death.
It is only when Sheila (Embeth Davidtz), a woman he’d grown close to, is kidnapped by the deadites that Ash is willing to take action. He brews his own gunpowder, turns his car (which traveled to the past with him) into a vehicle of destruction, and teaches the people how to fight. The day is won, and he returns to his own time, despite the peoples’ pleas for him to stay and become their king — at least according to Ash’s version of the story that he is telling to his coworkers at S-Mart. His story is proven to be true (ish, since I expect he would gloss over the uglier bits of the story) when a deadite bursts into the store, and he kills it with one of the shotguns on display.
Now, I have a confession to make. I have not yet watched the TV series Ash vs Evil Dead, which aired across three seasons from 2015 to 2018. It’s one of an ever-growing list of shows that I mean to get to at some point. So, I’m going to have to lean on others a bit to give insight into how the TV series allowed Ash to go from being a caricature, as presented in the movies, to a more fully developed character with an emotional arc and growth. As Tom Reimann at Collider explains:
It’s not until Ash vs. Evil Dead that we get to see the man in context — how he interacts with regular people in a regular environment. And it is both my favorite interpretation of Ash, and the only version of Ash that can truly be considered a fully defined character. It’s not that he begins the series descended even further into the realm of self-parody, having gradually transformed into the biggest, saddest loser. (Ok, it’s not just that.) It’s the fact that, for the first time, we’re given a clear picture of who Ash is as a person. He’s kind of an idiot. He drinks too much and makes terrible life decisions. He’s blunderingly offensive, but not mean-spirited. His lifelong dream is to retire in Jacksonville, Florida. And he has history — a hometown full of old friends and acquaintances who all think he’s a cool guy, or a bum, or a possible murderer, or some combination of the three.
Thomas Mariani delves deeper into the character's arc in Ash vs Evil Dead, describing how the character kicks off the series in complacency, still leaning into his selfishness and living a bachelor lifestyle. Because Ash knows that evil can return at any moment, Mariani notes, he doesn’t get close to anyone or make any attempts to build a life for himself. However, as the show goes on, he slowly begins to build a found family and make a connection with his daughter — and it is these connections with others that help him to grow, take responsibility, and stand up against evil, ultimately sending “his daughter and surrogate kids away to face evil on his own.” As the author explains:
He willingly sends his stability away in favor of facing what could be a fatal fight. Ash fully accepts his role in the universe and fights off evil with blunt force and earnest sincerity amongst the silliness… Ultimately, it’s Ash knowing that he now has to fight off evil in a world where they have the advantage… and he accepts it with a willing spirit. Especially with the promise of doing so with his little patchwork family. He rides off into the sunset on his beloved 1973 Delta Oldsmobile Delta 88 like a cowboy on his loyal steed. A fantastic way of sending off the character of Ash.
As much as the Evil Dead franchise is about the undead and demons and wacky, gore-dripping monsters, it is also about the trauma and guilt of survival and the toll that can take on a person. And if we include the series, then it is also about coming through that trauma and forming connections again—while also fighting against wacky, gore-dripping monsters.
Sarah Connor, The Terminator
Understanding the narrative of the Terminator series can be a befuddling business due to the twisty time travel elements at the center of its universe, with characters jumping from the future to drastically alter the past — grandfather paradox be damned. Sarah Connor’s journey is carried through four properties (three films and a TV show), essentially representing three separate timelines (as I understand it).
The first timeline includes The Terminator (1984) and Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), in which the character is played by Linda Hamilton. In Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines (2003), it is revealed that Sarah died from leukemia prior to the start of the film, and the franchise follows her son, John Connor, and his journey toward becoming the savior of humanity.
The second timeline includes the first two films and then proceeds with Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles, a TV series that ran from 2008–2009, starring Lena Headey as the titular character. Since I haven’t seen the show, I can’t comment properly on it.
The third and arguably final timeline (though no franchise ever really stays dead) also includes the first two films and brings Linda Hamilton back as Sarah in Terminator: Dark Fate (2019) — and this is the timeline I’m going to focus on for this discussion.
The Terminator fits within the tropes of the slasher genre. A series of young women are violently murdered one by one — all named Sarah Connor — and the final surviving Sarah goes on the run from an unstoppable and impossible-to-defeat killer. When Sarah learns of the serial killings via the news, she enters a local bar to wait for the police, hoping to find safety in a crowded and public place. But two men find her first. One opens fire, spraying bullets across the club, and the other drags her outside to safety.
