Halloween (1978):
TENTANG LAHIRNYA FINAL GIRLS, BERKEMBANGNYA FEMINISME, DAN BERTAHANNYA PATRIARKI 

Halloween (1978) is a slasher feature film directed by John Carpenter. It tells a story about an institutionalized man named Michael Myers who, 15 years after murdering his own older sister, escapes and goes back to his childhood home and tries to kill young people in the community, one of whom is the female protagonist Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis in her feature debut) (Carpenter, 1978). Considered a small budget film (about USD 300,000), Halloween was a commercial success, grossing up to USD 60-70 million, more than two hundred times as much as its production cost, and thus is regarded as one of the most financially successful independent features in history.

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Halloween has set the stone for slasher films in the following decades, most notably in the 1980s, during which the subgenre was flourishing with successful franchises, such as Friday the 13th (1980) and A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). It was also one of the earliest movies that inspired the now-commonplace plot formula where a few people are murdered by a monstrous presence one by one, building an ever-increasing tension throughout the movie, before reaching the climax with a final confrontation between the monster and the last person standing, which is usually a female protagonist. The recurrence of the last survivor in mainstream slasher movies being a woman has resulted in a lengthy discourse initially brought about by Carol J. Clover, who also coined the term “final girls” to refer to these female characters.

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Clover states that there has emerged a convention about several characteristics that final girls share that distinguish them from other characters. They are “tortured” and sometimes “accidental survivor[s]” (Clover, 2015) who, “while being chased, wounded and cornered by the killer[s], [are] forced to endure the trauma of encountering the mutilated bodies of [their] friends long enough to either be rescued or slaughter the killer [themselves]” (Paszkiewicz and Rusnak, 2020). Despite, at the surface, the final girl trope seemingly embodies empowered women, especially relative to the woman-in-distress narrative that was pervasive in the previous era, for Clover, its alignment with the feminist agenda is in some way problematic. For instance, final girls are usually portrayed as not available sexually. This contrasts them with their girlfriends who are sexually more liberated and, afterward, become the killers’ victims, implying to some extent the notion that those who are sexually active need to be punished and women must hold traditional moral principles to survive. Moreover, Clover also sees that last standing women are frequently masculinized in some way, most notoriously by having non-feminine names or making use of “phallic” tools in their eventual showdown with the murderers, such as knives, so that they can be more appealing and relatable to male moviegoers (Clover, 2015).

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Those features are evident in the context of Halloween, and the film’s final girl Laurie is shown to have the characteristics that Clover mentioned. Firstly, Laurie’s female friends are confronted by Michael at the time around which they are dating their lovers; one when she is heading to meet her loved one and another when having some time together with her boyfriend. In contrast, Laurie is unsure about dating any man, and on Halloween night, she commits to her responsibility to take care of children as a babysitter. The movie also implied that Michael’s first murder case, i.e., of his older sister when he was six, had something to do with her being sexually active. In addition, the name “Laurie” is commonly used for boys as it is for girls, confirming Clover’s argument. Finally, despite Laurie’s relentless attempts to halt Michael in prior scenes, the film’s climax eventually resolves with an essential involvement of a male character when Dr. Loomis comes to help Laurie and shoot Michael with a rifle (Carpenter, 1978).

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However, Clover and other scholars are also careful not to altogether label the trope as misogynistic. It is worth mentioning that from the 1980s on, final girls were illustrated as having more agency to decide their fates or to regain the power to do so if they could not do as such. This is evident in the first Elm Street Nancy Thompson, who without any weapon whatsoever takes back the control of her dreams and fears from the antagonist Freddy Krueger as the movie comes to an end (Christensen, 2015). Clover (2015) is also aware that to simply focus on whether the final girl or another person eventually halts the monster negates the strategic intelligence and capacity of the final girl to survive until the movie climax. In addition, some also see that there has been an oversimplification of extracting meanings of incidents in slasher films. Judith Halberstam, for example, argues using a postmodernist view that it is difficult to decide whether a portrayal of sexism in movies is to support the misogynist values or provide the audience with a depiction of misogyny as a horrific principle (Markovitz, 2000). Thus, the fact that Michael Myers begins to kill those who are sexually more active first before Laurie can equally be inferred as: (1) the filmmakers’ support for conservative views of women or (2) their way to depict misogyny as something of an evil figure. Nonetheless, either meaning is problematic because, in the end, the monsters reign, for they are the ones who enforce the patriarchal system. In contrast, the final girls and their girlfriends can only accept the rules that oppress them.

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The Indonesian film industry has varying similarities in female representation in horror movies to that of Hollywood. Female characters in Indonesian horror movies can equally be portrayed as a protagonist, antagonist, and even ambiguous character. The main female character in Indonesian horror classic Sundel Bolong (1981) is a revengeful ghost for those who have harassed her, leading to depression that costs her life. To make her assaulters pay, she seeks revenge and uses promiscuity as a weapon to trap them along the way. The movie yet reaches its resolution with the presence of a male religious figure stopping her, something that Anggit Pangastuti (2019) perceives as a way to retain the patriarchal order and banish those who resent and disrupt it. Pangastuti sees this reflects the dominant views of the New Order and Transitional periods.

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Horror movies with a lesser extent of supernaturalism (but still exists) within their antagonists in Indonesia are more frequent at least in the last fifteen years. Pangastuti (2019) uses Air Terjun Pengantin (2009) to exemplify the final girl trope in contemporary Indonesian cinema. In contrast to Western final girls, the main character in the movie is sexualized, a common occurrence in horror movies to market them at the moment as the sexploitation trend resurged. Another notable slasher from the era is Rumah Dara (2009), which differs since the main antagonist is not a man, but a woman who serves as a matriarch for her adult children (men and women). In these two movies, the final girls eventually confront the main antagonists with minimal to no assistance from any male characters. Nevertheless, patriarchal expectations about motherhood to these women persist, i.e., being pressured to marry for Tiara in Air Terjun Pengantin (Pangastuti, 2019) and to take care of the victims’ newborn for Ladya in Rumah Dara.

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In conclusion, it is therefore a complex, if possible, task to understand whether the formulaic final girl trope helps feminist development in mainstream media. In addition to different views of the concept, there have also been myriad slasher films with unique details that may lead to different conclusions, and Halloween is no exception. An interesting further investigation can be done, however, in comparing the first installment of Halloween to the latest release of its sequel (2018), with a possibility to also compare with Halloween H20 (1998) to see how the idea of a final girl has evolved in the franchise along with Laurie’s character development.