From Final Girl to Action Hero

From Final Girl to Action Hero:
Women and the Modern Slasher Film
MA Film and The Moving Image
Final Dissertation
Keith Devereux
Student Number: 10154146

The horror
film
occupies a
position in
popular
culture
roughly
comparable
to that of
horror
literature.
That is to
say, it is
generally
ignored,
sometimes
acknowledged
with bemused
authority
and viewed
with alarm
Introduction
In the introduction to a booklet for the Toronto
Festival of Festivals, Robin Wood defined horror as
‘one of the most popular and, at the
same time, the most disreputable of
Hollywood genres’ (Britton, Lippe, et. al.:
1979:13). While being popular and profitable, horror
films were either ‘restricted to aficionados *or+
complemented by total rejection’ (Ibid.: 13), leading
to their being derided by most critics. However, in
the intervening years, the modern American horror
film, i.e. those dating from the 1970s onwards, have
been noted for a range of transgressive themes and
motifs that have differentiated them from the genre
films of preceding generations. This has led to horror
being submitted to a range of readings, using a
variety of critical tools, to explain their appeal,
development and relevance both to film theory and
to the changes in popular culture.

Andrew Tudor discussed the evolution of the horror film, splitting them up
into six main chronological periods between 1931 and 1984: the classic
period, the war period, the fifties boom, American decline, the
seventies boom and a period of sustained growth from 1978
onwards (Tudor, 1989:24-25). Within this period, Tudor suggested that while
the basis of the horror film remained the same: ‘normality’ was disturbed by
an external force which required resolution, the mode of the threatening
external force changed in response to the norms of the day. During the early
part of the classic period, the horrific threat was from a supernatural source
(e.g. Dracula (Tod Browning, 1931)) or from science gone wrong (e.g.
Frankenstein (James Whale, 1932)), while during the 1950s the threat was
either from invasion, perhaps representative of the communist threat at the
time, or from misguided scientific experimentation. In each case, normality
was restored through the efforts of the authorities themselves or in concert
with an older individual armed with the knowledge to counter the threat.

However, from the 1960s onward the horrific threat, became less supernatural
and more psychological. In 1960, two horror films, Psycho (Alfred Hitchcock,
1960) and Peeping Tom (Michael Powell, 1960), unveiled a new terror, the
psychotic killer, seemingly ‘ordinary’ on the outside, but capable of
unspeakable evil within. Alongside this change, the influence of authority and
the role of experts became less effective against the threat, and this role was
taken over by another ‘ordinary person’, who recognised the threat and took
action against it. From the earliest examples of this new type of horror film, the
opposition to the threat was usually a young girl, who recognised the threat to
the community and was able to defeat it with the bare minimum of technology,
usually stabbing or slashing weapons.

While Psycho was acknowledged as the original template for most modern
slasher horror films, and for the similarly themed serial killer movies, the
contemporary slasher movie officially came of age with Halloween
(John Carpenter, 1978). Between Psycho and Halloween, a number of films
established the conventions of the genre, which were best summarised by
Carol Clover (Clover, 1992:26-41) as: killer, terrible place, weapons,
victims, ‘final girl’ and shock effects. These earlier films also
established the position of a young female as the heroic sole survivor, or final
girl. In her definition of the final girl as:
…the one who encounters the mutilated
bodies of her friends and perceives the
full extent of the preceding horror and
of her own peril; who is chased,
cornered, wounded; whom we see scream,
stagger, fall, rise, and scream again,
Clover isolated two main characteristics of the survivor: that she is the first to
recognise the terror that is stalking her and that she is different to the other
characters in the film in being able to feel terror –all of the other victims were
killed without appreciating their peril or a knowledge of their impending death.

However, while the final girl was able to
recognise the threat and fight against it, she
was never able to kill the monster outright, aid
from the authority figures were always
required. But as the slasher horror film
developed, so too did the resilience and
ingenuity of both the killer and the final
girl, and in this essay, I will discuss the role of
women in the contemporary horror film, and
demonstrate how the image of the final girl
has changed with both relation to the slasher
horror film and in the form of the mainstream
Hollywood blockbuster, in the guise of the
action heroine.

The Contemporary Horror Film: From Classic To Slasher
While the classic Universal films such as Dracula and Frankenstein were the first
films to put the genre ‘on the map’, horror films have been around a lot longer.
Early examples from Georges Méliès or the German expressionist films such as, The
Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (Robert Wiene, 1919) or Nosferatu (F.W. Murnau, 1922)
established the conventions from which the later Hollywood productions would
draw, but because of their European origins were largely ignored outside the
United States, where the appeal was for comedy or melodrama.
With the gain in power of the Socialist party under Adolf Hitler in the 1930s, many
German technicians and directors fled to Hollywood. As Tudor has observed, the
horror film and the gangster film were the main beneficiaries of this influx, the
studied compositions, elaborate lighting
techniques
and heavy shadows
(Tudor, 1989: 27)
fitting naturally with the style of the horror film that the studios produced.
Interestingly, Hollywood did not draw it’s inspiration for the classic horror films
from the original novels, but from the stage productions and from ‘the influence of
the circus, the fairground and the freak show’ (Neale, 2000: 98) that were popular
at the time.

With the unprecedented success of the Universal horror films, other studios
produced their own, most notably Freaks (Tod Browning, 1932) and King Kong
(Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack, 1933). While the various studios
produced relatively few horror films during the 1930s, compared to other genres,
they ‘left an indelible mark on the era’ (Balio, 1993: 298-310).
Balio also raised the role of women in these early horror films, particularly in
relation to Dracula, when he observed that the monster
terrorises the surrounding countryside‟
killing „young innocents, particularly
females, who are caught up as potential
victims; [and] the expert… is the only
character capable of
defeating the threat
(ibid.: 299).

From the 1930s to the 1960s, the
emphasis of the horror film developed
from one of an external or ‘foreign’
threat –the vampire or mad scientist was
not only aristocratic, but a foreign
aristocrat- to one of internal and
‘local’. During the 1930s, America felt
threatened from the rise of fascism in
Europe, especially Germany, while after
World War 2, when the cold war was at
it’s greatest,
male and female
scientists joined
forces in opposition
to a… common enemy…
that threatened
humanity in general
and Americans in
particular. It was
a battle for
survival between
civilisation and “the
other”
During the war years of 1942-46, the
horror genre produced less innovative
work, most likely due to the strictures
imposed by the war in Europe and Asia.
Most of the films produced were sequels
or remakes of the
werewolf/vampire/monster films of the
1930s, though films such as Cat People
(Jacques Tourneur, 1942) were among the
first to explore psychological and sexual
themes. Following the end of World War
2, and with the detonation of the atomic
bomb and the race to build more and
better nuclear weapons, the horror film
was subsumed into a horror/science
fiction hybrid, with tales of alien invasion
and radioactive mutations taking over
from the ‘traditional’ horror film, until a
gothic revival through the British
Hammer Studios, with remakes of the
vampire myth such as Dracula (Terence
Fisher, 1958) from the late 1950s
onwards.

In his analysis of over 900 horror films
from 1930-1984, Tudor found that
nearly one third of them –produced
between 1960 and 1984- were
concerned with ‘homicidal
psychosis’, depicting monsters that
were
victims of
overpowering
impulses that well
up from within…
Horror-movie
psychotics [that]
murder, terrorise,
maim and rape
because of some
inner
compulsion, because
the psyche harbours
the dangerous
excesses of human
passion.
The next major development in the
horror genre came with the release of
Psycho, which was considered notable
for two developments: an emphasis of
the role of psychosis in the monster,
rather than an external or supernatural
element, and the transference of
the narrative from the authority figure
to the ‘ordinary person’. Psycho was
also the first film to allude to the rules
of the slasher genre where the roles of
women are concerned and introduced
the ‘final girl’.
The internalisation of the monstrous
threat meant that anyone could be the
monster, inasmuch as anyone could be
the victim –or the hero.