He gets her into a car and begins to explain the situation. He is Kyle Reese (Michael Biehn), who has traveled from the future to protect her from a T-800 Terminator (Arnold Schwarzenegger), a cyborg killing machine sent from the year 2049 to kill her. Why? Because she will give birth to a man, John Connor, leader of the future resistance movement, who will be instrumental in stopping the machines from destroying all of humanity.
It is a wild story, one that Sarah is hesitant to believe. She is just a waitress, a nobody. She can barely remember to pay her phone bill, let alone become a warrior or mother of the future. And when they are both picked up by the police shortly thereafter, she quickly accepts the psychologist’s explanation that Reese is delusional. Because despite witnessing what the Terminator is capable of doing, placing her trust in the police and authority figures feels safer.
However, her complacency and safety are short-lived, because the Terminator finds them. As it proceeds to slaughter the police officers, Sarah and Reese manage to escape and once again find themselves on the run. As she dresses his wounds, Reese reveals that the reason he wanted to take this mission, with no hope of returning to his own time, was because he wanted to meet Sarah, who he describes as “the legend,” the woman who taught John to fight, organize, and prepare for the coming war with machines when he was a kid. Their conversation leads to a deeper trust, and they have an intimate moment (the point at which her future son John is conceived).
As the Terminator closes in, we start to see the first signs of Sarah’s strength and determination. She breaks into a factory to aid their escape, orders Reese to keep moving (sounding like a soldier herself), and she keeps fighting even after Reese dies in his attempt to destroy the Terminator. Injured and alone, she is able to crawl through a pressing machine, luring the terminator inside, and then uses the machine to crush and destroy the cyborg.
In the end, a now-pregnant Sarah heads to Mexico to go into hiding. A young boy tells her (in Spanish) to be careful because a storm is coming. She answers, “I know,” indicating that she is now prepared to face the future.
Sarah Connor’s evolution in Judgement Day is dramatic. Our first view of her is in a mental hospital, locked in a room with the bed overturned so that she can use it as a bar for pull-ups. She is physically ripped and intellectually intense — and it is revealed that she has been institutionalized for trying to blow up a computer factory (presumably in an attempt to stop the future from happening). Dr. Silberman (Earl Boen) notes that she has attempted to escape multiple times and exhibits violent behavior, including stabbing him in the knee with a pen.
When she learns that her son John has been attacked, she immediately enacts another escape attempt. She feigns disassociation and snags a paper clip, using it to escape her restraints and her cell. She attacks a guard and takes Dr. Silberman hostage using a needle full of drain cleaner. When he claims that she’s not a killer, she answers, “You’re already dead, Silberman. Everybody dies. You know I believe it, so don’t fuck with me!” She has become so wrapped up in the horrors of the future that she can’t even see the people around her as people — even her own son. When he comes to rescue her, she berates him for risking his own life. His role as a future hero is more important than this moment of human connection.
Her ongoing trauma is presented in a few ways. Outwardly, she’s tough, strong, and capable. Inwardly, she’s terrified. We see this in the way she panics upon seeing T-800 for the first time. She falls backward, feet slipping beneath her. She screams, all intelligent calculation gone, and runs straight into the arms of the guards attempting to catch her. “He’ll kill us all!” she screams as they slam her to the floor, and she’s shocked and shaking when John appears, explaining that it’s okay, this T-800 will not kill them. She quickly puts her fear aside and returns to action once she’s on solid ground, with an understanding of who her real enemy is, the T-1000 (Robert Patrick).
Later, when they stop to supply themselves with weapons, Sarah dreams. In her nightmare, she sees a version of herself — young, innocent, and playing with her son in a park — when suddenly everything is burned to ash in the wake of the nuclear explosion to come. She wakes with a jolt and stares down at the phrase “No fate” carved into a picnic bench.
Sarah has no intention of letting the future play out as planned, no intention of allowing the future to continue to come for her son. Without a word, she leaves her son with the Terminator and hunts down Miles Dyson (Joe Morton), the leader of the project that will create Skynet, the artificial intelligence that will attempt to destroy humanity. She takes aim with a sniper rifle and fires but misses. Then immediately pulls out a secondary weapon and stalks into the house with all the resolve and relentlessness of a Terminator.
