There’s a moment in the original Halloween — you’ve probably seen it a hundred times — where Laurie Strode is huddled in a closet, crying, trying to hold herself together while Michael Myers is literally just on the other side of the door. And she does something remarkable. She stops crying, fashions a weapon out of a wire hanger, and decides she’s going to fight back. In 1978, that was kind of a big deal.

Here’s the thing about horror movies: they’ve always had women at the center of them. But for a long time, those women were mostly just there to scream, run, trip, and eventually get rescued — usually by a man, usually at the last second, usually with not a lot of agency in the whole process. The “damsel in distress” wasn’t just a trope, it was practically the default setting for the genre. So when films started pushing back against that, when they started giving us women who fought back, who outsmarted killers, who survived on their own terms, it mattered. It still matters.

Today I want to talk about three of the most iconic female leads in horror history — Laurie Strode, Nancy Thompson, and Sidney Prescott — and how their stories trace a fascinating evolution in the way horror movies think about women. Because when you put these three characters side by side, what you’re really looking at is a genre slowly, sometimes awkwardly, figuring out what strength actually looks like.

Laurie Strode: The Original Blueprint

Let’s start at the beginning. When John Carpenter and Debra Hill created Laurie Strode for Halloween in 1978, they weren’t necessarily setting out to make a feminist statement. They were making a low-budget slasher movie. But Jamie Lee Curtis brought something to Laurie that elevated her above the material — a quality of genuine intelligence and resourcefulness that made her feel different from the horror heroines that had come before.

Laurie is a babysitter, a bookworm, a teenage girl who gets teased by her friends for being too serious. She notices things. She pays attention. When Michael Myers starts following her around Haddonfield, she doesn’t dismiss it the way her friends Annie and Lynda do. She knows something is wrong, even when nobody believes her. And when everything finally goes sideways on Halloween night, Laurie doesn’t just run and hide — she improvises, she fights, she protects the kids in her care.

Does she need Dr. Loomis to come in and save her at the last second? Yes. And that’s worth acknowledging. By modern standards, there’s a ceiling on Laurie’s agency in the original film, a point where the narrative hands the resolution off to a male character. But what came before that moment — the fighting, the problem-solving, the sheer refusal to give up — was genuinely groundbreaking for its time.

What makes Laurie’s story even more interesting is how it evolved across decades of sequels and reboots. The Blumhouse trilogy that began in 2018 essentially asked the question: what does Laurie Strode look like forty years later, after a lifetime of trauma? The answer they gave us is a woman who is complicated, broken in some ways, but ultimately undefeated. She built a bunker. She stockpiled weapons. She prepared for the moment Michael Myers would come back, and when he did, she was ready. The 2018 version of Laurie Strode isn’t a victim waiting to be saved. She’s the trap.

That arc — from resourceful teenager to hardened, battle-scarred survivor — might be the most complete character journey in the franchise. And it’s a testament to both the character’s enduring power and to Jamie Lee Curtis’s commitment to her that Laurie Strode remained compelling across nearly five decades of storytelling.

Nancy Thompson: The Girl Who Refused to Sleep

A few years after Halloween changed the genre, Wes Craven came along with A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984) and gave us Nancy Thompson — and honestly, Nancy might be the most quietly radical of all the horror heroines we’re talking about today.

Here’s what makes Nancy so interesting: she doesn’t just survive Freddy Krueger. She defeats him. On her own terms. Through a plan she devised herself. And the plan isn’t about running faster or hiding better — it’s about understanding the rules of the game and then changing them.

Craven has talked about how Nancy came out of a conversation with his daughter about the way women were portrayed in horror movies — specifically, the tired trope of the heroine who trips and falls at the worst possible moment. He wanted Nancy to be smarter than that, more capable than that. And she is. Nancy is the one who figures out that Freddy draws his power from fear. She’s the one who realizes she can pull him out of the dream world and into reality, where he’s vulnerable. She sets the traps. She executes the plan. When Dr. Loomis shows up in the Halloween franchise, he’s there to save Laurie. When Nancy comes up with a plan, she’s there to save herself.

There’s a quote Craven gave about Nancy that has always stuck with me. He described her refusal to sleep — her insistence on staying awake and facing the truth — as the genuinely heroic thing about her, saying that “people who opt for that course of self-willed consciousness… are the only people that ultimately will survive.” That’s not just a description of a horror character. That’s practically a thesis statement about what it means to be brave.

