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Halloween (1978)

This October, Decider.com is going to celebrate Halloween by honoring horror movies, and in particular, the characters who manage to survive the guts and garrottes and emerge at the end: the Final Girls. Each Friday, we’re going to profile a different Important Final Girl in horror history and pay tribute to what makes their finality truly special. Sometimes it will be one character, sometimes it will be an actress whose roles spanned multiple Final Girls.

This week’s Final Girl is Laurie Strode

NOTE: Spoilers for the Halloween movies follow.

The Final Girl

Laurie Strode, as played by Jamie Lee Curtis, in the original run of Halloween horror flicks.

The Killer She’s Evaded

Michael Myers, a mysterious masked murderer who winds up being her biological brother.

Why She Slays

In many ways, Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode is the platonic ideal of a Final Girl. She starts off as a smart, innocent — dare we say virginal? — teen who must confront a killer one-on-one. Over the course of the film, she becomes more wily, more feral, and more dangerous in turn. She summons strength from within to slay the slasher. In subsequent chapters, though, she must confront a deeper darkness: the psychological fallout of her actions and the horrible truth about herself.

It’s a pattern that’s come to define the Final Girl — and the genre — and Jamie Lee Curtis was arguably the first actress to epitomize it.

Curtis was initially cast as a publicity stunt. The first choice, Anne Lockhart, was tied up with another project, and Halloween writer/producer Debra Hill thought casting Janet Leigh’s daughter would boost the project’s hype. If anything, the meta-casting proved to be artistically successful, too. Psycho cemented Janet Leigh as cinema’s literal “scream queen.” Jamie Lee Curtis subverted the term. She was no longer a pristine victim who succumbed to the killer’s fury, but a nubile heroine whose primal instincts would triumph over evil…for the most part.

Jamie Lee Curtis is one of the few major stars happy to return to the world of horror and the role that made them. Over the years, she has appeared in five Halloween films — even though one of them was just an uncredited cameo role. By passing Halloween on to future generations, she has kept the mythos of her franchise alive.

Her Best Moment

In the first Halloween, a terrified Laurie seeks shelter in a closet. It’s a confined space that could have spelled her doom, but she weaponizes the household feature for herself. She takes a wire hanger and straightens it out, so that when Michael Myers fights through the door, she is able to stab him in the eye. She then grabs his own knife, stabs him with it, and gets the children in her charge to safety.