Horror Lexicon #6: The Tour of the Dead

While dissecting what he called “Dead Teenager Movies,” the great movie critic Roger Ebert once came up with a pretty funny joke.  I’m paraphrasing a little, because I don’t remember the words exactly.  But the joke went something like this: “How do you know when a Dead Teenage Movie is over?”

“The same dead teenager turns up twice.”

Turns out, this was a pretty apt observation. Though I don’t share Ebert’s disdain for the Slasher movie format, it’s undeniable that “The Tour of the Dead,” as I term it, has become a de rigueur component of the sub-genre.

In the so-called Tour of the Dead – universally set during the final act -- the resilient Final Girl flees from a terrifying mad-dog killer (usually masked), but the bloodied and savaged corpses of her friends and associates begin popping up in her path...sometimes quite violently.  

The sudden re-appearance of these murdered characters provides both authentic jolt scares for the audience, as well as horrifying obstacles to the character’s successful escape trajectory.

One of the earliest (and still best…) Tours of the Dead appeared in John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) and thus fits in with that film’s organizing principle: Halloween festivities, including trick-or-treat pranks. 

Here, poor Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) visits the house across the street in suburban Haddonfield, and sees the body of her friend Annie (Nancy Loomis) posed on a bed…underneath a tombstone for Michael's sister, Judith.  

As Laurie recoils in horror from this macabre sight, other corpses pop out to terrify her, thus providing more than Laurie’s Halloween quotient of “one good scare.”  Laurie grows so terrified that she absently seeks retreat (walking backwards, a  big horror movie no-no…) at the doorway of a dark room…where the white-masked Shape emerges from impenetrable blackness.

I was happy to see in the 2018 Halloween, there is at leas a little tour of the dead in the final act, with Laurie Strode following a blood trail to a closet, and discovering a victim of "The Shape" perched inside.

The Friday the 13^th movies of the 1980's quickly adopted the “Tour of the Dead” convention, starting in the first film. There Alice (Adrienne King) runs from nutty Mrs. Voorhees (Betsy Palmer), and navigates a veritable battlefield of dead bodies.  

Steve’s corpse comes down swinging from a Camp Crystal Lake sign, for instance. Another corpse gets tossed through a window at Alice.  Yet another ends up hanged on a cabin door. 

For the sequels, it was a case of rinse-and-repeat as imperiled Final Girls ran similar corpse gauntlets before earning their victories.  

The Tour of the Dead convention is entertaining in these franchise films, but entirely devoid of the "trick or treat" context of Halloween it doesn't make a whole lot of logical sense. Mrs. Voorhees (and later Jason)  not only move from place to place killing camp counselors, but apparently pose the bodies, and calculate -- with precision accuracy -- what path the prey (like Alice) will ultimately take. 

What makes the conceit interesting (and a little funny...) in the original Friday the 13th is the way that director Sean Cunningham uses signage like "Danger," or "Keep Out" to subtly punctuate the gruesome exhibits on the Tour of the Dead.

In some fashion, the Tour of the Dead is is not just a final challenge to navigate and a visual symbol that the Final Girl is really and truly alone and therefore without help, but a bloody reminder (to the character and to the audience) that she was right about sensing danger. 

Where the other characters blissfully ignored warning signs of impending massacre, the Final Girl heeded them.  I’m aware that some critics may term the Final Girl’s equation as being something akin to “Survival of the Chaste-st,” but I propose something more along the lines of “Survival of the Smartest.”   

Final Girls – at least the good ones – boast insights, values, feelings, and behaviors that their more impulsive friends lack.  And by undergoing the Tour of the Dead, the Final Girl gets confirmation of her greatest character traits. She was right..and is still alive. Her friends were wrong and are now...ornaments.

In some Slasher movies, the Tour of the Dead is more ritualized than in others. In films such as Happy Birthday to Me (1981)  for instance, victims' bodies are propped up at a table (with a birthday cake…) and posed as if at an actual birthday party. 