The tragedy of Nancy’s story is that the sequels didn’t quite know what to do with her. By Dream Warriors, she’s been softened somehow, reduced from the fierce, proactive girl in the original to more of a mentor figure. Heather Langenkamp herself has said she felt lost in that role, that Nancy had lost the dynamic energy that made her so compelling the first time around. It’s a good reminder that creating a strong female character is only half the battle. You have to keep writing her that way.

Still, the original Nancy Thompson remains one of the great horror heroines — and one of the most underrated, honestly. She doesn’t always get the same cultural real estate as Laurie or Sidney, but she was doing things in 1984 that the genre is still catching up to.

Sidney Prescott: Self-Awareness as Superpower

By the time Scream came out in 1996, horror movies had already been making final girls for almost two decades. Kevin Williamson knew that. He was counting on it. Sidney Prescott is a character who exists inside a genre that she is consciously aware of — and Williamson used that self-awareness to build something genuinely new.

The genius of Sidney is that Scream acknowledges all the rules of slasher movies and then watches her break them. She doesn’t do the dumb things horror heroines are “supposed” to do. She doesn’t investigate the strange noise alone. She doesn’t trust the wrong person for too long. When Billy Loomis reveals himself as the killer and tries to frame her trauma against her, she stares him down and pulls the trigger. Sidney Prescott doesn’t wait to be saved. She ends it.

What Neve Campbell brought to the role over the course of six films (and counting — Sidney is set to return in Scream 7) is something that’s hard to overstate. She played Sidney growing up in real time. From the terrified teenager in the original to the crisis counselor hiding from the world in Scream 3 to the married mother of three in Scream (2022) who shows up in Woodsboro like she’s done this before — because she has, she just doesn’t want to anymore. Campbell herself described Sidney as someone who refuses to be a victim, someone who gives audiences “the confidence that they can overcome.” And she meant it. You can feel it in every performance.

There’s also something worth noting about the way Sidney’s relationship with fame and survival evolved across the Scream franchise. By Scream 4, she’s written a self-help book. She has a platform. Her cousin Jill tries to hijack that platform by staging her own attack and framing Sidney — because in 2011, fame was the thing worth killing for. The franchise grew with the culture around it, and Sidney grew with the franchise. That kind of longevity is rare, and it says something about how well the character was built in the first place.

What Connects Them — And Why It Matters

Laurie, Nancy, and Sidney all occupy different eras of horror. They reflect the anxieties and values of the times they came from. But there’s a thread that runs through all three of them, and it’s this: they survive because of who they are, not in spite of it.

Laurie survives because she pays attention, because she’s careful, because she cares about the people around her. Nancy survives because she’s smart enough to figure out the rules and brave enough to rewrite them. Sidney survives because she refuses to let the narrative someone else wrote about her define who she is. These aren’t just scream queens. They’re three different versions of the same essential idea — that intelligence, resilience, and sheer refusal to give up are the things that actually get you through the night.

Film scholar Carol J. Clover coined the term “final girl” back in 1992 to describe this archetype, and it’s a useful term, but it’s also a bit reductive. Because when you look at the actual characters — really look at them — what you see isn’t a formula. You see three specific, individual women who happened to be put in impossible circumstances and found ways to survive them.

Horror gets a bad rap sometimes for how it treats women. And honestly, a lot of that criticism is fair — especially if you’re looking at the slasher genre’s lower depths, where the body count of supporting female characters exists for shock value and little else. But the genre’s best work has always given us something more interesting than that. Laurie Strode huddled in that closet, deciding to fight back. Nancy Thompson staying awake when everyone told her to just go to sleep. Sidney Prescott looking Ghostface in the eye and not flinching.

Those moments matter. They’ve always mattered. And for a couple of generations of horror fans — myself included — they were some of the first times we saw that kind of strength modeled on screen. Not strength as invulnerability. Not strength as the absence of fear. Strength as what you do with the fear you can’t get rid of.

That’s worth celebrating. That’s worth revisiting every time the lights go down and the music gets tense and someone picks up a phone they definitely shouldn’t answer.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go watch Halloween for the hundredth time.