As she points her weapon at Dyson, however, his wife and son get in the way. Up close, she sees their fear, his fear, and she hesitates, suddenly afraid of what she’s become. Moments later, John and the Terminator burst into the room. She’s grateful and slightly awed that her son came to stop her from killing Dyson, and she admires his compassion. For the first time since the start of the movie, she tells John, “I love you.”
When Dyson learns about the future to come, he agrees to help them by destroying his research and the cybernetic arm and chip found after the first T-800 attacked Sarah in the 80s. They manage to get into the facility and obtain the items, but Dyson dies in the process, the building is destroyed, and the T-1000 is once again on their tail. They escape into a molten metal manufacturing plant and manage to drop the T-1000 into the molten metal, along with the other items. In order to fully stop the future, all evidence has to be destroyed, including the T-800, and Sarah holds onto her son in his grief as they watch the terminator slide down in the molten metal and disappear.
With Dyson dead and all cybernetic machines destroyed, Sarah finally looks to the future with hope — but as with every franchise, that hope is soon destroyed.
At the start of Dark Fate, Sarah reveals that their actions did successfully stop Judgement Day from occurring, but she couldn’t save her son. Another T-800, a Terminator from a future that never happened, successfully assassinates John Connor, leaving Sarah bereft — but not idle.
For decades, she has been receiving text messages with precise GPS coordinates for the location of a time portal opening with something coming from the future. So she gathers her weapons, heads to the location, and kills whatever comes through. “I hunt Terminators,” she explains. “And I drink till I pass out.”
On her most recent mission, she helps save the life of Dani Ramos (Natalia Reyes) alongside Grace (Mackenzie Davis), an augmented human sent to protect Dani. Although Sarah and John were able to stop Skynet, a new robotic threat called Legion, a program designed for cyber warfare, rises to take its place and will begin its own campaign to destroy humanity in the future. (In a franchise, even if the enemy is defeated, another one will always rise in its place, bigger and more powerful than before, not allowing its characters to rest.)
When she learns that Dani has been targeted the way she was decades before, Sarah doesn’t hesitate to offer her help, feeling connected to Dani because she’s been through the same thing. However, she misunderstands the reason as to why Dani is being targeted. Caught up in her own past, Sarah rants about how Dani will be the mother of some man who will one day save the world. “Fine, she concludes. “Let someone else be Mother Mary for a while.”
However, later, Grace reveals the truth. Dani is not the mother of the future, but rather, she is the future. She will become the person who will bring people together and lead them to fight back against the machines. “She’s John,” Sarah says, and in that small moment, it hits her—the loss of her son and a renewed compassion for Dani, a new future leader, who she has been fighting to protect and guide, just as she once did for John. Additional evidence that she is meant to become a mentor to Dani is when Grace states, “You taught me there was no fate but what we make for ourselves,” the phrase that Sarah repeated to herself over the years, a phrase that she likely would have taught to Dani and that Dani would later teach to Grace.
As they search for a way to defeat the REV-9 (Gabriel Luna) that’s hunting them, the group decides to find the person who has been sending Sarah text messages. If they can predict when something from the future comes through, then maybe they can help stop the machine. It turns out to be the T-800 that killed Sarah’s son, now living as a human named Carl, having grown a conscience in the absence of new orders.
Sarah reacts the way you would expect a traumatized and heavily armed person would under these circumstances: He grabs a gun and immediately attempts to kill him. After some conversation, Sarah agrees with Grace and Dani that they need his help in defeating the REV-9, though Sarah promises to kill him as soon as the mission is done. As a soldier, however, Sarah grows to respect Carl as they fight side by side, and we see a level of acceptance and forgiveness when she calls him by his chosen name during the fight.
After a number of epic battles, the team manages to defeat the REV-9, though it takes everything they have, and both Grace and Carl are lost along the way. Only Sarah and Dani are left, and they watch a young Grace play in a playground, unaware of the future to come. “I won’t let her die for me again,” says Dani, and Sarah replies, “Then, you need to be ready.”
Sarah has lost so much throughout her life, but she has never given up fighting. Although Skynet was destroyed, another enemy rose in its place because, as Sarah puts it, humanity never seems to learn. In the face of a new threat, she could collapse in despair and defeat. But Sarah is a soldier and a fighter, and she has no intention of quitting. The future will come, whether she’s prepared or not—so she is going to be prepared, and she is going to make sure that Dani is prepared, too.