Whether the change in emphasis of the monstrous threat demonstrated a
natural development of the genre (Jancovich, 1996:220-223) or, as Tudor
implies, a radical break in the format and function of horror films (Tudor, 1989),
the bulk of the post 1960s horror films represented the ‘return of the
repressed’ (Wood in Britton, Lippe, et. al., 1979: 17) with it’s concentration on a
threat not only from inside the mind but from within the American community
as a whole. Wood relates the change in the genre to a change in the image of
the American family from the 1930s to the 1970s:
The family (or marital)
comedy in which the Thirties
and Forties are so rich,
turns sour… in the Fifties
and peters out; the family
horror film starts (not, of
course, Without precedents)
with Psycho in 1960, and
gains impetus with Rosemary‟s
Baby and Night of the Living
Dead toward the end of the

By the 1970s, the family became the monster in such films as Texas Chain Saw
Massacre (Tobe Hooper, 1973) and even in contemporary, films where the family is
apparently united, that disruptive element is never far away (The Stepfather, Joseph
Ruben, 1987).
The sense of apocalypse in horror films such as Texas Chain Saw Massacre, was
explored by Wood (Britton, Lippe, et. al.: 1979) and Sharrett (1984), and suggested
that the ‘Age of Aquarius’, when the emphasis on ‘doing your own thing’ was
nearing it’s end and America had suffered from the trauma of losing the war in
Vietnam.
America found itself in an enfeebled
world position, faced with a faltering
economy
(Dika, 1987:97)
and the sense was that
annihilation is inevitable, humanity is
now completely powerless
(Wood in Britton, Lippe, et. al.: 1979:20).

The success of these slasher films
generated a range of sequels, and
derivatives such as the Nightmare on
Elm Street series. Hollywood was not
keen to develop the characters too
far, though, preferring to stick with an
established formula, and the
‘conventional’ slasher movie, became
basically a re-treading of the original
film with the killer terrorising the young
community. Consequently the different
series’ came to be perceived as ‘highly
formulaic and thus
uninteresting’ (Sconce, 1993: 105)
and from a groundbreaking debut with
Halloween, by the time Halloween 4:
The Return of Michael Myers (Dwight H.
Little, 1988) was released, it was
described as ‘a further unnecessary
sequel. Poorly made’, (Halliwell, 1999:
346) and there were still two sequels to
go!
However, the release of Halloween and
Friday the 13th (Sean S. Cunningham,
1980) coincided with the election of
Ronald Reagan in the United States, with a
return to traditional values ‘family,
home, and religion’ (Dika, 1987:98).
The slasher heroine was seen to embody
‘personal restraint’ in ‘sexual matters…
family or professional relationships’ (Ibid.:
98) and as such her actions were valued
over the other characters within the films,
such as the sexually liberal actions of the
victims. Alongside an increase in the
emotional strength and violence of the
final girl in the horror film, there was also
a celebration of the male body in the form
of the action hero, cementing the restored
power of the United States on the world
stage. These two aspects would later be
combined in the form of the action
heroine.

One of the strengths of the early horror films was that the identity of the
killer remained a mystery for most of the narrative, thus increasing the
tension for the spectator, as they possessed knowledge that the characters
within the film were unaware of. For example, the use of the point-of-view
shot from the killers perspective upon an unsuspecting victim reinforced
the
a knowledge on the spectators part
that exceeds that of the characters
under threat of attack
(Neale, 1984:340).
However, in the sequels the identity of the killer was known to the
audience, and while still being masked to the characters in the film, was no
longer hidden by point of view shot, thus depriving the spectator of that
element of threat. It was therefore necessary for the filmmakers to create
new means of providing tension within the audience, as in Aliens (James
Cameron, 1986) where the audience was fully aware of the appearance of
the aliens from the first film. In this instance the aliens were redefined as
an army to be annihilated –as suggested by the tag-line for the film ‘This
Time it’s War’.

In The Terminator (James Cameron,
1984), the slasher film which also
probably started the action movie genre
in the 1980s, the body of the T-101
cyborg, while displaying all of the
characteristics of the slasher movie
killer, is celebrated and fetishised
throughout the film.
However, many of the conventions used
in The Terminator were still that of the
post-Halloween slasher movie, in
particular the victims’ failure to use
violence, the recognition of the final
girl in her plight and the knowledge of
the ‘older’ warrior needed to defeat
the monster.
The Terminator also combined the
ineffectiveness of authority to
recognise the threat of the killer by
portraying the police predominantly as
victims and the psychotherapist as
dismissive of the warrior’s story.

With an emphasis on the killer, after all
the killer goes from film to film. The
teenagers do not
(Sconce, 1993: 113),
in some instances, particularly in the Nightmare on Elm Street films, the killer
became an ‘anti-hero’, being given ‘all the best lines’ and dispatching the victims,
who –apart from the final girl- were reduced to caricatures, in more and interesting
ways. The film makers dropped plot in favour of ‘accelerated perception and
dazzling spectacle’ and ‘intense visual excitement’ (Ibid.: 113-114).
However, despite the change in emphasis the audience was never expected to
identify with the slasher movie killer. With repetition of the story time and again,
the audience became aware of the conventions of the genre and knew that
Freddy, or Jason or Michael, were not unstoppable, no matter how many hapless
young teens were despatched in the process, and that they would be defeated in
the end –until the next in the sequence. In the sequel to The Terminator, however,
like Aliens this was redefined as an action/adventure film, both to distance itself
from it’s origins and also to reflect the change in the star image of Schwarzenegger,
who by this time was hailed as an action hero.

Many of the slasher movie franchises eventually lost their ability to thrill and
became repetitive in their narrative, or fell back on previously used narrative
techniques (for example, the survival of Michael Myers in Halloween 5: The
Revenge of Michael Myers (Dominique Othen-Girard, 1989), in falling down a hole
and escaping through an underwater stream, is derived from the scene of the
survival of Frankenstein’s monster in Bride of Frankenstein (James Whale, 1935). It
was not until Scream (Wes Craven, 1996), that the elements of the slasher film
were taken and brought up to date literally, as script writer Kevin Williamson has
said, because he ‚loved the idea of exposing the conventions of the
genre.‛ Scream extensively used the conventions that earlier films had
established, and while there was little further development in the character of the
final girl: Sidney was still ambivalent to sex and her 'PG-13' relationship with her
boyfriend reflected Laurie Strode's own inability or unwillingness to arrange a date
for a dance in Halloween 20 years before. However, the film was the first to
portray the killer suffering from assault throughout the film and Scream may be
considered to be the 1990s equivalent of Psycho, developing a new direction and
revitalising the genre.

…those commercial feature
films which, through
repetition, and variation,
tell familiar stories with
familiar characters in
familiar situations. They
also encourage expectations
and experiences similar to
those of similar films we
have already seen.
(Grant, 1986:xi).
Genre, The Slasher Movie And Action Cinema
When we are ‘establishing a genre’ (Kolker, 1999:104), we are creating
a pattern by which other films within that genre may be made. I have already
considered how the various generic elements of the slasher movie:
killer, victims, final girl and so forth, have arisen –and how the horror genre
itself evolved from the classic supernatural texts of the 1930s to the
psychotic horror texts of the 1960s and beyond, but I would like to look
at how a study of genre can aid in my discussion of the development of the
final girl as action heroine.

Like other genres, the horror film often displays ‘intertextuality’, overlapping
with other genres, such as science fiction, or other cultural forms, such as
books and graphic novelisations, to provide variations of the theme. Indeed,
providing a new direction and continually defamiliarising the audience is
essential in keeping a genre vital in the eyes of that audience, be it cinematic or
literary.
However, by creating a pattern,
it is easier and cheaper to turn out
many versions of the same pattern than
reinvent a new one
(Kolker, 1999:104-5)
and one of the difficulties with the franchise horror film, as has already been
discussed, was that by providing only minor variations on the theme, or simply
copying scenes from previous films, apathy was quickly generated within the
horror audience.

One of the developments that occurred
in the transformation of Ripley
from the final girl of Alien to the
action heroine of Aliens, was the
recognition that a female could
successfully adopt the action hero
role and make it her own.
While at the time the presentation of a
female action heroine disturbed some
within Hollywood, Ripley was not seen
as transgressive by the
audience, indeed the film was the most
successful of all of the series and a
recognition of the change in ‘social and
historical forces’ is also vital for the
development of a genre.
A more successful series was created
from Alien (Ridley Scott, 1979). The
original film, in 1979, was a slasher
movie, the unidentified monster
picking off the crew of the Nostromo
one by one. However, the second
film in the series, Aliens was a
‘barnstorming’ action movie. As
Flanagan observed,
whereas Alien
capitalised on the
horror boom of the
late 1970s and
early 1980s, the
market had changed
by 1986. The
horror genre,
represented by
such lamentable
efforts as Friday
the 13th Part VI:
Jason Lives… was

While the repetition of particular themes
and motifs within a genre suggests that
they are static, they are actually
continually evolving, and should be
understood as ‘processes’ (Neale,
1990:45). As Neale argues, while
these processes may,
for sure, be
dominated by
repetition… they are
also marked
fundamentally by
difference, variation
and change
(Ibid.: 56)
and each new ‘genre film’ will add a new element or transgress an older one.
Whenever a new variation on the theme of an established genre comes along, it is
often described as ‘postmodern’, in that it is challenging the established
conventions of a genre. But postmodernity itself is only temporary and will
become subsumed into the dominant ideological and cultural form. As Jean-
Françios Lyotard says, postmodernity is
part of the modern… a work can become
modern
only if it is first postmodern
(Lyotard, 1984:79).

