The Anti-Feminist Final Girl Trope

This book is an exploration of the Final Girl trope and the overall treatment of women in John Carpenter’s 1978 smash-hit slasher film Halloween, its sequel, Halloween II (1981), and David Gordon Green’s newest Halloween trilogy (2018-2022). I argue that the treatment of women in the first two films of the Halloween franchise are bogged down by Susan Faludi’s concept of the backlash against American women in the late 1970s and throughout the 1980s, and that the Final Girl trope strips Halloween’s Laurie Strode of her femininity, replacing it with masculinity despite the trope’s gendered name. David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, on the other hand, released from 2018 through 2022, is punctuated by the MeToo movement in Hollywood and actively reverses the anti-women hatred seen in the first two films of the franchise, restoring Laurie Strode’s femininity through her role as a caretaker, mother, and guardian of her daughter and granddaughter.