Laurie Strode, Halloween
Halloween (1978) helped define the slasher movie sub-genre. It introduces Laurie Strode (played by iconic scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis) as the first Final Girl and essentially develops the horror movie survival “rules” (don’t have sex, don’t drink or do drugs, etc.) that are emulated in other slashers and later described satirically in Scream.
On Halloween night in small town Haddonfield, Laurie and her friends are getting ready to babysit a couple of kids who live in the same neighborhood — unaware that Michael Meyers (Tony Moran), a man known in the community for having killed his own sister and parents when he was a child, has escaped a mental hospital. All throughout the day, Laurie notices a man in a mask watching her in the distance. He doesn’t seem to be doing anything; just watches her and then disappears shortly after. Although it’s weird and creepy, she doesn’t become fully spooked. After all, it’s Halloween, and it’s not unusual to see men in masks wandering around, pulling pranks.
When evening falls, Laurie and her friend Annie (Nancy Kyes) go to their respective babysitting gigs. While Laurie seems to be taking it seriously, playing games and keeping an eye on Tommy (Brian Andrews), Annie seems more interested in having time with her boyfriend. It’s not long before Annie brings the kid she’s babysitting, Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards), over to Laurie to watch so that she can make out with her boyfriend in peace.
As the night goes on, Annie and the other teens are brutally murdered by Michael. When she doesn’t hear anything from Annie, Laurie becomes worried. She leaves the two kids at Tommy’s to go check on her friend. At the neighbor’s, she discovers the corpses of her friends displayed throughout the house and is attacked by Michael, who has locked all the entrances and exits to trap her.
Despite a tumble down the stairs, she manages to escape the house and runs screaming down the street. She bangs on doors, but no one will let her in — not until she reaches Tommy’s house and the kids let her back in. Ushering the two kids inside but soon realizes that the man has also followed her into the house. She tells the two kids to hide and also hides in a closet herself, but he finds her and bursts through the closet door. She fights him off with coat hangers (the only weapon she has on hand because she foolishly threw the knife away) and manages to stab him in the eye. He collapses backward and appears dead.
Laurie sends the kids to the neighbors, telling them to call the police. She then slides down to the ground and sits, expression blank. In her shock, she doesn’t notice Michael rising behind her. He attempts to stab her again, but she fights back. In their struggle, she pulls the white mask from his face — which forces him to stop and put the mask back on. The pause is long enough for Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence), a psychiatrist who has been hunting Michael all night long, to arrive. Loomis is able to shoot Michael in the chest six times, causing him to fall out the window.
Shaking and terrified, Laurie says, “It was the boogeyman,” referring to Tommy’s warning of the boogeyman coming to get them earlier in the movie. Loomis turns to her and answers, “As a matter of fact, it was.”
Halloween II (1981) kicks off immediately after the events of the first movie. Laurie is carted off to the hospital on a stretcher to receive care for her injuries. When the doctor says they’ll need to put her under to patch her up, she begs the doctors not to give her, afraid of being so vulnerable and helpless, but they ignore her. They stitch her up and leave her in a recovery room to heal.
Laurie lays in her hospital bed, silently trying to make sense of what’s happened to her. She is occasionally comforted by a kind and cute EMT named Jimmy (Lance Guest), who informs her that Michael Meyers was the killer. She recognizes the name from local lore, and she’s shocked and horrified. “Why me?” she asks, “I mean, why me?”
While in bed, she also has dreams of the past. In one, a woman turns to a young Laurie and states bluntly, “I am not your mother.” These dreams are connected to the investigation being conducted by Loomis and Sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers), who discover that Michael is not targeting Laurie randomly. After Michael killed his sister and parents and was sent away to a mental hospital when he was a child, Laurie was adopted by the Strodes, and her records were sealed. He is hunting her because she is his sister.
Unaware of this information — or that Michael is already in the hospital and killing nurses, security guards, and everyone he finds — Laurie becomes uncomfortable with waiting. She abandons her hospital bed, barely able to move due to her injuries and the lingering drugs in her system. Nevertheless, she wanders down the hallways until she finds an empty room in which to hide. She attempts to use the phone, but it is disconnected. So, she resumes wandering the halls, slightly dazed, which is when she stumbles into Michael.