In Tobe Hooper's brilliant The Funhouse (1981), the bloody corpses become part of the amusement park environs, therefore blending entertaining, funhouse-style horror with the real thing.  

As is the case with other elements of the horror lexicon, "The Tour of the Dead" reveals how the best horror directors deploy familiar conventions to good and inventive effect, while others just ape and imitate for the heck of it, for the sake of doing something that's expected, rather than what best tells the story. 

The View from My Screen #6

Guess which episode? And which series?

Sci-Fi Headline of the Week #6

First Final Girl: Laurie Strode

This week, the blog has featured musings about the power to scare movie audiences, as embodied by Halloween's Michael Myers, or "The Shape."

It has also featured a (briefer) discussion of Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasance) as a manifestation of a curse called the Cassandra Complex: the scenario of knowing the worst is true, but not being able to convince anyone of that fact.

These analyses would not be complete, however, without a close-up look at another historically significant character: Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the protagonist of John Carpenter and Debra Hill's Halloween (1978).

Carol J. Clover, the horror scholar who coined and defined the term "final girl" in 1992, wrote of Laurie Strode as the "original" of the form, or the prototype. Historically, this categorization is borne out by the fact that Laurie arrives in film history before such heroes as Ripley (Sigourney Weaver) in Alien (1979), or Nancy Thompson (Heather Langenkamp) in A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984). A final girl is, broadly, defined as the one (always female) character in a horror movie who survives to battle the villain, and often defeats it. 

Pop culture's on-going love affair with Laurie Strode is partly about the charm and talent of the actor who embodies this final girl: Jamie Lee Curtis. But the admiration runs deeper than that as well.  Jamie Lee Curtis brings the character to life with humanity, and empathy, and has revisited the character at various stages of her life (in Laurie's forties, and in Laurie's sixties, too), in a meaningful way.  But Laurie is more than the efforts of an actor. Laurie is an archetype, a role model, and a person of tremendous individuality.

As is plain from Halloween (1978), Halloween 2 (1981), Halloween: H20 (1998), Halloween: Resurrection (2002), and Halloween (2018), Laurie is alo Michael Myer's equal, or opposite. She is certainly his equal both in terms of etymology and action. 

Etymology is the study of words and their meaning, and perhaps the place to commence any look at Laurie is with a dissection of her name. 

"Laurie" is derived from the name "Laura," and means "from the place of laurel leaves."  Famously, the ancient Greeks used laurel leaves to create wreaths. They would then use those wreaths to crown the victors in athletic contests requiring great skill or endurance .So the name Laurie explicitly involves victory, something that Halloween's Laurie knows something about, having survived several encounters with The Shape.

Meanwhile, "Strode" is the past tense of the word "stride," which might be defined as "crossing an obstacle with one long step."  

Once more, it is not difficult to see the relevance of this name, as it applies to the horror movie character. Laurie Strode has crossed the greatest obstacle imaginable, surviving an attack by Michael Myers.  

The "long step" in that name might even be parsed to suggest a forty year obstacle, as the new movie suggests.  Maybe Laurie wears her crown of laurel leaves not for a spring (one night of terror), but for a marathon, a life of trauma, and PTSD.

A fascinating element of this etymological game is that "strode" is past tense, meaning, perhaps, that Laurie's fate -- a key element in Halloween -- is ordained from the very beginning.  She WILL overcome the challenge of Michael Myers. He may kill her eventually (as he does in the continuity of Halloween: Resurrection) but she somehow still manages to overcome the challenge he poses to her.  After all, winning isn't always about surviving.  Maybe it's about Laurie winning the battle against fear, against trauma.

If assembled, the elements of Laurie Strode's name suggest a competitor, a challenge, and a winner. Thus Laurie Strode, in her very name, was designed to be the equal, or superior, of The Shape.

Why else do audiences identify so closely with Laurie Strode? One key quality of the final girl "type" that Laurie embodies is insight. 

As Mathias Clasen writes in Why Horror Seduces (Oxford University Press, 2017), the "proximal narrative motivation for her survival is that Laurie Strode is the only character who detects and responds adequately" to her surroundings.  

