Most characters don’t make it out alive in horror movies. Some survive until the final reel if they’re lucky, while others become bodies on the slab before the titles have even run! They are sacrifices for us bloodthirsty fans, but there’s more to them than that. They have wants never met. Stories never properly finished. In Always the Final Kill, Never the Final Girl, writer Matt Konopka digs up these poor souls lost under the shadow of heroes to give them the proper attention they deserve.
If a character slices back into a horror franchise enough times, odds are they’re going to meet a bloody end eventually. Not everyone is a survivor like Sidney. Yet while some are given heroic endings deserving of their series status, others are cut down so unceremoniously that it feels like a squashing of their legacy. I can’t help but think of HALLOWEEN’s Jamie Lloyd in this regard.
The HALLOWEEN franchise has a spooky record when it comes to satisfying conclusions for its Final Girls (see the disappointing disposal of Laurie Strode in HALLOWEEN: RESURRECTION). When we cherish a story, its characters become like members of our household. For fans who grew up with HALLOWEEN, Jamie, first introduced in HALLOWEEN 4 and played by Danielle Harris, was like a little sister. A sweet young girl faced with a nightmarish evil, she was that rare child hero in horror that we rooted for. Found strength in. If she could survive Michael Myers twice, I could get through another day of bullying at school. After all Jamie was put through, some semblance of happiness was warranted.
And then HALLOWEEN: THE CURSE OF MICHAEL MYERS gave fans a trick instead of a treat.
Directed by Joe Chappelle and written by Daniel Farrands, the film was indeed “cursed”. From script changes to disagreements on set, it had all the luck of a black cat smashing a mirror. I enjoy CURSE—back off, I like what I like—but one of the many problems with the film came in Harris not reprising her role of Jamie. Not that she didn’t try. Harris even went so far as to legally emancipate herself from her family so she could work longer hours on set. But she left the project when the storyline for her character took shape. Can you blame her? Her childhood spent with Michael Myers, only to be cut out in the first few minutes and replaced as the star by pervy neighbor watcher Tommy Doyle (We still love you, Paul Rudd).
Take a step way back for a moment to the night he came home again, H4. After two films of Laurie Strode, we’re introduced to her daughter, Jamie. We meet this lonely kid as she stares out the window of her foster parents’ home at a raging storm. All three “Thorn Trilogy” films open with rain, a visual metaphor for the tumultuous sadness which has blanketed Jamie’s life in tears. She doesn’t have any friends at school. Her mother died in a crash. And her uncle really is the Boogeyman. Every day is Halloween at Jamie’s house, but not in the fun way.
While John Carpenter and Debra Hill lamented the decision to make Laurie Michael’s sister, H4 leaned all the way into it. The Shape bore a more defined mask of evil with one specific goal: A permanent trip to the graveyard for his family. A tragic irony, because Jamie yearns for that Jack-O-Lantern glow of comfort from a family that feels like her own.
Some consider “The Thorn Trilogy” to be a, er, thorn in the side of the HALLOWEEN series, but the complex relationship between Jamie and Michael is where the dark heart of the franchise beats loudest. Throughout H4 & H5, Jamie shares a connection to her un-killable uncle that goes deeper than blood. Michael is the specter of Jamie’s familial grief. He is the skeleton in the closet. The ghost in the mirror. The chipped tombstone resting in the bed of Jamie’s family, engraved with darkness and death. Yet some of us are blinded by the tie of blood. We try our best to connect to our relatives, evil or not, if they’re all we have. Jamie does this when she dresses as a clown on Halloween like Michael. Her sub-conscious attempt to put on the fleshy costume of her uncle and see behind his Devil eyes.
During a finale which boils the thematic guts of David Gordon Green’s HALLOWEEN KILLS down to a single moment, Michael is gunned down by an angry town traumatized by their boogeyman. But not before Jamie leans down to touch Michael’s hand. Is it his evil that draws her to him? Perhaps. I say Jamie is the light to Michael’s darkness. She is the only one capable of sympathizing with this body of evil shot six times and then some. They’re similar, after all. Two malformed pumpkins shunned by the rest of the patch. In each other is a home, however decrepit and full of cob-webs. Jamie empathizes with the scared boy Michael once was underneath that bone-white mask…the lost child Jamie is now.
H4’s shocking conclusion stabs home the anger which Jamie has been building for years. The attack on her step-mother isn’t just a corruption of Michael’s evil, but a representation of the pain she feels from her biological mother’s abandonment. Imagine the devastation of knowing your own parent, accidental or not, had left you all alone in this frightening world of goblins and ghouls.
The darkness only gets darker for Jamie in H5. Between these two films, she loses her dog, Rachel, Tina, her friends, her voice, her whole damn childhood. Her only “companion” is a crazed Doctor Loomis pouring more despair into her cauldron of trauma with wild accusations of Jamie helping Michael. He, like the town heaving bricks through her window, refuses to see the child underneath the sheet of the ghost that haunts them. “You’re just like me,” Jamie realizes in the end while drawing a single tear from Michael. She’s right. The true curse of the Myers family is in the loneliness that comes from being feared. The final showdown between Jamie and Michael in the old Myers home is a weighty reminder that as a Myers, you are bound by blood to a life of being an outcast. No matter how hard she tries to escape it, that haunted house of horrors will always stick in her mind like the blade of a butcher knife.
Which brings us back to CURSE. Jamie has been held captive for the past 10+ years and has birthed a Myers baby that most definitely was not conceived through consent. From the time she stepped through the foyer of that foster home to now, her life has been nothing but pain. Instead of some semblance of sympathy from the franchise, Jamie meets a brutal end on the spiky prongs of a hay separator while holding her arms out to the only true family member she’s ever known, Michael. All she ever wanted was a family that hugged her back.
What cuts deepest is that that mistreatment has carried over into real life, in which Danielle Harris has been more or less shunned by the HALLOWEEN world. She recently described a gutting encounter with Jamie Lee Curtis in which the Scream Queen dismissed her at the HALLOWEEN ENDS premiere. It’s not like Curtis needs to drop any candy in Harris’ Halloween bucket, and Harris has been outspoken about her disdain for the new films, so I’m not saying Curtis should’ve reacted any differently. But the experience further twists the knife in the wound of the Harris/Jamie HALLOWEEN saga, the star of a trilogy all about the yearning for family, ironically kept at a distance by the real-world HALLOWEEN family and fans that came before her.
If I had it my way, that inevitable force of fate would give Jamie a new path similar to Laurie’s, a legacy sequel starring Harris that picks up after H5 but slashes CURSE and gives the character some actual justice. Jamie earned that much at least, didn’t she?
Preferred pronouns: He/him
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