She flees, escaping into the basement and then outside while Michael chases her. In the parking lot, she discovers that all of the tires on the cars have been slashed. She climbs into one of the useless cars and curls up into a ball on the floor of the footwell. When she sees Loomis and the sheriff entering the hospital, she runs to them — and is let inside just as Michael is about to reach her.
The sheriff is killed quickly, leaving Laurie and Loomis with nothing to do but run. Finding themselves cornered, Loomis gives Laurie a gun, which she uses to shoot Michael in each eye, blinding him. As he swings the butcher knife wildly around the room, they open valves to fill the room with flammable gas. Loomis tells Laurie to run, and when she’s out of the room, he ignites the gas, causing an explosion that consumes both Michael and himself.
Laurie watches Michael stumbles out of the flames and collapses in a burning heap. She has survived the night, but as she is transferred to another hospital, we can see by the flat expression on her face that she will be dealing with the trauma for years to come.
Curtis leaves the franchise after the second film, and Laurie Strode is only mentioned briefly in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), when it is noted that Laurie died in a car accident prior to the start of the movie — and her daughter Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris) has taken up the role of Final Girl.
However, Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), the seventh film in the series, brings Curtis back to reprise the role of Laurie. This film ignores the daughter (who no longer exists) and reveals that Laurie faked her death in a car accident and changed her name in order to stay hidden from her homicidal brother.
Two decades later, Laurie is the headmistress of a private school. She bears a lot of scars — both physical (the scar on her arm where she was cut by Michael) and internal (nightmares, anxiety, and a penchant for drinking). She even has occasional hallucinations, seeing Michael in reflections or out of the corner of her eye — images that vanish as soon as she turns her head. With it being Halloween, she is especially jumpy to the extent that even her boyfriend, Will Brennan (Adam Arkin), a guidance counselor at the school, notices and asks her about it. She admits to him that she has tried a number of ways to deal with and process her past — such as self-help, aroma therapy, and meditation — but it hasn’t worked.
Another element of her trauma is the overprotectiveness of her son John (Josh Hartnett), who she can barely let out of her sight. Since he is 17 and wants to forge his own path, this causes tension between them, which devolves into a fight when she catches him sneaking out of the closed campus. John retaliates, stating, “If you want to stay handcuffed to your dead brother, that’s fine, but you’re not dragging me along.” The fight jars her enough that she agrees to let him go on the school camping trip, a concession to make peace with her son and a reflection of her desire to not live in fear. However, he betrays her trust by secretly hiding out in the school with some friends.
When Laurie tells Will the whole story about her past, he asks her why Michael would wait so long to finally come after her. He means this to be comforting, but it is at this moment that Laurie makes the connection — her son has just turned 17, the same age she was when Michael first tried to kill her. She immediately panics and tries to get ahold of her son — quickly realizing that he has skipped the camping trip, so he must still be on campus.
Laurie and Will manage to find John and his girlfriend Molly (Michelle Williams) just in time. They are both injured but alive. And Laurie comes face to face with her monster for the first time in two decades.
Although she suffers the loss of Will, Laurie manages to get John and Molly safely out of the school — but she turns back, closing the gate behind her, essentially locking herself in with Michael. The moment echoes a lesson that Laurie taught earlier that day, in which they discussed Frankenstein having to take responsibility for his own monster. Laurie now intends to do the same and put an end to Michael.
Laurie confronts Michael with an axe and hacks into his shoulder, only to get sliced in the arm herself (the same arm with her original scar). He chases her through the building, and she evades, finally getting ahold of two kitchen knives and using them to hack and slice at him until he falls backward through a window. Although the police arrive and put him in a body bag, she is not convinced that he is truly gone. She steals the ambulance that holds his body bag and crashes the vehicle, causing it to tumble down a hill and pinning Michael between the ambulance and a tree. Unable to move, he reaches for her — and she uses an axe to remove his head, finishing him off.
Unfortunately, the satisfaction of this ending is immediately negated by the opening of the subsequent movie, Halloween: Resurrection (2002). Laurie is locked away in a mental hospital, apparently catatonic since the events of H20. Two nurses discussing her condition reveal that the man Laurie killed was actually an EMT; Michael crushed his vocal cords and put him in the mask so that an innocent man was killed instead of him. Therefore, her catatonic state is due to guilt.
