This story contains spoilers for the Halloween franchise.
When John Carpenter pitted babysitter Laurie Strodes (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) against masked maniac Michael Myers for his 1978 film Halloween, he kicked off a ruthlessly efficient new breed of horror, not to mention the genre’s first ever franchise. The babysitter slasher, which is known as the “Final Girl” movie amongst horror aficionados, changed horror’s relationship with its female protagonists.
On October 13, the final instalment of the Halloween franchise is released into cinemas and since there’s nothing quite like gasping along with a cinema filled with fellow horror fans, we’ll be seeing it the day it’s released.
The Halloween Legacy and the First “Final Girl”
Laurie Strode, a 17-year-old babysitter was an unassuming hero. At the start of Halloween, her biggest problem is getting made fun of by her adventurous girlfriends for still being a virgin and not holding her pot. Targeted by a masked maniac, Strode is let down by the police, her dad, and the doctors who let forensic patient Michael Myers slip through their fingers. As her friends are mowed down, Strode realises no help is coming and finds herself resourceful (and violent) in a crisis.
Halloween was released just nine months after Ted Bundy’s infamous “Chi Omega” college killing spree, and four years after the “co-ed killer” Edmund Kemper was apprehended. The high-profile arrests and trials of the “serial killer ‘70s” highlighted sloppy police work and ill-advised early paroles (and… white privilege) in the criminal justice system that lead to multiple escapes, delayed arrests and many preventable deaths. The police seemed less reliable, and for white Americans with high school and college-aged daughters, the suburbs felt less safe.
Halloween — which was made on a shoestring $325,000 budget — provided a much-needed antidote to this fear in the form of a plucky, bad guy fighting babysitter, and netted $70 million at the box office. Laurie Strode remains cinema’s most popular Final Girl and Halloween Ends, the franchise’s thirteenth film, will see her face up against Michael Myers for the ninth time in 44 years.
Ahead of Halloween’s final, bloody chapter, we rank horror’s hardest working Final Girl showdowns:
8. Halloween (2007)
The Halloween franchise has been picked up by many directors and is full of retcons and remakes, so establishing a linear timeline is impossible. Rob Zombie’s 2007 Halloween is a remake of the first Halloween, and a controversial one at that.
Rob Zombie’s 2007 and 2009 renditions of the Halloween franchise are divisive. The Halloween series was popular because of the attention it paid to its female protagonist, with audiences challenged for the first time to adopt the point of view of a female victim. Zombie’s films spend less time on Laurie Strode and more time fleshing out Michael Myers’ background, some critics argue that this gives too much sympathy for the devil. It’s also shot like a Nine Inch Nails music video.
Myers’ pathologies aside, Scout Taylor-Compton’s garter-belt-wearing Laurie Stokes doesn’t give Myers much of a fight. She’s kidnapped, she misses shots, shoots with a blank revolver and gets herself trapped while hiding. Eventually, she’s rescued and escapes wailing, so it’s not particularly inspiring stuff.
7. Halloween II (2009)
Strode finds herself in a psych hospital and the first twenty minutes of the film are full of tension and action — only to realise “it is all a dream”. Myers and Strode face off at the end, but she doesn’t play much of a role in his death. While Strode gives him a stab once he’s been shot by police and safely impaled on some farming equipment, there isn’t much Final Girl energy to be found in this fight.
6. Halloween: Resurrection (2002)
Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, which was released in 1998, was supposed to be a nail in the franchise’s coffin but it was a smash hit (more on this later), so Jamie Lee Curtis found herself back as Laurie Strode in Halloween: Resurrection. When the film starts, Strode has stepped down from her position as the Dean of a Californian private school following an on-campus massacre in which she… decapitated the man who comes back to kill her in “Resurrection” (natch).
After ensnaring Myers on a rooftop, Laurie makes the rookie error of reaching for Myers’ mask, just as he’s about to freefall. This move has been criticised, but… she did hack his head off in their last encounter so you’ll forgive her curiosity. Myers turns the tables on her and plunges his knife into her back, Laurie falls, and the film ends — so it seems like Myers has finally triumphed. However, just like the Halloween franchise and its villain, a Final Girl isn’t so easily killed.
5. Halloween (1978)
Carpenter’s Halloween is the first film in what became a decades-spanning franchise and is considered a groundbreaking shift in horror cinematography. From the meandering existential thrillers of the ‘60s (Rosemary’s Baby) to the gruelling, low-budget ‘gore porn’ productions of the early ‘70s (Texas Chainsaw Massacre), early horror audiences were trained to adopt the perspective of the real or supernatural antagonist. Heroines were treated to long, lingering shots as they were stalked, and audiences watched them scramble to get away from their attackers.