One way for a genre to develop is to hybridise with other genres, or
become subsumed by them. Neale discusses this in relation to the Russian
Formalist tradition when he argues that genres are ‘embedded’ not only
within the
generic formations, but of wider
cultural formations as well
and that one dominant genre may be displaced by another. The role of the
‘dominant’, as expressed by the Formalists, was
a formal organisational principle
around which other structures in the
work cluster
and may be represented as
a set of conventions common to many
films
(Thompson, 1981:34).

Thus as a genre such as the slasher horror film has changed, it is subjected
to a ‘sequence of rivalries’ (Jauss, cited in Neale, 1990: 58) that
marks its readjustment from one form to another. In the case of the horror
film, and in particular the slasher horror film, the dominant form was to
adjust the actions of the final girl from one of passive defence to one of
attack, taking the violence to the killer and becoming subsumed into an
emerging generic form, the action blockbuster.
Those slasher films that continued to pursue the ‘conventional’ slasher form
and narrative were also influenced by the emerging action film, becoming
‘highly formulaic and uninteresting’ (Sconce, 1993:105).

Consequently, while the slasher horror film became ‘thin on plot and heavy on
special effects’ (Ibid.: 105) the action film became the dominant cinematic
form throughout much of the 1980s and 1990s, making stars from pumped-up
action heroes like Schwarzenegger, Willis and Stallone, and reflecting, as many
believe, the dominant ideological form of the day –as expressed by Reaganism or
Thatcherism, where the emphasis was on the development of the individual,
rather than a recognition of community. The development of the female action
hero also continued through the eighties and nineties, in the form of Sigourney
Weaver as ‘Ripley’ in the Alien series and Linda Hamilton as ‘Sarah Connor’ in
Terminator 2: Judgement Day (James Cameron, 1991). Other action heroines to
make an impact were Geena Davies (Cutthroat Island (Renny Harlin, 1995) and
The Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlin, 1996)) and Angela Bassett (Strange Days,
Kathryn Bigelow, 1995)).
The slasher movie then recaptured the final girl as action heroine in Scream,
which provided two ‘arse-kicking female protagonists’ (Hills, 1999:38) in the
form of Neve Campbell and Courtney Cox.

Hailed as a postmodern horror film,
Scream was notable for being very ‘self-
conscious’ in its selection of stars and in
it’s use of intertextuality. Courtney Cox
was originally famous for her role in the
highly successful television series, Friends,
and Neve Campbell and other younger
stars of the film were well known for their
roles on American television and in
situation comedies. The use of ‘self-
consciousness’ in films therefore provides
another source of the interrelationship
between the text and popular culture.
Scream also redefined the role of the
victims firstly in allowing them to use
violence against the killer for the first time
and also using intertextuality to
define the status of the victim.
For example, in the narrative of
Scream, Drew Barrymore, the first
victim, was not coded by her
behaviour as the archetypal slasher
victim -she was merely going to watch
a horror movie with her boyfriend.
However, the audience would know
from readings of the actress’s life that
although the innocent of E.T. The Extra-
Terrestrial (Steven Spielberg, 1981),
Barrymore was also formerly a drug
addict and alcoholic in her
Hollywood lifestyle, thus making her
more ‘acceptable’ as a victim. Scream
also used a plot device first used in The
Slumber Party Massacre (Amy Holden
Jones, 1982) presenting a number of
‘final girls’ working in concert to
destroy the threat.

In revitalising the slasher genre, Scream
led to several other inferior slasher movies –
using the same device with teen T.V. stars to
carry the narrative. The renewed interest in
teen horror was also seen on television, with
the small screen version of Buffy The Vampire
Slayer making a star of Sarah Michel Gellar
(who also appeared in a cameo role as a victim
in Scream 2 (Wes Craven, 1997) –itself a
parodic reflection of her vampire butt-kicking
personality in Buffy).
The introduction of the first overtly aggressive
final girls (in Scream 2, Sidney, Neve
Campbell, takes a gun and shoots the killer
between the eyes ‘just to make sure’, a
scenario that would not have been
contemplated by final girls from the 1970s
slasher movies) brings us to Halloween: H20
(Steve Miner, 1998), which I consider to be a
turning point for the next generation of horror
films.

The Slasher Film And The ‘Final Girl’
Don't you know the rules?
There are certain rules that
one must abide by in order
to successfully survive a
horror movie…
(Scream, 1996)
Clover’s analysis of the slasher film and Dika’s consideration of the generic
elements of the early slasher films (Dika, 1987) established the ‘rules’ by
which the various characters in the films are allowed to perform. There are
two communities within the horror film, the family and authority (the
‘old’ community) and the young community and the killer, which Dika
described as an ingroup/outgroup division (ibid.: 92). The family and authority
are ineffective in the typical horror film, often denying the threat exists until it
is too late, or simply being unprepared for it, leaving the young community
isolated and forced to defend itself.

In turn, the young community is divided into three sections: the victims,
who are unable to defend themselves or are aware of the threat, the
killer, who is ‘a relic from and earlier time that has now returned to
disrupt the present stability of the young community’ (Ibid.: 93), and the
heroine. It is only the heroine who perceives the threat and is able to use
violence to protect herself from it –and defeat the killer.
The typical narrative of a slasher horror film is as follows: in a
period prior to the start of the story, an event happens that
traumatises the killer, perhaps concerned with the ‘old’ community
when they were young (in Friday The 13th, Jason Vorhees drowns
at a summer camp due to the inattention of his minders, or in A
Nightmare on Elm Street (Wes Craven, 1984), a vigilante mob
comprised of the young communities’ families kill paedophile
Freddy Krueger). Years later, an event resurrects the homicidal
impulses of the killer, who returns to the scene of the traumatic
event and stalks and kills members of the young community. The
threat is eventually recognised by the heroine (in some instances
only when everyone else in the young community has been killed -
for example Halloween, Friday The 13th or Texas Chain Saw
Massacre) who fights the killer and eventually defeats him.

Dika observed that although the killer has been defeated, the threat to the heroine is
not removed. The killer is often not killed outright but only ‘subdued’ and able to
return to kill again (especially if the series is popular and enjoys good box-office
revenue) and the heroine is forced to face a renewed threat (as in Halloween 2 (Rick
Rosenthal, 1981)), or the narrative turned over to a new young community. The
heroines in all slasher horror movies share certain traits, summarised by Clover as the
‘final girl’ (Clover, 1992: 35-41). On the whole, the final girl is resourceful and
resilient. She also shares more screen time than most of the other characters and we
are aware that she recognises the threat while the other characters, obviously coded
as victims, do not.
The final girl is also able to use violence to escape from the threat, fighting back in a
way that the victims were unable to do. Whereas the other members of the young
community are despatched quickly, and the female victims are made to suffer for
longer than their male counterparts, the final girl
lives with the knowledge [of her possible
death
for long minutes or hours
(Clover, 1992: 35).
However, in the early slasher horror movies the final girl was not able to defeat the
killer herself, this was still left to the members of the old community, or by good
fortune –as in Texas Chainsaw Massacre, where Sally is rescued by a passing motorist.

Drawing from antecedents such as Psycho, Black Christmas (Bob Clark, 1975) and
Texas Chain Saw Massacre, Halloween is acknowledged to have been the first film
to self-consciously take the generic elements of the slasher film and place them into
a simple story: psychotic killer (Michael Myers) escapes from a mental
institution and returns to the scene of his old crime. This film also established the
development of the final girl from displaying passive defence, where the heroine
escapes by luck or the intervention of an external force, to a position of active
defence. Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) was able to fashion weapons of her own,
though she was limited to household objects: knives, knitting needles and
clothes hangers, in her fight against Michael Myers. However, she was still not able
to kill Michael herself, which in Halloween was left to Sam Loomis (Donald
Pleasance), or the police or other authority figures in the later instalments of the
franchise.
Following Halloween, while the killers became more ferocious,
the final girl needed to become more resilient and resourceful.
In Friday The 13th, Annie confronts the killer, Mrs. Vorhees,
though she is not portrayed as a psychotic/supernatural threat
like Halloween’s Michael (or Jason Vorhees in the Friday
sequels), and able to decapitate her (with the police
showing up once everything is over).

In Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 (Tobe Hooper, 1986), Stretch actually
‘becomes’ the monster, forced in one scene to wear the skinned face of her
colleague L.G. to dance with Leatherface, and later taking possession of a
chainsaw herself and attacking ‘Chop Top’, the survivor of her battle with
the cannibalistic Sawyer family with it.
Perhaps the most obvious merging of the monster with the final girl is
shown in Alien Resurrection (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 1997), where the DNA of a
cloned Ripley is merged with that of the alien, making her
faster, stronger and more monstrous than both the aliens and the other
human characters, who would typically be expected to be coded as victims.
Indeed, as Linton commented,
there is nothing in the formula of
the genre that points to these two
[Johner and Vriessas] the humans most
likely to survive; they are not the
best looking, nor the most
sympathetic, nor the most essential
to the mission
(Linton, 1999:177).

In her critique of the female role in the contemporary horror film, Barbara
Creed addressed the role of the monstrous feminine, an ‘analysis of the
representation of woman as monstrous in the horror film’ (Creed, 1993:7). Using
the process of ‘abjection’, Creed proposed that in horror films,
the monstrous is produced at the border
between human and inhuman, man and
beast… normal and supernatural, good and
evil
(Ibid.: 10).Creed’s argument, that the female could be represented as
an active, terrifying fury, a
powerfully, abject figure,
and a castrating monster
is certainly reflected in Alien:Resurrection. Here Ripley is presented more as a
hybrid between the action heroine that the character became in Aliens and
the alien monster that she was fighting against since it’s appearance in the
first of the series some 18 years before. While her action and behaviour
reflects this hybridity, her dress, a one-piece leather suit, also reduces the
humanity of the character. In becoming the ‘monsters mother’, she has
also become more monstrous herself, a representation also seen in the
portrayal of several other final girl characters.

The representation of the young community has been the source of much
comment and criticism. While accepting that the victims are from the young
community, the gender of the victims have remained questionable. Clover
has insisted that while the gender of the victim may be either male or female
(in Halloween for example the victims are two couples and an unknown male
truck driver), the emphasis was given over to the fate of the female victim,
sharing longer screen time in their death than the male victim and their
extending their suffering (Clover, 1992: 33).
In one sequence in Halloween:H20, although the female victim is
terrorised and made to suffer, when her boyfriend is killed we only see
the aftermath of the murder –the discovery of his body. In Texas Chainsaw
Massacre: The Next Generation (Kim Henkel, 1995), the sole female victim is
tortured throughout the film, being locked in a freezer, hung from a hook,
beaten, set on fire and finally crushed! The major difference between the
victims and the heroine is that the victims are portrayed as transgressive
in some way –for example they are either sexually active or trespass
somewhere that puts them in the way of the killer, whereas the heroine does
not fulfil these roles –the killer chases after her.

scopophila, looking for pleasure,
Mulvey argued that the look may be associated with fetishism or desire,
and the look of the male hero is de-eroticised and passed over to the
female characters, reflecting the control that the male exerts on the image
by actions, cinematography etc. Hence the gaze of the heroine upon the
killer reduces his, and likewise the audiences, identification with him and
confers greater authority upon the heroine.
In her paper 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative
Cinema' Laura Mulvey explores three aspects
of looking in the cinema:
identification with the image,
and
the actions of the characters as they look upon each other.

In this psychoanalytical discussion of the gaze, Mulvey argues that the
power of the gaze is male –the active form- and is passed to that of the female
–the passive form. However, in a follow-up to her paper ‘Afterthoughts…’ (in
Kaplan, 1990), Mulvey proposes that the female heroine –and the female
spectator- submits to
an oscillation between “passive”
femininity
and aggressive “masculinity”
(Mulvey, 1990: 31).
Hence, it is only while the final girl is taking on the aggressive role in attacking
and defeating the killer that she is moving the narrative forward. Once the killer
is defeated, she ‘reverts’ to the ‘traditional’ female role, the (male) authorities
turn up and the story is resolved. The narration cannot move further forward
and must be brought to a swift conclusion. For example, in Alien, once the alien
is killed Ripley retires to her sleeping capsule clutching Jonesy, the cat. In
Halloween, Laurie is left crying and hugging herself on the stairs and while in
Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2, once Stretch –‘a white trash bitch with a chain saw’
(Halberstam, 1995:143)- has killed the last surviving member of the cannibalistic
Sawyer family, she is left madly waving the weapon above her head as the movie
fades to the credits.

While the male victims also fall under the power of the gaze of the killer, they
receive a swift death and shorter screen time, whereas the look of the female
victim is presented as ‘I-camera’ from the point of view of the killer. This has been
read as placing the audience in the position of the male killer, and the male
spectator, thus reinforcing the superiority of the male over the female, leading to
readings of mysogyinism against slasher horror films, that because of their
sexual behaviour the female victims are being punished for not conforming to ‘the
traditional role for women within a patriarchal society’ (Jancovich, 1992: 105).
However, by presenting the killing of a woman from an unidentified killers point of
view, I believe the audience is implicated more fully in the fate of the female
victim, and suffers that much more for it.
Clover argues that the gaze of the final girl upon the killer is in direct opposition to
that of classical Hollywood cinema, where the female is always the recipient of the
male gaze as described by Mulvey. She suggests that
the female exercise of scopic control
results not in her annihilation, in the
manner of classic cinema, but in her
triumph; indeed her triumph depends upon
her assumption of the gaze
(Clover, 1992:60).

But if an audience identifies with characters depending on their own gender
and sexuality, so in a slasher horror film, if the protagonist is female, how will
a predominantly heterosexual male audience react?
In order to confront this issue, which has featured prominently in much
feminist discourse in the slasher movie debate, Clover has argued that while
the final girl is feminine, she is not completely so. Her dress is often
ambiguous -trousers or jeans and a shirt an her name is masculine (Laurie,
Stretch, Sidney -from Scream- or Ripley -from Alien). She is also sexually
inhibited, or sexually inactive, compared to other characters, who are usually
coded as victims.
She argues that a male audience will support a female in peril to a greater
degree than a male, and that a female protagonist provides an emotional
buffer that allows the males in the audience to "explore taboo subjects" that
they would not otherwise enjoy. By taking this position, Clover is suggesting
that the final girl is not female, but a girl in drag –a surrogate male.

For the final girl, the point of view is reversed, she is able to face the killer
and take away the power of his gaze, giving her the strength to use violence
against him (the majority of movie psychotics are male of course, adding to
the claims of misogyny, the few exceptions including Mrs Vorhees in Friday the
13th and, ironically, Jamie Lee Curtis in Mother’s Boys (Yves Simoneu, 1994)).
However, this has also been challenged by feminist writers in that it is said
that the final girl is punished for daring to look at the killer, her look paralyses
the final girl into inactivity allowing the killer to master the look and chase her,
before redoubling her strength for the final attack (Williams, 1993:87). This is
articulated very well in Halloween:H20 where, after rescuing her son John from
the clutches of Michael Myers, Laurie Strode gazes in horror at Michael, frozen
into immobilitity and missing the opportunity to shoot him with the gun she
is carrying.

This perspective has been challenged by Pinedo (1999), Dika
(1987) and Jancovich (1992b, 11) who observe that while
[t]he audience for the stalker film
is overwhelmingly young… these
films of excessive violence against
women found an audience that was 55
percent female
(Dika, 1987:87).
So in this instance, writers who have assumed that the predominant
audience for the slasher film is male, and adopting the
psychoanalytical argument of lack, based on the Freudian notion of
female castration, may not find this to be truly applicable to the final
girl. Why would an equal number of female spectators watch these
films when the target audience is male? We also find in the slasher
genre, there are just as many heroines that are clearly not male –
‘Nancy’ in A Nightmare on Elm Street, ‘Annie’ in Friday The 13th, and
so forth, so an argument for the androgyny of the female hero must
only be part of the overall picture.

