Michael Myers and the Halloween franchise make for the best match come October. Despite the criticism that The Shape wasn’t in 1982’s Season of the Witch, he kinda was. Halloween (1978) plays on a TV during Cochran’s “Hills ran red,” monologue. It wouldn’t be until 1988 that he truly returned in all his silent, stalking, menacing form. With an over forty-year long legacy as a horror monster, Myers isn’t the only character that gets recognition. Other than Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasence), it’s Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) that has since become the popular face of the series.
And yet, the movies without her have placed a heroine front and center: Look out for Kara (Marianne Hagan), and Sara (Bianca Kajlich). But there are two Final Girls who rise up to the occasion of being the best heroines of the series. It’s Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris) and Rachel Carruthers (Ellie Cornell), with their complex character development. Being a cut above the rest, it's a shame they weren’t treated with a decent amount of respect.
Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) had the tough job of resurrecting a slasher franchise towards the end of a decade which saw the rise and fall of that subgenre. Not only would Myers have to be brought back in all his morbid glory, director Dwight Little and screenwriter Alan B. McElroy needed to create new protagonists after Jamie Lee Curtis’ exit from the series. Rachel is a more complicated teen than even Laurie and her gal pals. In dealing with boy troubles, a mean girl, and babysitting a foster sister, Rachel had a lot on her plate before the day went to hell. Jamie is a younger heroine than the series ever had, still to this day too. She’s mercilessly bullied by classmates who apparently aren’t afraid of who her uncle is. Within seconds of sobbing, she collects herself before Rachel picks her up, showing forced maturity. The main arc between Rachel and Jamie is where the movie really works. Rachel starts out annoyed to care for Jamie when she already has plans, as most teens would be with such a duty.
By the night’s end, she has turned into a fighter who does everything she can to keep Jamie safe. One of the biggest examples of this is also one of the major suspense set pieces for The Return of Michael Myers. Rachel carries Jamie on her back as they escape the Meeker house with Rachel trying to not slip on the lack of traction of the roof tiles. “When the leads start doing stunt work, you have to be careful,” Cornell said in an interview. “The only thing they wouldn’t let me do was the free-fall. They had a stuntwoman come in with a cable. The climbing around, sliding down, all that stuff – that was us.” It looked real and was all the better for it. The sister bond that develops between Jamie and Rachel is what makes the suspense scenes reach such a high level of anxiety. It also makes the ending of Jamie attacking her foster mom (Rachel’s biological mother) a bleak place to roll the credits.
Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers was released the following year. For all the careful setup done in the previous installment, it’s all swiftly undone. Before the thirty-minute mark, Rachel is killed off by Michael, getting stabbed by a pair of scissors. The murder isn’t too bloody, a far cry from the graphic, original idea which Ellie Cornell put a stop to: “I didn’t like the way she was killed, so I had them rewrite it; it was too undignified for her character. It wasn’t thought-out, and it wasn’t honorable, so they rewrote it. Years later, I was at a show with our producer Moustapha Akkad, and he said he really regretted killing her off. I thought that was really sweet. He didn’t realize there would be a backlash.”
As for little Jamie, her act of violence on Mrs. Carruthers was little more than an afterthought, in favor of Michael Myers once again being the big bad. “So I got the script and was like ‘I don't even speak for half of the movie!’” Harris remembered while talking to IGN. “I was like ‘What is this? I'm mute! I don't get it!’ But then I was like ‘Ooh, I get to learn sign language, cool!’ That was sort of my thinking.” Jamie doesn’t get it any easier this time around. She senses Rachel’s death, tries to warn Tina (Wendy Kaplan) before her own fate, and is used as bait by Dr. Loomis. In the final moments, she walks into the Haddonfield police station to find that someone has rescued Michael, leaving everyone else dead. As a gentle reminder of how essential Jamie’s character was to The Revenge of Michael Myers by the studio, the poster included both Michael and her. It's something Harris only realized during her interview with IGN. And like Rachel, Jamie would suffer a similar ill-conceived fate by the sequel.
After a troubled production and reshoots, Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers was released 1995. Something that never changed all that much was how little Jamie mattered to the story. Played, this time, by J. C. Brandy, Jamie has been kidnapped by the Cult of Thorn, and in one version of the movie, subjected to sexual assault in order to give birth to Michael’s child. It doesn’t matter the version watched, be it the Theatrical or Producer’s Cut, Jamie is brutally killed, leaving the rest of the movie to be led by Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd) and Kara Strode. Dr. Loomis would be the only other returning character since Halloween 4 restarted everything. The fact Danielle Harris isn’t in the movie is quite telling, but for a whole other reason.
It wasn’t that Harris chose to not return, she felt she had no other option. Because of her age, the only way the producers would have allowed her to come back was if she got legally emancipated. Which Harris did, spending thousands of dollars to do so. Then she received the script. “The script was not what I thought it was going to be. I mean I was pregnant with Michael's baby…My mom and I were talking about it and were like ‘Oh god…,’ I'd just done Last Boy Scout like a year before, and I was just coming off of Roseanne and my career was changing.” Even with the reluctance, Harris didn’t want someone else to come in to take over her character. “So I started getting into negotiating and honestly, the money they were offering wouldn't even cover half of my lawyer expenses. And to quote Miramax at the time, the business affairs guy said ‘You die in the first act. You're a scale character,’ which was $1500 a week.”
When thinking back to Halloween 5, Cornell might have suggested a different fate for her character, taking a cue from the franchise’s slasher: “Like when I hit him with the truck, there’s no way he could have survived through that, but of course he did because he’s Michael Myers. If I had been more seasoned and braver, I would’ve said, ‘You guys, be careful. Once she’s gone, she’s gone.’” When Curse bombed, Jamie Lee Curtis returned to honor the 20th anniversary and save the series with H20, doing so again in 2018. Although Michael Myers will always be a draw for moviegoers for the Halloween movies, human characters are needed to equal things out. This is the same killer with a “blank, pale, emotionless face, and the blackest eyes.” The blankness of Myers is a major part of the scare factor, but it needs an opposite to go up against. Back in 1988, Ellie Cornell and Danielle Harris had these responsibilities. Laurie Strode was just a teen out of her depth when first encountering Myers. She fought alone. For Jamie and Rachel, they had one another. Their sibling bond was a major aspect in making audiences root for them, something the franchise never saw to expand upon. Maybe in another retconned sequel.