But wait — Laurie has actually been faking this whole time, waiting for Michael to come for her. She sees him standing outside and sets a trap, leading him up onto the roof, where she catches him in a snare. As he dangles over the edge of the roof, she confronts him, stating, “You failed Michael, and you want to know why? I’m not afraid of you. But what about you? Are you afraid of me? Are you afraid to die, Michael?” But before she can bring herself to cut the rope and send him plummeting to his death, she wants to make sure that she has the right person this time. So, she reaches to remove his mask — only for him to regain control of the knife, stab her, and drop her to her death instead. A brutally unsatisfying turn of events.
Now, let’s do a reset.
Another twenty years later, Curtis once again returns to the role of Laurie Strode in Halloween (2018), which is more or less a direct sequel to the first film in 1978. As a result, it removes all reference to Michael and Laurie being siblings, as stated in Halloween II, or anything else referenced in the other sequels.
The Laurie of this film is old, hardened, and still traumatized by the attack that happened four decades ago. She lives in a house of locks and traps, does target practice with firearms, and regularly cleans her guns to make sure they’re operational. She is well prepared for Michael’s return, but her life is a mess. She is an alcoholic, has had two divorces, and her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) was taken away from her by the state when she was young. As a result, her relationship with her family is rocky. Her daughter explains how Laurie’s trauma was passed on to her and that she is still unraveling the experience of living in lockdown and being taught paranoia and fear throughout her childhood, which is why she has distanced herself from her mother.
However, Laurie’s relationship with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) is slightly better. With it being Halloween, she goes to Allyson’s school and watches her through a window (an echo of the way Michael once watched her). She gives her granddaughter $3,000 in cash and attempts to convince her to leave town. Instead, Allyson confronts her about her inability to let go of the past and how all her preparations cost Laurie her family. Laurie simply responds, “If the way I raised your mother means she hates me, but that she’s prepared for the horrors of this world, then I’m okay with that.”
Unable to help herself, she drives to the mental hospital where Michael is housed and watches as he is loaded onto a bus for transport to another facility. The sight of him causes her to have a panic attack, and she is still upset when she goes to the celebratory dinner for Allyson making the honor society. Although she tries to remain calm, it is all too much for her, and she breaks down at the table and leaves — returning home to barricade herself inside.
Later that night, she watches the news and learns that the bus that was carrying Michael has crashed. She immediately arms herself, locks up her home, and goes to retrieve her family and bring them to safety. However, she’s hostile about Karen and her husband’s lack of defenses as soon she enters, and, since they don’t believe her about Michael’s escape, they kick her out of the house. Laurie then goes looking for Allyson, who is out partying for Halloween.
After a series of murders later, Karen and Allyson begin to realize that Laurie was right about Michael’s escape. Both separately make their way to Laurie’s house, and they join her for a final showdown. While putting Karen in a safe room in the basement, Laurie confesses, “I was wrong to raise you the way I did. But I can protect you.” She then locks her daughter in and proceeds to clear the house, searching each room before locking it down.
In her confrontation with Michael, Laurie receives a gut wound. But together, the three women are able to use their wits, along with guns and knives, to trap him in the basement and set the house aflame around him. They escape on the back of a pickup truck, believing they have defeated him — but by now, we know how this goes.
As Laurie and her family are rushed off to the hospital in Halloween Kills (2021), they see the firefighters arrive to put out the fire. They shout at them to let the house burn, but by then, they are too far away. At the hospital, Laurie is immediately rushed into surgery for her wounds, and she is left to recover from her injuries while townspeople turn into a mob to hunt down Michael. As a result, Laurie doesn’t have much to do in this movie except talk about the past with Officer Hawkins (Will Patton) and wax poetic about the nature of evil and how Michael feeds into the fear of the town.
In the end, Karen joins the mob and leads Michael into a trap, where he is beaten and stabbed by an angry crowd of people. Karen joins in, stabbing him in his upper back and delivering what she believes to be the final blow. However, he almost immediately gets up and slaughters most of the mob, as well as finding and murdering Karen. When Laurie calls Karen to check on her, she is greeted with Michael’s breathing. Enraged at the death of her daughter, she promises, “I’m coming for you, Michael.”
Halloween Ends (2022) jumps ahead several years. After the massacre in 2018, Michael Meyers disappeared, leaving the town of Haddonfield bearing the scars of that night and unable to heal. As a result, Laurie explains that the people have become infected, thus falling “into grief, blame, and paranoia.”
