Tracing The Shape 4: Laurie Strode's Morning Walk

Great Final Girls come in all varieties. Despite what Randy Meeks would have you believe, there is no single formula for nailing the character in any given film. If there was a formula, though, it would be Laurie Strode. Virtuous, apparently pure of heart and body, and determined to fight back, she's what we think of when we think of the movie Final Girl in the classic sense, even if she wasn't technically the first.

But what really makes Laurie the blueprint is not her grit, or her apparently sexless high school existence. Laurie's not a badass, and she's not a prude, and she's certainly not the picture of absolute old-fashioned moral right that some fans might have you believe (this is a girl who unreservedly shares a joint with her best friend right after school). No, what makes Laurie really work, like Jess Bradford before her and Nancy Thompson after her, is a sense of interiority, a feeling that her head contains not just a sound mind, but a whole world.

We have Jamie Lee Curtis to thank for this, but we also have producer and co-writer Debra Hill, whom Curtis and other crew members have credited with enriching the lives and characters of Laurie and her friends in a way that Carpenter's voice alone could not. Debra Hill was never as prominent as Carpenter, and she's gone now, but she shaped the American slasher film in ways we're still unpacking, and it begins with a certain tightrope the film walks between Laurie's inner life and her outer one.

We first meet Laurie as she walks alone down a Haddonfield street, massive stack of books tucked against her ribs. It's an interesting, and it turns out vital, choice to present her this way. It's a clear contrast between this side of her life and the side she'll show when Annie and Lynda show up, and it reveals Laurie to be not just a person with a mind at work, but a person with a powerful sense of duty.

The two people Laurie speaks to on her morning walk are her father and her babysitting charge, Tommy Doyle (the one thing I've never quite nailed down is how close Tommy's house actually is to Laurie's, but that's a topic for another time). She's bound, apparently graciously, by a duty to both of these male figures in her life. For her father, she's dropping off a key in the hope that he'll finally move the most cursed house in town off his real estate client list. For Tommy, she's preparing a Halloween night of fun and safety and warmth that he'll hopefully remember fondly.

This sense of duty, of care, to those around her is vital to who Laurie is, and it extends to her friends, but she's also a dreamer, a person who believes there's a world of wonders just outside of her reach, if she could just stretch herself far enough to touch them. As we'll soon learn, she daydreams about boys, she has a crush, she's whip-smart in a way that suggests a fulfilling future beyond social interaction.

According to this film, anyway, she's everything Judith Myers was not.

The dance, the chess match, between Laurie Strode and Michael Myers over the course of this film is powerful and nuanced, much more than a simple game of predator and prey, and it begins on this walk, when Laurie is hooked into her sense of duty and care for others. Over the course of nearly five decades since this film was released, many people both inside and outside the Halloween franchise have made a big deal about trying to tie Laurie's and Michael's stories together in ornate ways that explain his drive to kill her, to keep pursuing her no matter what. But as Laurie's morning walk shows us, it's all quite simple.

Their first encounter is here, when she drops a key under the mat at his home, the home he's just seen again for the first time in 15 years. She has no idea; she's just helping out her Dad. Why does he pursue her? Because she's crossed into his territory, and he's intrigued.

We know this because Michael does not attack or pursue Laurie directly right away. Instead he simply follows her outside when she's down the sidewalk, watches her walk away, and hears her, alone and off in that massive interior world of hers, singing.

Just like his sister was singing right before he stabbed her.

This moment is a chemical reaction, an alchemy Laurie doesn't clock and Michael probably can't explain, but when he sees this girl cross into his world, into the last place he ever felt free, he only knows he must move. Annie and Lynda are targets, but Laurie? Laurie's something else, something special, and what's great about this moment and the moment that follows it, when Michael watches Laurie from outside her classroom, is that we know this too. We feel what Michael feels. albeit in a much more empathetic way.

We can sense, thanks to Hill's writing and Curtis's performance, Laurie's kindness, her intelligence, her dreams and hopes. It takes minutes, and a scene where she spends more time walking than actually talking to anyone, but Laurie Strode's morning walk is arguably the most important scene in the film. It sets up who she is and what she values brilliantly, but it also sets up what makes her the ultimate prize for someone like Michael. Right here, on the sidewalks of Haddonfield, the classic, inescapable Final Girl was born, and she was born not with virginity or prudishness in mind, but with intelligence, and kindness, and simple hope. All things Michael Myers doesn't have.

All things he wants to destroy.

Next Time: The Boogeyman is coming!