Rather than arguing in favour of ‘lack’ in allowing the female heroine to take on the
‘traditional’ male mantle, an alternative argument may be one of
‘empowerment’. In Screen, Hills took issue with feminist writers taking the
psychoanalytical approach, such as Creed and Clover, to suggest that the difficulty of
theorists accepting a female action heroine was that they were approaching the
concept from a position of ‘binaristic logic’ and that
psychoanalytic accounts… theorise sexual
difference within the framework of linked
binary oppositions (active male/passive
female)
(Hills, 1999:38).
Taking this ‘negative’ approach, rather than applauding the positive, has greatly
limited the options of feminist writers –who must argue for strong female characters
from the position of being castrated males, thus allowing the male to identify with
them while not feeling that their own patriarchal position is being threatened. Hills, on
the other hand, using the writings of Deleuze and Guattari, argues that the final girl –
and the action heroine- is able to ‘adapt to change’ and to
experiment with new modes of being and the
ability to transform
herself in the process

Hills states that the final girl is able to adapt –thus ensuring her survival-
in ways which the other characters, and in particular the victims, are not.
This ‘becoming’ is emphasised as being independent of what the body is
composed of –it is, as Deleuze calls it, a
Body Without Organs
and the emphasis is therefore on what it can do rather than what it is.
To use Hills’ own example, rather than using Freud’s hypothesis where a
knife (or a gun) in the hand of the final girl is a
fixed referent for the phallus… it
can be understood as part of a
machinic connection: a woman‟s hand
forming an assemblage with a gun
(Ibid.: 44).

The distancing of the body from its composition to its capabilities, as Deleuze
argues
we do not even know what a body can do
(Deleuze, 1989:189),
allows the action heroine to be
imagined outside the notions of
„passive‟, „lack‟ and „other‟
(Hills, 1999: 45).
In using violence against the threat that has killed her friends and colleagues,
this not to say that the final girl is ‘imitating’ or ‘becoming’ a male but that she
is adapting herself to a new situation, one that ensures her own survival. As
Rodowick observes in his investigation of the work of Deleuze:
To establish a successful line of flight
means not only recognising a power that
must be evaded, but knowing its forces
and potentialities well enough to
formulate strategies of evasion and
creation

Hence in the development of the action heroine, as we have seen from Ripley in
the Alien series, Sarah Connor in The Terminator films or in the original final girl role
of Laurie Strode in Halloween, Halloween 2 and Halloween: H20, in order to survive
the action heroine must recognise her position and adapt her situation.
An alternative psychoanalytical reading of the development of the final girl to
the action heroine was that argued by Iaccino (1994), using the Jungian models of
anima and animus. Jung proposed that each genders psyche is a mixture of
masculine and feminine, that
the very essence of a man‟s soul was so
dominated by the anima that, through his
dreams and fantasies, the unconscious
feminine side could take on a more
personified form
(Iaccino, 1994:129).
Similarly, the female mind is dominated by the animus that is able to express itself
as ‘masculine projections… in her conscious life’ (Iaccino, 1994:129). However,
because the dominant form in the man is masculine, and that of the woman
feminine, the anima and animus remain ‘submerged’ in the unconscious.

In his analysis of Halloween, Halloween 2 and the Alien series, Iaccino suggests
that while in both Halloween and Alien, the final girls –Laurie and Ripley- are
able to defeat the killer (though Laurie only with the aid of Dr. Loomis), Laurie
is more innocent and less ‘animus-assertive’ than Ripley, who recognises the
threat from the alien at an early stage and tries to counter it. However, in
both Halloween 2 and Aliens, Laurie and Ripley do recognise the threat and
are able to assert their own masculine animus in their battle against the evil
forces that are threatening them. The advantage of using a Jungian analysis
over a binaristic Freudian argument is that Jung, like Deleuze, can accept
empowerment in the actions of the final girl
from the initial martyr-
victim to a budding
warrior figure to a full-
blown Amazonian with
feminine elements
(Iaccino, 1994:143)

The Final Girl As Action Heroine
Combined with a recognition in the development of the female action role that
was created in the 1980s, Halloween:H20 jettisoned much of the narrative that
occurred in the series since Halloween 2, the only exception being to use the
idea raised in Halloween 4 that Laurie Strode was ‘killed’ in a car accident to
protect her from Michael Myers. Laurie is now 'Keri Tate', the headmistress of a
private school in California. Divorced and with a son, John (Josh Hartnett), who
she protects ferociously, Laurie/Keri is preparing to close the school for the
holidays. Once the school is closed, the students are sent to summer
camp, which in itself is a reversal of the normal slasher movie conventions, of
course: summer camps are normally a haven for the psychotic killer. Before
they go, Laurie/Keri tells the students: ‚no musical sleeping bags, no
booze, no drugs‛, all things that would typically get them killed in a slasher
movie. So no one is left at the school except for Laurie, Will Brennan (the school
counsellor and Laurie's boyfriend) John, his girlfriend and two friends. In the
meantime, Michael -who actually survived an attempt to kill him 20 years
earlier- has discovered where Laurie is living and is looking for her.

Both the horror film and the action film
are very reliant on the display of
the body. In both genres we see the
body being assaulted and both the
hero(ine) and killer are continually
under attack. In Halloween: H20, there
is acknowledgement of the role of the
body, associated with the look,
which first emerged during the 1980s
and was subsequently subsumed into
the action pictures that have
dominated mainstream cinema ever
since.
Originally seen as the embodiment of
‘fascist idealisation of the white male
body’ (Tasker, 1993:1), the male action
hero grew out of the new Hollywood
blockbusters such as Jaws (Steven
Spielberg, 1975), Star Wars (George Lucas,
1977) and the unanticipated success of
The Terminator, which also launched the
career of the most successful action hero,
Arnold Schwarzenegger.
One of the first overtly female action heroines was Brigitte Nielsen in Red Sonja
(Richard Fleischer, 1985), alongside Arnold Schwarzenegger. Some feminist readings of
these films are to explore the sexuality of the character. For example, Tasker’s reading
of Red Sonja is that Sonja is attempting to re-establish a ‘normal’ sexual identity
(Tasker, 1993:30) after the rejection of the advances of the villainness Gedren. By
‘masculinising’ her body, she is challenging the male hero (Schwarzenegger) to beat
her in a fair fight before he can establish a heterosexual relationship with her.

The pumped-up body of the action hero(ine) in the fantasy films, and the
later action texts was also read as linking the display of the body to the
ideological and political establishment. Jeffords argued that the display of the
body was central to ‘popular culture and national identity *on the one hand+
while, on the other to articulate how the polarisation’s of the body altered
during the years of the Reagan and Bush presidencies’ (Jeffords, 1994:13). Her
argument was that:
whereas the Reagan years offered
the image of the „hard body‟ to
contrast directly to the „soft
body‟ of the Carter years, the
late 1980s and early 1990s saw a…
rearticulation of masculine
strength and power through
internal, personal and family-
oriented values.
(Ibid.: 13)
The fetishisation of the body as utilised in the depiction of the action heroine,
generated much discussion in the final scenes of Alien where, after undressing, Ripley is
cornered in a cupboard in the shuttle of the destroyed space-tug Nostromo. As in much
feminist discourse, the argument has taken two diverging paths, one that Ripley’s
power is reduced by making her the object of the erotic gaze of the male spectator
(Newton, 1990, Jennings, 1995) the other that although cornered Ripley is still able to
adapt to her situation and defeat the alien (Hills, 1999, Tasker, 1993).

But why do we see the overt development of the final girl into the action hero role
in late 1990s horror texts like Halloween: H20? By this time, the pumped-up
action hero role of the 1980s had been superseded by the ‘new man’ of the
1990s, again first recognised by Schwarzenegger in action hero parodies like Last
Action Hero (John McTiernan, 1993). During the Clinton years, the action hero
became more ‘self effacing’, a hero who ‘instead of learning to fight, learns to
love’ (Jeffords, 1993:245). This is not to say that the action hero(ine) is returning
to the ‘soft body’ of the 1970s, but that they are combining strength with
empathy.
At the same time the female roles have become stronger, more independent
and in a range of texts, from Terminator 2: Judgement Day to Pitch Black (David
Twohy, 2000), the traditional action hero (Schwarzenegger in the former, Vin
Diesel in the latter) steps back, to let a female action heroine take control of
the situation. However, in each of these films, patriarchal superiority is re-
established in that the action heroine cannot defeat the threat without the action
hero's assistance.

There is also a re-articulation of the action heroine role in Halloween:H20, and
I would suggest this is a case of the maturity of the action heroine/final girl. The
final girl has ceased to be an innocent teenager, Laurie/Keri is 40 years old,
divorced, tortured daily by her experience and a 'functioning alcoholic'. Like the
action hero of the 1980s, the female heroine of the 1990s is a flawed character,
an outsider from her own community. In this Laurie/Keri poses an interesting
comparison to the slasher films of the 1970s and 1980s. In the earlier situations,
the killer and the final girl are from the same young community, with the older
community proving ineffective against the threat. In Halloween:H20, there are two
‘young’ communities, that of Laurie’s son John and his friends, and that of Laurie
and Michael. However, it is left both to the counsellor, the security guard in the
school and to John to act as the ‘older’ community, first disbelieving that a
threat exists, then proving ineffective in combating the threat (John is wounded and
the counsellor is killed).
Consequently there is no room for Laurie to behave like a teenager, she cannot run
and hide from her attacker, but must take the initiative, to fight and protect her
son. A Jungian analysis would also suggest that as she gets older the masculine
animus is asserting more dominance and projecting through to her conscious
life.

