10 Horror Movie Sequels That Totally Insulted Great Characters

Laurie Strode is, along with Friday the 13th’s Alice, the formative cultural image of the Final Girl. Jamie Lee Curtis’ surprisingly subtle, brittle portrait of a chaste, shy teenage babysitter simply trying to survive the night throughout John Carpenter’s punishingly tense slasher was instantly iconic. The turn won the actor similar roles in the likes of Terror Train, Prom Night, and Carpenter’s own The Fog, and Curtis maintained the title of scream queen extraordinaire through two more iterations of the franchise, even nabbing a central role in Ryan Murphy’s meta-comedy slasher Scream Queens for maximum self-referential points.

So what did the producers do to her that earned Laurie a spot on this list?

Well, David Gordon Green’s recent reboot of the Halloween franchise brought the character back to her roots to much acclaim, but before that 2002’s execrable Halloween: Resurrection gave Laurie the weakest ending imaginable to her part in Michael Myers’ twisted story.

Psychologically shattered by her encounters with the masked murderer, Strode is confined to an asylum where she is visited by a somehow-still alive Michael, who tricks her and offs the once resilient heroine before the end of the opening scene. It’s a shameful cameo which sees the resourceful star into an afterthought, sent into the sweet hereafter quicker than you can say “Wait, Ms. Curtis wants to be paid how much? Damn, then we need to kill off her or Busta Rhymes. Easy choice.”