Halloween: Laurie Strode is worse than her brother and here’s why!
Is Michael Myers the real bad guy in the Halloween franchise, or is it actually supposed protagonist Laurie Strode? Find out why it’s the latter.
Greetings, ghoulies!
I’m probably going to get a lot of hate from hardcore Halloween fans for this article, but this has been bothering me for the last few days with no realistic or proper explanation. Here it goes: Laurie Strode ditched her daughter at the mercy of Michael Myers in Illinois while she changed her identity and moved to California to live the good life…and that makes her a very bad mother.
Growing up I watched a lot of Nightmare on Elm Street films with Friday the 13th a close second. I was more entertained with the fantasy/supernatural elements with those films than I was with Halloween. I never understood the appeal throughout the years because to me it was just another run-of-the-mill slasher series. It just seemed very boring to me. So, I owed it to this website and my fellow co-workers to revisit the very first Halloween film now that I’m an adult and see what the hype is all about.
Image courtesy of Universal Pictures
It looked something like this.
After watching the first film, I understood more why I thought this franchise was just a basic slasher film: this was the movie that started the P.O.V. trend and created the formula for modern slashers we know today. Immediately right after watching the first film, I watched the 1999 documentary about the flick and came to a better understanding for the love of the franchise. I queued up the rest of the series and started binging them on my birthday a few days ago (skipping Part 3).
When Halloween 4 started, I was a little confused. Here we have Laurie’s daughter, Jamie, with the background story that Laurie had been killed in an automobile accident . The last Halloween film I watched in theaters was H20 (it was a big event back in the day and my mother was excited to see Laurie Strode) and I remembered that Laurie was still alive. But, I kept an open mind and continued on with the series.
I didn’t finish Part 6, as I was almost immediately turned off by the underground cult and ruining Jamie’s story with that bull (I was told that film was struck from continuity anyway). I then popped in H20 because I heard that the film also ignored the previous sequels sans Part 2. But as soon as the opening credit montage started, I saw this newspaper clipping:
A still from the opening credits to H20 – Courtesy of Dimension Films
Part 4’s connection to H20?
There it was. If this film was allegedly not connected the sequels, why did they choose to include her automobile “death” from Part 4? Why not just ignore the cause of death and write something new? I did a little bit of digging around on the interwebs and found out that the original writers did in fact write a scene where Laurie found out her daughter died, and threw up. They changed a few scenes last minute to try and pretend that the daughter storyline didn’t exist to try and make Laurie more into a hero instead of abandoning her daughter.
But, as you can see, something slipped through the cracks and now it’s part of the original continuity. It didn’t sit right with me and I started looking at Laurie Strode as a selfish person that abandoned her daughter in Illinois for Michael Myers to find and mutilate. Why not just move with your daughter, Laurie? Congratulations, your brother has had more contact with your daughter than you have!
I’m glad they’re going back to the roots of the first film and making this new Halloween 2018 film a direct sequel to the first one whilst ignoring everything that came after it. Supernatural cults and child abandonment from our hero wasn’t very appealing at all.
I, for one, have ZERO ISSUES with the rebooting of the sequels. I welcome it with open arms.
Next: Is Roy Burns really Michael Myers?
How do you feel about this article? Is Laurie Strode a bad mom? Sound off with your thoughts in the comments section below.