However, in the four years since she last saw her monster, Laurie is doing her best to improve herself. To honor her daughter, she explains, “I made a promise not to let fear rule my life anymore.” She has made a home with her granddaughter Allyson, a regular home instead of a trap full of baked goods instead of weapons. We also learn that she has given up drinking, gone to therapy, and is writing a memoir to process her experiences. She wants Allyson to be happy and encourages her to get out and have fun. Gone is the overprotection, the paranoia.
Laurie almost seems like a different person — the polar opposite of who she was before. But as the movie continues, we see the cracks in her façade as a happy little homemaker. The people of the town, it turns out, blame her for the massacre, claiming that it was her fault for antagonizing and stirring Michael Meyers up into a frenzy. When she’s confronted with this as she’s leaving the grocery store, her mask slips, and we see some of the lingering depression that lies underneath her mask.
Despite Laurie’s attempts to make the home as open and loving as possible, Allyson still feels trapped by her grandmother. She confesses to Corey (Rohan Campbell), a boy haunted by his own past (having accidentally killed the boy he was babysitting), that she feels like she can’t escape Haddonfield and the past like she wants. She is afraid that, if she does, her grandmother will relapse to her old ways.
Initially, Laurie encourages Allyson’s relationship with Corey, but she quickly becomes suspicious of him when she looks into his eyes one day and sees the same coldness she once saw in Michael. And she is unaware of how right she is about him. He has secretly been meeting with a wounded Michael Meyers and learning how to kill from him — has, in fact, killed several people who were antagonizing and bullying him in town with Michael’s help. Some of Laurie’s hard-edged nature comes out when she Corey and demands that he stay away from her granddaughter. He responds in turn that if he can’t have Allyson, no one can.
This confrontation comes to a head when Laurie tries to warn her granddaughter away from him. However, Allyson is exhausted and tired of everything, and she only grows angry at the suggestion. She has found common ground and happiness with Corey. In her frustration, Allyson blames Laurie for the deaths of her friends (echoing the blame of the people in town) and announces that she’s leaving with Corey that night.
Alone and upset, Laurie starts drinking again. Her attempt at building a happy life is falling apart. She unlocks a gun from the safe — and for a moment, it seems as if she is going to kill herself. But it is really just a trick for Corey, who has come to make sure that she is dead. They fight and Laurie shoots him, but Corey’s final act is to stab himself in the neck to make Allyson believe that Laurie killed him in cold blood. When Allyson comes looking for Corey, she is horrified at what she sees, furious at her grandmother, and runs away.
Despite her despair, Laurie notices that the back door is open and immediately goes into defensive mode. She sets up a noise trap, drawing Michael into the kitchen, where they get into a gnarly fight. He slams her face into a clock and attempts to shove her hand into a garbage disposal, but she is able to fight him off. She pins both of his hands with knives to the butcher block. “I’ve run from you,” she tells him. “I have chased you. I have tried to contain you. I have tried to forgive you. I thought maybe you were the boogeyman. No, you’re just a man about to stop breathing.”
She cuts his throat, and when Allyson returns again, they slice his wrists open. He’s dead at last but “not dead enough,” according to Laurie. They form a nighttime procession of townspeople, who take his body to the scrapyard and publicly dispose of his body in a metal shredder — proving once and for all that Michael can never come back. The town puts up no memorial or tombstone for him in the hope that memories will fade and the town can finally heal.
In the end, Allyson packs up and drives out of town, a smile on her face to finally be free, while Laurie writes the final chapter of her book. “I’ve said goodbye to my boogeyman, but the truth is evil doesn’t die,” she writes. “It changes shape.” An oddly pessimistic closing to her book.
Nevertheless, rather than retreat inside and wallow alone, she sits on her porch chatting with Hawkins about cherry blossoms, which generally symbolize rebirth, renewal, and new beginnings. She is still traumatized and will still have to deal with her feelings of guilt and grief, but she is willing to consider the future.
A Splattering of Final Thoughts
When diving into my favorite horror franchises, I can’t help but have a dual-edged experience. On the one hand, I love to see my favorite characters return to the scary stories I love and watch them smartly struggle against seemingly impossible odds and still come out on top. On the other hand, it would be so much better for these Final Girls if we would just leave them alone.
After all, as long as they continue to be on screen and present within the film, they are subject to the horrors and the looming presence of death that abide there. They cannot escape the cycle of fear and trauma to which they are subjected.