Consider that Michael Myers is present in Haddonfield throughout much of the original film, and in often lurks in the plain sight, for intervals, of characters from Sheriff Brackett, to Annie and Lynda, and even Dr. Loomis. 

Yet out of all of these characters, only two people detect Michael. One is little Tommy Doyle, who is overcome by fear (as any child would be), and the other is Laurie Strode, who spies Michael several times, and begins to develop a kind of defensive posture because of the invasion he represents. 

Laurie spots Michael in a row of bushes on a suburban street. She sees him (or at least his stolen car), outside her high school English classroom too. And finally, she sees him standing, staring up at her, from a backyard clothes line.

The other characters in the film are locked in their own narrow silos of normality and routine, unable to conceive of a threat to their lives. Sheriff Brackett is dismissive of Loomis's belief that Michael has returned to Haddonfield. And Annie, Bob, and Lynda are so consumed with their own personal dramas that they can't conceive of a wolf in the fold.

But Laurie can detect the truth. She puts the pieces together.  She sees the danger in everyday life that others do not.  "Not only is she vigilant," writes Clasen, "but she is bright and conscientious." 

What makes Laurie able to see where others do not?  Simply stated, Laurie is present and engaged in her life. And if you'll forgive the teacher in me for this next statement, she is clearly a reader. In the scene set in the classroom, Laurie is able to verbalize a literary comparison between two authors, and the individual ways they interpret life in their works.  This ability suggests not only that Laurie is smart, but that she is an effective critical thinker. Laurie is able to understand and interpret different concepts or meanings of the word "fate," specifically.  It's pretty clear that this comparison is not something that would interest Annie or Lynda. They don't contextualize their lives in that way, whereas Laurie pretty clearly does so.

In Halloween: H20 (1998), Laurie repeats this feat, lecturing as, a teacher, to a classroom full of students about the connection between Victor and the Monster in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  Laurie is then able to understand and contextualize her connection to her own monster, Michael.

The next point to make about Laurie and her popularity/significance is one that is related, perhaps, to her engagement and vigilance. Laurie might be described aptly as the horror movie equivalent of the catcher in the rye. 

She is not merely a survivor of a massacre, but she takes great efforts to rescue two endangered children, Tommy and Lindsey. She must save not just their innocence, but their lives. Loomis possesses good motives. He wants to do good. But as an avatar for a failed aspect of 20th century society (medicine or science, basically), he is ineffective. 

By contrasts, Laurie gets her wards, the children, to safety. 

It's true that Loomis shows up at the last moment to shoot Myers, (which is again, ineffective), but Laurie plays the cat-and-mouse game with Myers long enough, and successfully enough, to protect the children she babysits. Again, one need only contrast Laurie's behavior as a babysitter with Annie's approach to that task.  By comparing the two characters, one can see that it is Laurie who is a full person, not just a shallow or superficial teenager.

Laurie is etymologically and psychologically Michael Myers perfect nemesis. She is the only one who can stop The Shape. But perhaps the real reason so many people have loved this final girl for so long is that they are acutely aware that for Laurie, the battle comes with a cost. Laurie keeps Michael from the children. She survives when he wants to kill her, it is true.  But in her survival, Laurie faces year and decades of trauma. She stands up and fights, but even when the battle is done, it continues for Laurie, if only in her head.

A reluctant warrior, Laurie always fights for us, even though the cost to herself is brutal. In different iterations of the Halloween myth, the audience sees Laurie succumb to alcoholism, and pills to overcome the presence of Michael Myers in her mind. In the new film, the audience registers fully what Laurie gives up -- the love of family -- to protect it from Michael.

Laurie fights, and wins, but she always suffers. That is the fate she, finally, reckons with. It is also the reason so many of us love the character. Michael is a character untroubled by conscience, guilt, remorse, or regret. He is solitary, and alone, and that is fine by him. Laurie is the opposite. She reckons with loss and loneliness, and realizes fully that sadness and trauma are now her fate.

Pop Art: CB Action Magazine

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