The maternal influence runs very strongly through the horror/action
movie canon, particularly when the protagonist is female. In Halloween,
Laurie is a baby sitter, in Alien, Ripley risks her own life to save the cat and
later in Aliens to save the little girl, Newt (in Alien: Resurrection where she is
closer to the aliens than the humans, she refers to herself as ‘the
monsters mother’). One notable exception is the role of
Schwarzeneggar as John Matrix in Commando (Mark L. Lester, 1985). At the
beginning of this film, he is seen being the perfect father to his daughter,
playing games, fetching ice cream and so on. When she is kidnapped, he
uses his special forces training to rescue her (killing several hundred bad
guys along the way). Here the action movie departs from the horror film in
that the hero(ine) is generally associated with the forces of authority,
such as the police (Die Hard (John McTiernan, 1988 or Lethal Weapon
(Richard Donner, 1987)) or the security forces (The Long Kiss Goodnight or
Predator (John McTiernan, 1987)).

The development of the final girl as action hero has still not enabled the
character to take an active sexual role, for that would allow the killer to attack
and possibly kill her. While clearly sexually active, Laurie/Keri has a seventeen
year-old son and a relationship with the school counsellor, throughout
Halloween: H20, Laurie/Keri remained sexually inactive, the only opportunity
for sex being interrupted by the realisation that Michael was not after her, but
John. However, while resisting the change to make the final girl into a final
boy, killing off Laurie and letting John defeat Michael, Halloween: H20 was the
first slasher horror to allow the final girl to move from a position of active
defence to attack. Although in Friday the 13th Annie was able to decapitate
Mrs. Vorhees, she was continually on the defensive and took up the weapon
only in order to defend herself from aggression. Similarly while the first final girl
to show aggressive tendencies towards the killer was Ripley in Aliens, by this
time the series had moved into the action genre. However, the Alien series
never moved too far from its horror roots –especially in Alien3 (David
Fincher, 1992) which attempted to return the slasher franchise to an outer
space prison colony. In Halloween:H20, though, Laurie did not run from Michael
–except when she lost her own weapons- but searched for him during the films
climactic scenes and continually assaulted his body.

Employing a mature action heroine
brought the genre full circle back to
Psycho, for the characters in Psycho were
not teenagers but adults, able to control
their own destiny. References to Psycho
are very prevalent in Halloween:H20,
from the casting of Janet Leigh (Marion
Crane, the first slasher victim) in the role
of the school secretary to references
to showers, the appearance of Marion’s
car, and so forth. While this may be an
attempt to distance the film from the
‘teenie-pic’ connotations of the 1980s
slasher film and position the film on a
more serious critical level, the knowing
use of popular cultural references,
particularly in the horror film, connote a
further element of the self-
consciousness that these films
portray.
The display of the body of the action
heroine raises once again the subject
of the gaze. Mulvey’s positioning of
the active male/passive female
argument in relation to the male
action hero has been that any notion
of eroticism is displaced by subjecting
the male body to continued assault in
‘ritualised scenes of conflict’ (Tasker,
1993:115). In his study of ‘masculinity
as spectacle’, Neale acknowledges that
while the male body may be filmed
erotically –he uses Rock Hudson as the
subject in melodramas, which may be
considered by some for a
predominantly female audience- the
body of the male action hero is marked
not by eroticism but by ‘fear, or hatred,
or aggression’ (Neale, 1993:18).

The action heroine is also presented in a similar way, any former erotic look
deflected onto the suffering that she endures during the narrative. In The
Long Kiss Goodnight, for example, Samantha Caine (Geena Davis), has a family
and is filmed as the subject of a male gaze, her performance as ‘Mrs Santa
Clause’ in the town pageant eroticised by the commentary of the TV reporter.
However, once she regains her lost memory, as Charlie Baltimore she not only
disowns her previous identity (‘look what she did to my behind?’) but becomes
androgynous in looks, with heavy make-up and a thick parka, and by the suffering
that she is subjected to in her battle with the villain played by Craig Bierko.
In Halloween:H20, Jamie Lee Curtis only wears feminine clothes while acting as
the headmistress of the school. Once all of the students have been despatched
to summer camp, she reverts to a T-shirt and trousers, thus reducing any display
of femininity. During her battle with Michael, she is attacked and, like the action
hero(ine) the object of the gaze is not on her body but on her actions.

In her critique of the action movie, Yvonne Tasker introduced the psychoanalytical
term of 'homeovestism' (Tasker, 1993:128-129), defined as
a perverse behaviour involving wearing
clothes of the same sex.
The action hero, male or female, adopts a similar costume, designed to show their
body to the best, so that the audience can bear witness to the brutality they
receive yet at the same time admire them.
Compare the costume worn by Schwarzenegger in Commando or Willis in Die
Hard, with that worn by Geena Davis in The Long Kiss Goodnight, Linda Hamilton
in Terminator 2, and Laurie/Keri during the climax of Halloween: H20.

The costume of the female action hero was also represented by the ‘little
black dress', first popularised by Anne Parrillaud in Nikita (Luc Besson,
1990) and the vampire horror film Innocent Blood (John Landis, 1992). Jamie
Lee Curtis used this costume for her own action movie role in True Lies
(James Cameron, 1994), and this was also used in the publicity poster for
Halloween: H20, silhouetted against Michael's mask, though she never wore
the costume in the film.
In True Lies, for the better part of the narrative she was portrayed as
Schwarzenegger’s long-suffering wife and a secretary in a law firm. At first
tricked by Bill Paxton –a con man posing as a spy- when she is ‘recruited’ by
Schwarzenegger to play at being a spy she converts the dowdy gown she was
wearing into the ‘little black dress’ of the female spy. Once in this dress, she
is ‘empowered’ to behave as the action heroine, using a gun and fighting
with the villainess. However, this being a Schwarzenegger film, once rescued
she is restored to the position of passive rather than active form and takes
little participation in the remainder of the narrative.

Much as a Schwarzenegger film like True Lies can
be assumed to contain action, spectacle and
violence, by donning the action hero costume in
Halloween: H20 Jamie Lee Curtis is informing
us that we should expect much the same. It also
confirms that the role of final girl, traditionally
that of a victim-hero, is now coded as an action
hero. So we should not be surprised that in the
last act of Halloween:H20, when the final girl is
facing her most desperate time, Laurie/Keri
should take the fight to Michael, tracking him
down and meting out as much violence to him as
she can. The Laurie of Halloween, who was
overtly coded as the victim, could never have
considered such acts. Indeed, no longer does the
original final girl show fear, but in her
determined destruction of Michael Myers, the
adult Laurie Strode actually relished the
experience.

While many of the actors in the low
budget slasher horror films of the 1970s
and 1980s were unknown at the time
the films were made, a strategy both to
minimise the cost of the films and to
disavow spectator identification with a
character coded as a victim, the final girl
was often a higher profile actor, for
example Linda Blair in Hell Night (Tom de
Simone, 1981) or Jamie Lee Curtis in
Halloween. In Curtis’ case, it was her
relationship to Janet Leigh and Tony
Curtis that secured her the role. Aside
from the late nineties regeneration of the
genre, the low budget horror films of the
1970s were treated in a similar manner to
pornography by mainstream Hollywood
and once an actor was established in the
genre, they were considered to be
suitable only for other horror roles.
Jamie Lee Curtis: Scream Queen To Action Heroine
A star image is composed of several
different ‘media texts’, summarised
as
‘promotion, publicity, films, criticism
and commentaries’ (Dyer, 1998:60)
and these elements position the
actress in the audience’s psyche. By
coding stars according to the roles
that they play, Curtis’ presence in
several horror movies during the
1970s and early 1980s ‘connoted
strength and power gleaned from
her own previous appearances in
these films’ (Dika, 1987:91), allowing
the film makers to use her image to
promote their product.
Consequently, unable to secure
mainstream roles, Curtis became
known as the ‘scream
queen’, always appearing as the
heroine.