It is rare for the the survivor to kill the killer and remove them from the fictional universe, good and for all, since the franchise always needs to go on. Even if they do, the villain can always be resurrected as someone or something else. The only other way to break free, it would seem, is to either die or to pass the curse of survival onto the next generation of Final Girls, who must struggle through their own horrors.
And yet, despite the ongoing trauma, the act of surviving a horror franchise is itself a form of privilege when you consider that all the Final Girls (and Guy) mentioned here are white, straight, and cis-gendered. They fall into a set of particular expectations of who is allowed to survive at the end of the film and return for the next one.
We are starting to see a shift in this regard, as a number of new horror films are pushing the boundaries of what it means to be the Final Girl. Alexa Woods (Sanaa Lathan) not only becomes the sole survivor in Aliens vs. Predator (2004) but also gains the respect of the Predator she fights alongside. In the Fear Street trilogy (released on Netflix in 2021), lesbian couple Deena (Kiana Madeira) and Samantha (Olivia Scott Welch) are able to pool their strength and skills together to fight off a centuries-old curse. And Tess (Georgina Campbell) manages to claw her way out of a horrifying AirBNB experience in Barbarian (2022). This is just a small fraction of the films that are redefining the image of the Final Girl, and horror novels are also actively examining this trope.
Notably, these break-the-mold survivors tend to be the stars of a single film or two. They rarely get an opportunity to continue on as the center point of the horror franchise — an important exception being Sam and Tara taking up the mantle from Sidney as the ongoing survivors of the Scream series.
On the flip side, the villain/killer of most major franchises tend to be male — Michael Myers, Freddy Krueger, Jason Voorhees, and Pinhead. Ghostface is recognizable as the villain but is essentially genderless, as the killer can be of any gender under the mask. Likewise, since the Deadites are possessed humans, they can also be any gender but lack a single instantly recognizable visage. However, there are virtually no women killers who have been granted a place as the central villain of their own franchise. In the Western horror world, the only exception I’m aware of is Tiffany (Jennifer Tilly), who appears in four films — Bride of Chucky (1998), Seed of Chucky (2004), Curse of Chucky (2013), and Cult of Chucky (2017).
Female horror villains do appear more regularly in Asian cinema, however. For example, Sadako Yamamura in the Ring franchise, played by various actresses across eight Japanese films, and Kayako Saeki in the Ju-On franchise, also played by multiple actresses across seven Japanese films and four American adaptations. These women also appear in a crossover film, Sadako vs. Kayako, released in 2016.
The different portrayals of women in Asian horror are largely due to cultural differences, as explained by Ren Zelen at Horror DNA, who points out that “women in Asian horror have the better deal regarding roles offering depth and personality.” To further expand on this, she notes that these portrayals of women in horror are often counter to the restrictive cultural expectations of women in real life:
Confucian ideals of womanhood have been pervasive in Asia for almost two thousand years. Since the Han Dynasty, parables about the selfless wife and humble daughter-in-law became embedded in education in China and the surrounding regions. Unsurprisingly then, East Asia also generated a system of stories depicting women seeking revenge after they have been victimised because they have not abided by these norms — women who have been maligned simply because of their biological qualities.
Asian horror cinema has proved to be the perfect medium through which this restrictive image of femininity can be challenged. What could be further from the Confucian feminine ideal than a woman who terrifies men by grotesque physical deformity, biological otherness, supernatural potency or violent rage?
To close, I’ll simply say that there is room in the horror genre for a variety of stories from a multitude of perspectives and for new, innovative storytelling, and we are seeing more and more of that in horror films, novels, and games that are being released. Of course, not every horror film transforms into a larger franchise — some because they don’t need to be (a single story is enough on its own) and others because they don’t manage to achieve that combination of luck and marketing that launches a multitude of sequels. It’s not always possible to foresee — or control — what will become a successful franchise. Either way, I’m looking forward to seeing what kinds of Final Girls, villains, and monsters will come forth in the future.
This article is the last of our October horror focus. If you love this article and our magazine, please consider supporting us on Patreon. Happy Halloween!
Interstellar Flight Magazine publishes essays on what’s new in the world of speculative genres. In the words of Ursula K. Le Guin, we need “writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope.” Visit our Patreon to join our fan community on Discord. Follow us on Twitter, Facebook, or Instagram.
