Hello, and 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.

Thus far in class we’ve been focusing on those plucky characters who manage to victoriously survive the carnage of the film. We might as well close this chapter of characters out.

There's a definite prestige involved with surviving a horror movie. If you survive you must be important. At least one would assume. So of course the mere act of surviving has the tendency to retroactively make characters seem important even if they weren’t.

Generally speaking the Hero always lives, though there are exceptions (They Live, 1988).  But just because another character happens to survive along with the Hero doesn't necessarily mean they were a Couple. In John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) both Kurt Russell and Keith David survive, but that was just dumb luck for David. Russell is a Solo Hero. David is what we'd call…

A Straggler.

Stragglers are simply the other characters who don’t die, the people fortunate enough to have been hanging around the Hero at all the right times. There are two basic types of Stragglers: Dependents and the Lucky.

The Dependent Straggler
The Dependent Straggler is like the Worthless Girl in as much as they needed the Hero to get them through the film safely. A Love Interest who didn't quite have enough screen time to form a Couple with the Hero is the most frequent Dependent Straggler (Shaun of the Dead, 2004). Some times the D.S. is a whacky best friend (I guess, in some ways, Shaun again – depending on what one means by “survive”). Then of course there's my least favorite Dependent, the Little Kid.

The Little Kid is very, very much like the Worthless Girl: in constant need of saving, only multiplied tenfold. Dakota Fanning was a big enough character in War of the Worlds (2005) that one could argue she and Tom Cruise were a Couple, but let's be realistic here, she was more of a prop than an actual character. I have to assume Little Kids appeal mostly to adult audience members. Cause I always have the reoccurring thought of, "Man, I'd just let that whiny brat die." Maybe I'm just evil. Who's to say?

The Lucky
The Lucky are ‘lucky' in the sense that to survive a horror movie normally you must either be the Hero or be saved by the Hero. Like Keith David in The Thing, the Lucky Stragglers found a way not to die without the Hero's direct help.

Lucky Stragglers will occasionally contribute something useful at an earlier point in the movie, but will be gone or out of commission (knocked out often) during the final showdown. Then they’ll come strolling up once our Hero has vanquished the monster. “What did I miss?” Wacka wacka. Roll credits.

A Straggler oddity that sticks out in my mind is Juliet Lewis, who fights side-by-side with Mr. Clooney in From Dusk Till Dawn's (1996) climax, though strangely, she was neither a Love Interest, nor a Partner, nor a big enough character to qualify as a Second Hero. So the question could be raised, "Why have her live at all?"

This is one of the many reasons I love horror movies. Only while talking about a horror movie would one wonder why everyone didn't die at the end. But actors are expensive and there needs to be plenty of deaths in the film. Horror movies can’t afford to fuck around in this area. They don't have the budget for it. All expendable characters must go! That's the general rule.

Usually this works just fine. Most horror characters are 2-D and unlikable anyway. If we wanted to watch interesting character interplay we'd rent an Ingmar Bergman film. We paid good money to see these annoying jag-offs die. Truth be told, in a lot of these movies I'd prefer to see everyone die, Hero included. Can't Jason win? Just once?

Every now and then, though, we'll get a movie with some characters we actually like. Movies like Critters (1986) or Tremors (1990) often have a lot of Stragglers (Tremors, if I remember correctly, has like seven). Films like these are usually going for adventure and fun versus out-and-out horror and scares. Scary horror movies don't like many, if any, Stragglers. Scream (1996) is a rare example of a genuinely scary movie that chose to let numerous supporting characters survive. Although I know at least one of those Stragglers (Deputy Dewey) originally died and was resurrected in a reshoot.

So I suppose there could be a third kind of Straggler, the very very lucky kind. For some Stragglers are saved, not by the Hero, not by their own actions, but by test-audiences. Despite having clearly died earlier in the flic, they'll preposterously wander up after the dust clears in an obviously re-shot ending. Brandi in I Still Know What You Did Last Summer (1998) is a particularly ridiculous example of this. I like to call this character the Lazarus Friend (further discussion for a future class).

Well, that’s all the time we have. See ya next time! And keep watching those horror flics, cause remember – just because it’s bad doesn’t mean it can’t be great.




Past classes of HORROR 101:
The Solo Hero
The Couple