Two things:  One, two new reviews are up that I don't think I've linked to yet:  The Ring and Demons.  Enjoy!

Two:  Time for more from my thesis.  Today, we will be finishing off the 1970s with the iconic Halloween.  Cited works include the film itself, Robin Wood's essay "An Introduction to the American Horror Film" from Planks of Reason:  Essays on the Horror Film, Joseph Maddrey's Nightmares in Red, White, and Blue:  The Evolution of the American Horror Film, Tony Magistrale's Abject Terrors:  Surveying the Modern and Postmodern Horror Films, James F. Iaccino's Psychological Reflections on Cinematic Terror:  Jungian Archetypes in Horror Films, and Tony Williams' "Trying to Survive on the Darker Side:  1980s Family Horror" from The Dread of Difference:  Gender and the Horror Film.  Next time, we roll into the heavy hitters of the 80s final girls with Friday the 13th.

      The other movie that can be seen as part of the initiation of the defensive, responsive, strong-willed female protagonist is also one of the original "slasher" films. The film in question is John Carpenter's Halloween. In it, the story of serial killer Michael Myers is told. As a child, Myers killed his older sister in an apparent response to negligence she showed in choosing to have sex with her boyfriend while she was supposed to be babysitting him. He was sent to a mental institution for 15 years to determine the root cause of his crimes and was examined by Dr. Loomis, who discovered that "what was living behind that boy's eyes was purely and simply evil"(Halloween). Shortly before Halloween night, Myers escapes through Dr. Loomis's inadvertent help. It is at this point that the film shifts from a focus on Myers and his instability to Myers and his obsession with Laurie Strode, the protagonist.

      He proceeds to Haddonfield, his original hometown, where he begins a murderous rampage, targeting young women in an apparent mission to gain further vengeance against his older sister. In fact, some analysts believe that Myers sees Strode as a new, reincarnated version of his dead sister. (Wood 196) Much of the finale of the movie is a showcase of Myers's bloodlessly filmed, violent murders of Strode's friends in what a relentless quest by to get to Strode and finish what he believed he started that earlier Halloween night.
      Interestingly, the movie stars Jamie Lee Curtis, the daughter of the actress who played Marion in Psycho, Janet Leigh. (Maddrey 62) One can compare the characteristics of the mother's character to that of Curtis's to see just how far the female protagonist had come in the 17 intervening years between the films. In Psycho, Marion was simply a victim. She had no method to fight back against Norman and was taken relatively by surprise. She was somewhat suspicious of Norman, of course, after their short discussion during dinner in his parlor, but she both appeared to be more suspicious of Norman's "mother" than Norman himself and showed nearly no signs of actual trepidation about her safety after her meeting with Norman. Instead, she appeared more scared of someone discovering the stolen money than of losing her life. She also decides to disobey both her boss's orders and societal norms of the time by stealing the safe deposit box money in and of itself, and driving out of town alone. Overall, she appears to be far more similar to Laurie's friends Halloween than to Laurie herself. The two girls, Lynda and Annie, are both self-absorbed, thinking only of themselves and ignoring the preliminary signs that Myers had returned. As for their own sexual prowess, they are both specifically shown, either by word or deed, to be quite sexually active. These ideas combine in the end to get both them and one of their boyfriends killed.

     Laurie Strode is quite different from these particular stock characters, however. First, from the initial moment that Michael appears in Haddonfield, the only person observant enough to notice his stalking and to actually stop and consider its implications is her:

     "Laurie's marginal interest in sex, in contrast, allows her the ability to concentrate on other matters; we note on several occasions early in the film that her friends mock her nervous response to the looming presence of Myers.[...] Unlike her clueless girlfriends, Laurie senses intuitively that there is trouble brewing"(Magistrale 158-9)

     "Laurie Strode is a survivor-type, but she is characterized by her reactions rather than her actions" (Maddrey 133).

She is also, as previously mentioned, a virgin, as well as generally respectable, ethically and morally speaking, thinking of others or her surroundings before herself. As an example, a comparison of the events surrounding Lynda and Annie's deaths to those of the final battle is quite revealing. Lynda and her boyfriend Bob die after they have broken into a house to have sex, one being stabbed while getting a beer afterwards, the other being strangled in bed with a phone cord. Annie is killed in her car while she prepares to shirk house-sitting/baby-sitting duties to go see her own boyfriend. Both girls thus die as a result of decisions that indulge their own prurient self-interests.

     In Laurie's final fight against Michael Myers, on the other hand, the most important thing to her is not really her own life so much as the lives of the children she is caring for. (Magistrale 158-9) While she is fighting to stay alive, her first action once Michael is physically pursuing her is to run to the house where the children are so as to protect them. She keeps them with her through almost the entire final act of the movie in an effort to keep them safe. Once she has succeeded in this quest and it has become clear that Myers is after her, not the children, she fights for her own survival, using her intellect to try and outwit him by hiding in a closet. While she hides, she shows a resourcefulness not seen in female protagonists before by using a wire hanger to gouge out his eye (similar to slightly earlier in the sequence where she attempts the same action with a knitting needle) and allow her to momentarily escape. (159)
     It is important to note, however, that the full transformation from weak protagonist to strong independent heroine has not fully taken place in Strode. While she keeps herself alive through intelligence and ingenuity, she is not the person who doles out the "final" blow to Myers. That distinction belongs to Dr. Loomis who takes advantage of Strode's removal of Myers's mask, shooting Myers as soon as he retrieves his mask and is about to administer the coup de grâce to Strode, knocking him out a nearby window. (Iaccino 133) While this act does not kill Myers, thus freeing him to years of sequels, it does point out an interesting fact. While Halloween is said by some to be the first instance of the "final girl" survivor in "slasher"-type horror movies, she is still not fully independent, still not strong enough to fully save herself, and still haunted by the weaknesses of Marion and Lila in Psycho. (Williams 170)