Halloween starts from Michael Myers’ perspective as he stalks strode and commits a few casual murders. Then, as he commences his attack on the movie’s Final Girl, Carpenter shifts to Strode’s POV. The audience is suddenly placed in the 17-year-old babysitter’s shoes, as she’s in a scramble for her life. This, in itself, makes Strode’s confrontation with Myers in Halloween genre-defining, but it also stands on its own merits as a good girl, bad guy face-off.
Cornered by Myers, Strode reaches for some heavily symbolic domestic items (sewing needle to the neck, coat hanger to the eye), before turning his own butcher’s knife against him. While she’s rescued by a guy with a gun (it was the ‘70s after all), this scene sets Strode up as a less-than-desirable opponent.
4. Halloween 2 (1981)
If Strode didn’t learn it in the first movie, she learnt it in the second. The only reliable guy in a Final Girl movie is the one who’s coming to kill you. Halloween II starts at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, hours after the events of the first film. Here, the head of medical is “drunk at the country club”, the police are chasing their tails, and despite her protestations, Strode is dosed up on morphine hours after escaping Michael Myers. Dr Loomis comes to save Strode a second time, but then he’s then stabbed in the gut, so Strode seizes the gun that was intended to save her, and quickly fires two shots into Myers’ face.
3. Halloween (2018)
Halloween (2018) is the franchise’s most ambitious retcon, taking us all the way back to the events of the first film. Retcons are essential to horror franchises because they allow new directors to wipe slates clean, revive dead characters, and iron out inconsistencies that develop over four decades worth of storytelling. In this rendition of Halloween — as with Rob Zombie’s 2009 production — we pick up after the first film, but in this edition, it’s twenty years later.
In this universe, Strode hasn’t encountered Myers since his disappearance in 1978, but is haunted by the memory of her friends’ deaths, his seeming invincibility, and the knowledge that he’s “out there”. Strode lives out an uneasy domicile with her husband and two daughters, in a heavily fortified house with an elaborately rigged, Myers-sized trap in the basement.
When Myers finally comes, Stokes’ triumph is swift. He loses two fingers to a firearm early, before falling into a trap 40 years in the making: a gas-rigged, flare-triggered basement designed to incinerate Myers. Sadly, as is a theme in the Halloween franchise, worst intentions are thwarted by well-meaning men in authority. Firefighters arrive at the scene a little too quickly and Myers escapes with two less fingers and some burns.
2. Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later (1998)
Before Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, there was a slew of Halloween sequels: Halloween III (1982), Halloween 4 (1988), and Halloween 5 (1995) but all films were missing that special “Laurie Strode” magic. In Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later, Laurie Strode is back — twenty years older and seriously pissed off.
In this film, the hunted becomes the hunter as Laurie Strode (now the Dean of a private school) defends her son, his girlfriend, and her students from Michael Myers. In this conflict, Strode shows what she’s learnt from previous altercations, trapping Myers by disabling the school gates, grabbing her weapon of choice first (not off a dude), and doesn’t take his fall off a balcony as a guarantee. This film killed at the box office and had two best moments: when Strode goes to deliver a final stab but is thwarted by a well-intentioned idiot who thinks justice should be served in court. The second? When Laurie decapitates Myers and takes a long look as the light dies in his eyes, leaving seemingly no doubt that her troubles are over.
1. Halloween Kills (2021)
There’s nothing like getting the old gang back together and in Halloween Kills, Michael Myers’ surviving victims form a vigilante group to #cancel horror’s hardest-working maniac. Following their thwarted attempt to kill him in Halloween 1, Laurie and her daughters hook up with some OG survivors when they hear Myers is once again #killingit.
Halloween Kills is an exciting take on the Final Girl series because it shows she’s not actually alone. It also foreshadows a potential story killer in the twelfth and final iteration of the franchise: is Michael Myers mortal?
As Myers reanimates following a lingering knife-to-the-spine hit job, Laurie says, “I always thought Michael was flesh and blood like you and me, but a mortal man could not have survived what he’s lived through”. Will we get answers in Halloween Ends when it’s released into cinemas on October 13? Will those answers help Strode finally finish him off? And will it top our list of favourite showdowns between Strode and Myers? We hope so.