Strode was the defining “final girl” – a term coined by scholar Carol J Clover in her seminal book on slasher films Men, Women and Chainsaws, which refers to the last woman standing in a slasher, who is usually a paragon of innocence, rejects sex and drugs, and is coded as somewhat androgynous. She is never the pretty cheerleader, more likely the cheerleader’s friend, and is the character the audience, regardless of gender, empathises with the most. (Clover’s key, groundbreaking argument, is that slashers actually encouraged male viewers to relate to women, rather than being inherently misogynistic, as had been assumed by critics before). In some slasher franchises, like Halloween, and later in Scream, “the final girl” is also the real protagonist of the films. Whilst for the villain, killing her becomes the mission, for her, survival is everything. Strode grows stronger in every new entry in a slasher franchise, eventually becoming a hyper-capable, hyper-aware force of protection for those around her, without that completely erasing the trauma of her ordeal.
In Myers, Halloween also established a blueprint for the slasher villain. Whilst the “final girl” is the relatable central character, it’s the slasher’s villain that typically becomes any franchise’s icon. Their likeness is usually on the poster. Their name permeates the culture. They become Halloween costumes, Funko pops, stickers, t-shirts, tattoos. Mike Muncer, creator and host of the Evolution of Horror podcast, tells BBC Culture that the perfect slasher villain is “unstoppable. You can behead him, you can blow him up, and he will keep coming back”. They preferably have to have a simple backstory (in Halloween, we barely find out anything about Myers, save for the fact that he was evil incarnate from a very early age, when we see him commit his first murder as a toddler). And they have to have an iconic look, which makes them instantly recognisable even to non-horror fans. So it is that Myers, the Friday the 13th films’ Jason Voorhees, and Scream’s ever-changing Ghostface have all had their distinctive masks, while A Nightmare on Elm Street’s Freddy Krueger has his bladed glove. “[The looks] almost transcend even themselves,” as Muncer points out.
The power of the slasher villain
Like all monsters of horror cinema, slasher villains are almost always manifestations of cultural fears. Whilst the original monsters of horror were supernatural creatures with a dramatic flair – like Count Dracula, the Wolfman, the Creature from the Black Lagoon or the Mummy – this new generation of slasher villains was relentless predators whose identity was secondary to their iconography. At the same time, though, the villains of the slasher are always human (or were once, anyway), and through them we understand the core theme of the slasher film: the cycle of trauma that, if left undealt with, can lead people to commit terrible deeds.
Mary Wild, creator of the Projections lecture series at London’s Freud Museum and co-host of the Projections Podcast, both looking at cinema through a psychoanalytical lens, sees trauma as a defining characteristic of the slasher villain, even down to the use of the knife as a preferred murder weapon: “[when] they are stabbing other people, it’s an externalised manifestation of their trauma, displacing their own pain and suffering on to somebody else,” she tells BBC Culture. “It’s definitely trauma-driven, something really unspoken and something that’s become corrosively taboo.”