Curtis’ first non-horror role was as the
Playboy model Dorothy Stratten in
Death of A Centrefold (Gabrielle
Beaumont, 1981). Her portrayal led
to her receiving the nickname of ‘the
body’ and provided her break into
the mainstream as the kindly
prostitute in the Eddie Murphy
comedy vehicle Trading Places (John
Landis, 1983). The emphasis on the
body in the 1980s was also reflected
in culture and society that marked
Reaganism, and Curtis’ subsequent
role in Perfect (James Bridges, 1985),
as an aerobics instructor
acts [for]… the
aggressive fitness
culture which
emerged during the
decade
(McDonald, 1998:182).
The positioning of Curtis’ role as ‘the body’
may be seen as re-evaluating the actor for
a role in mainstream cinema, in the
conventional passive position as the
recipient of the male gaze -presenting her
as an object to be looked at. While this
was very much in evidence in her role in A
Fish Called Wanda (Charles
Crichton, 1988), as Megan in Blue Steel
(1990), director Kathryn Bigelow used her
horror star persona to transform Curtis into
an action heroine. Cast as a rookie police
officer, the film played with both the
conventions of the horror genre, in
presenting Curtis as an androgynous final
girl, using the police uniform to mask her
own femininity, and action hero. Providing
‘elements of gender stereotype reversal’
(Powell, 1999:137), Megan was ‘physically
strong, prefer*red+ ‘masculine’ attire and
behaved transgressively’ (ibid.: 137)

Blue Steel also feminised the character of her partner, Nick (Clancy Brown), who
would normally be the male hero –particularly as his previous role was as the
macho villain Kurgan in Highlander (Russell Mulcahy, 1988), and Powell has
suggested that his film is also transgressive in presenting him as the ‘hero’s
sidekick’ (ibid.: 149) a character that is coded as the victim in many cop ‘buddy’
movies.
Blue Steel was also notable for its fetishisation of the gun, both in the opening
credit sequence and in the use of guns within the narrative. The film
challenged the
conventional set of associations
between guns and images of a
specifically masculine power
(Tasker, 1993:159)
in giving the role to Curtis as Megan. Asked in one scene why she joined the
police, she replies: ‘I want to shoot people’ and then moments later
performs just this act in foiling a convenience store robbery. However, Megan
is also disempowered from her action heroine role within the film, both by the
actions of her superiors, who find her position a threat, and by her
relationship with the psychotic killer Eugene (Ron Silver) who ultimately rapes
her.

The film then becomes in part a rape-
revenge narrative, much like I Spit on
your Grave (Mier Zarchi, 1977). In her
discussion of the rape-revenge film,
Clover observes that while the final girl
of the slasher film is able to use
limited violence, the female heroine of
the rape-revenge film ‘proves to
be just as vicious as her
attackers’ (Clover, 1992:114).
Empowered with the police uniform,
which she takes from a male police
officer, thus reinforcing the androgyny
of the character, Megan hunts Eugene,
combating violence with more
violence. By casting the original final
girl as an avenging victim, Bigelow
empowers the final girl of the slasher
movie to use increased violence, a
scenario played out more fully in the
slasher films of the 1990s.
While director James Cameron is
known for promoting strong women in
his films, Curtis’ role in much of the
narrative of True Lies reinforced
traditional gender roles, placing her as
the wife to the super spy Harry Tasker
(Arnold Schwarzenegger) who ‘may
now work, but… still bakes
birthday cakes and has
supper ready on time’ (Arroyo,
1994:27). This is most likely because
this is an action vehicle for
Schwarzenegger, made at a time when
that actor was re-evaluating his own
position in the industry following the
relative failure of The Last Action Hero
(John McTiernan, 1993) and keen to
work with a director with which he
enjoyed considerable success as the
cyborg terminator.

While at the time, True Lies was condemned for a scene in which Curtis is
interrogated by Schwarzenegger and his partner, played by Tom
Arnold, about whether she was being faithful or not, this scene allowed
Curtis to assert her own action heroine credentials. Until this point, Curtis’
role is one of a wide-eyed innocent, reflecting her earlier final girl roles –
Laurie Strode could well have grown up to become Helen Tasker, if she had
not met Michael Myers. As the subject both of the spectator and of
Schwarzenegger through the two-way mirror, Curtis’ gaze is reduced to that
of her own reflection –until she takes matters into her own hands and
smashes the mirror, fragmenting her own image. From this point
on, Curtis is empowered as an action heroine, transforming herself into a spy
and in one scene into ‘the body’ when performing an erotic dance (although
as the subject of the male gaze in the form of the audience and
Schwarzenegger). As the action heroine she is able to fight with and
ultimately defeat the villainess, though once rescued by Schwarzenegger she
reverts to the passive feminine form, following behind her ‘husband’ as he
kills the stereotypical Middle Eastern terrorists and providing no active
participation in the flow of the narrative.

While Curtis’ role, in Virus (John Bruno,1998) was the first to attempt to place her
overtly in the action hero mould, she commented that she ‘never wanted to
be Sigourney Weaver in Aliens’ (Curtis quoted in Shapiro, 1998:36), and the
character was a flawed hero, unable to survive on her own merits, only with the
assistance of colleagues who sacrificed themselves for her. However, in her role as
Keri/Laurie for Halloween:H20, Curtis
wanted to show that, unlike a lot of
horror movie [characters], Laurie could
not confront the terror of Michael Myers
and move on to a normal life
(Curtis quoted in Shapiro, 1998:35),
reflecting the observation by Dika that although the final girl has defeated the killer
they are no longer ‘free’ from the horror that they encountered (Dika, 1987:94-95).
Taking credit for the inception of the project, originally a vehicle for John Carpenter
to direct, Curtis explained in an interview that ‘Laurie, 20 years later, has a
lot of vitality’, and reinforces her action heroine credentials when she
‘makes a conscious choice not to run anymore’ (Curtis quoted in
Shapiro, 1998:37).

Conclusion
In a constant state of
development, the horror genre
has internalised its monster into
the psychotic killer, combining
this with the supernatural and
monstrous threats of its classical
and invasion periods, and
brought the threat into the
community and the home.
During the 1980s the genre
went in two directions;
providing more of the same –in
relation to repeating the genre
conventions of its predecessors-
and also into the mainstream,
combining with other genres,
such as science fiction and the
action cinema, to give a final girl
with muscle, no longer a victim
but almost a monster.
While feminist writers such as Creed and Clover
posit that the final girl is a female victim-hero
who suffers abject terror before being able to
vanquish the killer that is tracking her, I have
shown that a simplistic binaristic evaluation of
the change in the character of the final girl –an
oscillation between feminine and masculine- is
not enough to explain change both in the
character of the final girl nor the development of
the horror genre.
In proposing such an argument, feminist writers
have denied that the horror film has adapted to
the changes in popular culture and society,
borrowing from and influencing mainstream
Hollywood in the development of the female
action heroine. Rather, in ‘becoming’ a vehicle
for action, the action heroine has experimented
with the opportunities available to adapt to ‘new
mode*s+ of thinking and acting’ (Hills, 1999:47).

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Filmography
p.c.: production company, p.: producer, d.: director
sc: screenplay, l.p.: leading players
Alien GB, 1979
p.c.: TCF/Brandywine; p.: Walter Hill, Gordon Carroll, David Giler; d.: Ridley Scott;
sc: Dan O’Bannon; l.p.: Tom Skerrit, Sigourney Weaver, John Hurt, Veronica
Cartwright, Harry Dean Stanton, Ian Holm, Yaphet Kotto. 117 min.
Aliens US, 1986
p.c.: TCF/Brandywine; p.: Gale Ann Hurd; d.: James Cameron; sc: James Cameron,
Walter Hill, David Giler; l.p.: Sigourney Weaver, Carrie Henn, Bill Paxton, Lance
Henriksen, Jeanette Goldstein. 137 min.
Alien3 US, 1992
p.c.: TCF/Brandywine; p.: Walter Hill, Gordon Carroll, David Giler; d.: David
Fincher; sc: David Giler, Walter Hill, Larry Ferguson; l.p.: Sigourney Weaver,
Charles S. Dutton, Charles Dance, Paul McGann, Lance Henriksen. 115 min.
Alien Resurrection US, 1997
p.c.: TCF/Brandywine; p.: Bill Badalato, Walter Hill, Gordon Carroll, David Giler; d.:
Jean-Pierre Jeunet; sc: Joss Whedon; l.p.: Sigourney Weaver, Winona Ryder, Ron
Perlman, Dominique Pinon, Michael Wincott, Brad Dourif. 108 min.

