I had been waiting for this section. The Slasher films are some of my favorites. After watching Halloween 1, I was interested and thought I should watch some videos on the plots of the films between Halloween 1 and Halloween 2018. Those annoyed me because of the multiple story lines and timelines and I was worried that I wouldn’t enjoy the 2018 film. I’m glad that it ignored most of the in between movies and that you didn’t need to watch any of those to understand Halloween 2018. I didn’t know much about Sleepaway Camp except my sister had seen it and told me that the ending was very disturbing to her. This made me anticipate watching the film. I thought all three movies were good. I also enjoyed reading Halloween and Her Body, Himself and will address the Killer, Weapons, Victims and the Final Girl in my blog post.
In the Halloween films, Michael Myers perfectly fits the description of the Killer given in the reading “Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Film”. We don’t have to guess who the killer is, we know from the beginning. We only get glimpses of what he looks like and he is virtually indestructible. I enjoyed the “Halloween” reading by Murray Leeder, especially how the use of the paraglide and music score were so effective in showing from Michael Myer’s perspective and making him present even when you didn’t see him. Sleepaway Camp didn’t seem to fit that description. The killer isn’t obvious and we are trying to figure it out during the film. We only get the perspective of the killer approaching victims and a shadow but don’t get clear view of the killer during the murders.
In Halloween, Michael used silent weapons, his preferred weapon is the butcher knife but he’s not opposed to strangling someone to death. In Sleepaway Camp, the “weapons" are always different and some are unusual like the boiling water, bees, curling iron and archery. The knife through the shower stall was pretty gruesome and even though it didn’t show the last one, the image of Angela holding the head in her lap left no doubt that it was bad.
In Halloween, the victims fit the slasher mold. With the exception of the guy he killed to get his clothes after escape, they were all sexually promiscuous, including his sister when he was a child and Laurie’s friends plus one of their boyfriends. He chased Laurie as a victim because he saw her with a young boy at his old house and she reminded him of his sister, his first kill. In Halloween 2018, he killed a lot of people that were just in his way of getting to his targeted victims. Once he was back in his hometown looking for Laurie, he was back to killing women in houses including a babysitter and her boyfriend who were fooling around. He also killed other men that were in between him and getting to Laurie. In Sleepaway Camp, the victims were campers who made Angela a victim. Those included a couple of perverts, rude sexually-pushy boys and mean promiscuous girls.
In Halloween 1, Laurie is the ideal “final girl”. She was intelligent and resourceful and not sexually active. The film had the typical slasher ending with Michael injuring Laurie but her getting away and then her fighting back and thinking she killed him twice before the doctor shows up to shoot him. I have to ask though, why do they always think the killer is really dead and drop their weapons?!! In Halloween 2018, there are three female survivors so in some ways they could all be seen as the final girl but I still see Laurie as The (O.G.) final girl. The granddaughter does stand out though because she reminded me of Laurie in the first film. Also, the image of the granddaughter holding the bloody knife as they rode away in the back of the truck made an impression. In Sleepaway Camp, it’s ironic that Angela is both the killer and the perceived final girl. She was the character portrayed as being “pure” throughout the film and fitting the characteristics of the final girl as she was fighting back because her victims did something to her. If I could have made myself finish reading the Freud perspectives, I’m sure I could dig deeper into Sleepaway Camp but as a woman, I just can’t read his work and take it seriously.