Imagine being Jamie Lee Curtis‘ “Laurie Strode”, the Halloween scream queen from the Jimmy Carter era. Imagine having no interests, longings or intrigues in life other than one thing…recovering from the trauma of having been nearly murdered by psycho-killer Michael Myers in ’78, back in her late teens (actually 22 by JLC’s calendar), and then deciding, 40 years later in her early 60s, “this Michael Myers shit ends now!…I won’t stand for it any longer!…even if the guy who’s been playing him for the last 40-odd years, Nick Castle, is 73 years old!”
Except she will stand for it because Halloween Kills isn’t the end…the finale is slated to arrive in mid October ’22 when Halloween Ends opens in theatres. Except if you know anything about the slithering, salivating paycheck whores behind this franchise, Michael Meyers will never really die.
John Carpenter on the original Halloween: “True crass exploitation. I decided to make a film I would love to have seen as a kid, full of cheap tricks like a haunted house at a fair where you walk down the corridor and things jump out at you.”
That’s actually a dodge, John. The Halloween movies are about jump-boo, okay, but the undercurrent has always been about one thing and one thing only — killing sluts for having sex while saving the chaste virginal heroines (Curtis’s Strode) so they’ll live another day….because sluts need to scream and howl and die horribly. Same difference with the Friday the 13th franchise. I first wrote about the slut-killing meme in my Films in Review review of Halloween, 42 and 1/2 years ago. You’d think this would have subsided or evolved over the decades.
From a 10.22.18 Refinery29 piece by Elena Nicolaou: “The horror genre is saddled with blatant sexism, the focus of which is found in the trope of the Final Girl — and in her opposite. In classic slasher movies, the Final Girl emerges from an encounter with great evil, bloody but unbroken. Her other female friends are usually not so lucky, typically meeting their demise after having sex. As the ‘Sex By Death’ trope goes, if a woman has sex in a horror movie, she’s doomed to die.”