Black Christmas Canada, 1975
p.c.: EMI/Film Funding/Vision IV; p.,d.: Bob Clark; sc: Roy Moore; l.p.: Olivia
Hussey, Keir Dullea, Margot Kidder, John Saxon. 97 min.
Commando US, 1985
p.c.: TCF; p.: Joel Silver; d.: Mark L. Lester; sc: Steven deSouza; l.p.: Arnold
Schwarzenegger, Rae Dawn Chong, Dan Hedaya, Vernon Wells. 88 min.
Die Hard US, 1988
p.c.: Fox/Gordon Company/Silver Pictures; p.: Lawrence Gordon, Joel Silver; d.:
John McTiernan; sc: Jeb Stuart, Steven E. deSouza; l.p.: Bruce Willis, Bonnie
Bedelia, Alan Rickman, Alexander Gudunov. 132 min.
Friday the 13th US, 1980)
p.c.: Georgetown; p.,d.: Sean S. Cunningham; sc: Victor Miller; l.p.: Betsy
Palmer, Adrienne King, Jeannine Taylor. 95 min.
Halloween US, 1978
p.c.: Falcon International; p.: Irwin Yablans; d.: John Carpenter; sc: John
Carpenter, Debra Hill; l.p.: Donald Pleasance, Jamie Lee Curtis, Nancy Loomis. 91
min.
Halloween 2 US, 1981
p.c.: Dino de Laurentiis; p.: John Carpenter, Debra Hill; d.: Rick Rosenthal; sc: John
Carpenter, Debra Hill; l.p.: Donald Pleasance, Jamie Lee Curtis, Charles
Cyphers, Jeffrey Kramer. 92 min.

Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers US, 1988
p.c.: Fox/Trancas International/Halloween 4 Partnership; p.: Paul Freeman; d.:
Dwight H. Little; sc: Alan B. McElroy; l.p.: Donald Pleasance, Ellie Cornell, Danielle
Harris, George P. Wilber. 88 min.
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers US, 1989
p.c.: Magnum; p.: Ramsay Thomas; d.: Dominique Othen-Girard; sc: Michael Jacobs,
Dominique Othen-Girard, Shem Bitterman; l.p.: Donald Pleasance, Danielle Harris,
Wendy Kaplan, Ellie Cornell. 96 min.
Halloween:H20 US, 1998
p.c.: Dimension Films/Moustapha Akkad; p.: Paul Freeman; d.: Steve Miner; sc:
Robert Zappa, Matt Greenberg; l.p.: Jamie Lee Curtis, Adam Arkin, Michelle
Williams, Janet Leigh, Josh Hartnett, L.L. Cool J. 86 min.
I Spit on your Grave US 1977
p.c.: Cinemagic Pictures; p.: Mier Zarchi, Joseph Zbeda; d.,sc: Mier Zarchi; l.p.:
Camille Keaton, Eron Tabor, Richard Pace, Gunter Kleeman. 100 min.
Innocent Blood US, 1992
p.c.: Warner; p.: Lee Rich, Leslie Belxberg; d.: John Landis; sc: Michael Wolk; l.p.:
Anne Parillaud, Robert Loggia, Anthony LaPaglia, Don Rickles. 113 min.
The Long Kiss Goodnight US, 1996
p.c.: Entertainment/New Line/Forge/Steve Tisch; p.: Renny Harlin, Stephanie Austin,
Shane Black; d.: Renny Harlin; sc: Shane Black; l.p.: Geena Davis, Samuel L. Jackson,
Craig Bierko, Ptrick Malahide, Brian Cox, David Morse. 120 min.

Mother’s Boys US, 1994
p.c.: Miramax/CBS; p.: Jack E. Freedman, Wayne S. Williams, Patricia Herskovic; d.:
Yves Simoneu; sc: Barry Schneider, Richard Hawley; l.p.: Jamie Lee Curtis, Peter
Gallafher, Joanne Whalley-Kilmer, Joss Ackland. 95 min.
A Nightmare on Elm Street US, 1984
p.c.: New Line/Media/Smart Egg/Elm Street Venture; p.: Robert Shaye; d.,sc: Wes
Craven; l.p.: John Saxon, Ronee Blakley, Heather Langenkamp, Robert
Englund, Johnny Depp. 91 min.
Nikita France/Italy, 1990
p.c.: Palace/Gaumont/Cecci/Tiger; p.: Jérôme Chalou; d.,sc: Luc Besson; l.p.: Anne
Parillaud, Jean-Hughes Anglade, Tcheky Karyo. 117 min.
Peeping Tom GB, 1960
p.c.: Anglo Amalgamated; p.,d.: Michael Powell; sc: Leo Marks; l.p.: Carl
Boehm, Moira Shearer, Anna Massey, Shirley Ann Field. 109 min.
Predator US, 1987
p.c.: TCF; p.: Lawrence Gordon, Joel Silver, John Davis; d.: John McTiernan; sc: Jim
and John Thomas; l.p.: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Carl Weathers, Bill Duke, Elpidia
Carrillo, Jesse Ventura. 107 min.
Psycho US, 1960)
p.c.: Shamley; p.,d.: Alfred Hitchcock; sc: Joseph Stephano; l.p.: Anthony
Perkins, Vera Miles, John Gavin, Janet Leigh. 109 min.

Scream US, 1996
p.c.: Buena Vista/Miramax/Dimension; p.: Cary Woods, Cathy Conrad; d.: Wes
Craven; sc: Kevin Williamson; l.p.: Drew Barrymore, Neve Campbell, Skeet Ulrich,
Courtney Cox, Rose McGowan, David Arquette. 110 min.
Scream 2 US, 1997
p.c.: Miramax/Dimension/Konrad; p.: Cathy Conrad, Marianne Maddelena; d.:
Wes Craven; sc: Kevin Williamson; l.p.: Neve Campbell, Courtney Cox, David
Arquette, Sarah Michelle Gellar, Jamie Kennedy, Laurie Metcalf. 120 min.
The Slumber Party Massacre US, 1982
p.c.: Santa Fe Productions; p.,d.: Amy Holden Jones; sc: Rita Mae Brown; l.p.:
Michele Michaels, Robin Stille, Andre Honore, Michael Villela. 76 min.
The Stepfather US, 1987
p.c.: Vista/New World; p.: Jay Benson; d.: Joseph Ruben; sc: Donald E. Westlake;
l.p.: Teryy O’Quinn, Jill Schoelen, Shelley Hack, Charles Lanyer. 88 min.
Strange Days US, 1995
p.c.: UIP/Lightstorm; p.: James Cameron, Steven-Charles Jaffe; d.: Kathryn
Bigelow; sc: James Cameron, Jay Cocks; l.p.: Ralph Fiennes, Angela Bassett, Juliet
Lewis, Tom Sizemore, Michael Wincott. 145 min.
Texas Chain Saw Massacre US, 1973
p.c.: Vortex; p.,d.: Tobe Hooper; sc: Kim Henkel, Tobe Hooper; l.p.: Marilyn Burns,
Allen Danziger, Gunnar Hansen, William Vail. 81 min.

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 2 US, 1986
p.c.: Cannon; p.: Menahem Golan, Yoram Globus; d.: Tobe Hooper; sc: L.M. Kit
Carson; l.p.: Dennis Hopper, Caroline Williams, Bill Johnson. 95 min.
Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Next Generation US, 1995
p.c.: Ultra Muchos, River City Films; p.: Robert J. Kuhn, Kim Henkel; d.,sc: Kim Henkel;
l.p.: Renee Zellweger, Matthew McConaughey, Tony Perenski, Robert Jacks, Lisa
Newmeyer. 94 min.
The Terminator US, 1984
p.c.: Orion/Hemdale/Pacific Western; p.: Gale Ann Hurd; d.: James Cameron; sc:
James Cameron, Gale Ann Hurd; l.p.: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton,
Michael Biehn, Paul Winfield, Lance Henriksen. 108 min.
Terminator 2: Judgement Day US, 1991
p.c.: Guild/Carolco/Pacific Western/Lightstorm; p.,d.: James Cameron; sc: James
Cameron, William Wisher; l.p.: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Linda Hamilton, Edward
Furlong, Robert Patrick, Jeanette Goldstein. 135 min.
True Lies US, 1994
p.c.: TCF/Lightstorm; p.: James Cameron, Stephanie Austin; d.,sc: James Cameron;
l.p.: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jamie Lee Curtis, Tom Arnold, Bill Paxton, Art Malick,
Tia Carrere, Charlton Heston. 141 min.
Virus US, 1998
p.c.: Universal/Mutual Film Company; p.: Gale Anne Hurd; d.: John Bruno; sc: Chuck
Pfarrer, Dennis Feldman; l.p.: Jamie Lee Curtis, William Baldwin, Donald Sutherland,
Joanna Pacula, Marshall Bell. 100 min.

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