Ahoy. Welcome back to Horror 101, where we like turn an academic eye on the vast, bitchin' and often unintentionally hilarious world of horror movie conventions.

We began our first class with a breakdown of the Solo Hero, because boiled down to its simplest form a horror story needs only a Hero and a Villain - a knight and a dragon, if you will. But what's the point of achieving badass glory if there's nobody around to impress? Enter the maiden!

Horror movies have changed a lot since the Classic Age of the Universal monster flics, but one of the few things that has held firmly intact is - The Couple.

A Couple is comprised of the Hero and his/her Love Interest.* But - bear with me - the mere existence of a Love Interest does not automatically mean that we have a Couple. The title can be confusing, I know, since our Hero can even be married or in a relationship, yet not in a Couple. Jenny Agutter is the Love Interest in An American Werewolf in London (1981), but she exists solely as dramatic conflict for David Naughton. The movie isn't their story, it's Naughton's.

The Couple functions like a unit, with other characters coming and going and dying, until ultimately the Couple must save the day (though as we'll discuss in a moment, it's rarely an equal partnership). Every now and then in a Couple we'll have two equal Heroes, what could be called an Even Couple (Jeepers Creepers, 2001), but we’re talking about conventions here and conventionally there is but one true Hero in a standard Couple. Accompanying our Hero will be one of two counterparts: the Partner or the Worthless Girl.

The Partner
The Partner is someone our Hero can rely on and is quite often someone they need, like a Guy/Girl Who Knows Things (more on this character in a future class), supplying our Hero with crucial information, while also being conveniently super sexy. The Partner is often a scientist paired with a law enforcement official, or the other way around depending on which is our Hero, as the law enforcement official will generally be a dude (Lake Placid, 1999). Reporters make good Partners too (Piranha, 1978) 

A lot of movies employ a False Partner (a gimmick I personally find weak sauce). The False Partner behaves exactly like a regular Partner, but ultimately proves useless by dying "surprisingly" before the final confrontation, their death often ushering in the climax. The False Partner is universally male, likely to play off the standard perception that girls need men to protect them and thus it's scarier when our Hero girl is suddenly left to fend for herself. The first several Friday the 13th movies all have False Partners.

The Worthless Girl
Let me paint a picture for you: Imagine our Hero running from a horrible monster, let's say a dreaded, deep-swamp mutation… the Zombigator. The Zombigator is fast but our Hero is making good time. In fact, the only thing that's slowing him down is the girl that he's towing in hand behind him. She may even be yelling stupid shit like: "I can't run this fast!" "I need to stop!" But our Hero has enough awesome for both of them. He'll get them to safety. Then, as if this girl weren't enough of a disaster, SHE TRIPS! That's right. She fucking falls down to the ground.

Now, I can tell you right now, if a Zombigator were chasing me and the girl I was with - who I likely just met earlier that night - tripped, I doubt I'd even notice and if I did, I can assure you I would not run back to help her.

Of course, this is why I'm merely a cowardly horror fan, because that's exactly what our horror Hero does. He might even pick her up and carry her. He's that badass and she's somehow that useless. Meet the Worthless Girl: she's hot, she wears heels in the woods, and her idea of “helping” is screaming when she spots the monster.

Next to the Solo Hero, the Worthless Girl is probably the most time-honored character in the horror genre. She doesn't have to be female, but almost always, always, always is. The point of the Worthless Girl is to give our Hero someone to constantly save, thus repeatedly demonstrating his manly valor. She's the maiden sitting up in the tower who can seemingly do nothing other than cry for help and make-out with our Hero as a reward for saving her worthless ass.

For reasons I will not bother to analyze here, it is just not acceptable for a male Love Interest to be that helpless on screen. Sure, we can have female Heroes, though more often than not (and I'm talking about decades worth of movies here, not just our current PC-mass-appeal-cinema) they're still worthless and need to be saved by supporting characters like Dr. Loomis (Halloween, 1978). The best example of a Worthless Man is Hicks (Michael Biehn) in Aliens (1986), though his "worthlessness" is caused by an injury sustained in heroic battle, not something as unflattering as pathological-tripping.

While far from dead, the Worthless Girl is slowly being phased out of studio horror movies to better reflect our nation's current perception of gender roles. As one might expect, this is being executed in an amazingly half-assed fashion. The Worthless Girl will still be worthless for a vast majority of the film, but will have at least one really out of place scene where she inexplicably kicks all sorts of ass. You can practically hear the script-notes meeting at the studio where someone said, "Nah, you don't need to rewrite the character, just give her a scene where she does something cool."

So now our Progressive Worthless Girl, who is of course still a push-up-bra-bimbo anyway, will at some point (in between all her tripping) suddenly wield a battle ax with expert confidence and take out a bunch of baddies; a feat which is invariably followed by a groan worthy one-liner that's either weirdly anachronistic to the PC-induced progressive moment, "That's for making me brake a nail!" or hacky Grrrl Power lame, "I don't do laundry!"

Well, look at the time. That’s about that for this class. Join me for the next installment of HORROR 101, won’t you?




* Generally speaking Couples involve the Hero and the Love Interest, but there’s certainly an extensive list of movies that buck this trend. Some films - Jaws (1975) being the first example to pop into my head - have a same-sex Couple (Hooper being The Partner). These are less common because our dudes can't have sexual tension or hook up. They could, but I'm not sure that would really appeal to the target demo. Also, having two dudes usually gives the film a buddy cop feel, more fun-loving - a Butch & Sundance tone - and Jaws, while definitely a horror movie in many ways is also just as much an action/adventure movie. Tremors (1990) has a similar thing going.

There's also been a recent trend - films like Jeepers Creepers again, Cursed (2005) and the House of Wax (2005) - where our Couple is brother and sister. They can't hook up either, but since most horror Couples spend more time running and hiding than snogging, the brother-sister Couple usually has the same vibe as a normal one (lots of cowering and holding each other).