Give me a horror movie in which a woman climbs behind the wheel of a big American car and hits the road to meet her doom and I’m a happy hitcher.

Well, perhaps I should clarify. It’s not that I want her to meet her doom — far from it. I always want the heroine to get away, or at least to come out of her descent into the femalestrom alive and in full possession of her capacities and with all ten fingers and toes… but it just seems that the best stories end badly for her. Probably the Queen of all Woman Alone in her Car horror movies is Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO (1960), which begins for all intents and purposes with bank employee Janet Leigh absconding with $40,000 of Texas oil money to take a stab at a happy life. Thirteen minutes into the film she hits the road, quitting Phoenix for the Interstate and a dream of a new start in California. Thirteen minutes later she comes to a dead stop under the neon sign of The Bates Motel. Well, you know the story. Leigh’s car trip takes up a good chunk of the film’s first act. You can imagine the studio notes if such a setpiece found its way into a modern screenplay – the feeling would be that too much time is spent in business that merely gets the protagonist from point A to point B, that it doesn’t tell us anything about her that we don’t already know, that there’s no conflict. All of which is, of course, koo-koo-krazy and kudos for Hitchcock for stretching this interlude as he does, allowing Leigh’s troubled Marion Crane a little headspace to figure out her next move.

Female protagonists in horror movies were nothing new in 1960. Women had been lighting candles and nosing around where they were not supposed to for ages by the time PSYCHO was released. It was something of a Gothic tradition for women to be the curious, sensitive ones whose female intuition urged them where angels and most men feared to tread. But when horror movies became a going concern in America after 1931 (the boom year of Tod Browning’s DRACULA and James Whale’s FRANKENSTEIN at Universal and Rouben Mamoulian’s DR. JEKYLL AND MR. HYDE at Paramount), men were invariably the audience identification characters. Women tagged along to be victims and the object of monstrous affections, to be corrupted or threatened with corruption, to be man and monster-handled. Halfway through the 20th Century, it was still fairly novel for a woman to slide behind the year of a fat American car to satisfy her own curiosities, to feed her own hunger for freedom, liberty, sovereignty, what-have-you, and of course to meet her doom. Maybe that’s why it was allowed — maybe men though these were cautionary tales, designed principally to teach women their place and to advise them that horror hunting was man’s work.

Three months after PSYCHO hit American movie screens, a low budget British film premiered in London that employed a similar narrative device. In THE CITY OF THE DEAD (imported Stateside in September 1961 as HORROR HOTEL), Venetia Stevenson plays Nan Barlow, a young university student who gets it into her head that a good way to study the purported existence of witches in New England is to motor on over to the eldtritch hamlet of Whitewood, where an accused witch was burned at the stake back in the cockle hat days. As in PSYCHO, director John Llewellyn Moxey devotes a fair amount of time to Nan simply driving her car, with a break in the middle of this early setpiece at a gas station (which mirrors, to a certain extent, Marion Crane’s divertissement at a used car dealership). As with Marion, once Nan gets out of the car it’s all over for her, her journey has ended. I’ll say no more, in case you’d like to give THE CITY OF THE DEAD a spin this Halloween (and you should!), apart from making the claim that the satisfying of Nan’s curiosity is one of the more upsetting scenes in horrordom. It is neither graphic nor particularly violent but its power to disturb comes from its depiction of obliteration as the price of knowledge.

Trailing these two films into cinemas in 1962 was Herk Harvey’s independently-financed CARNIVAL OF SOULS, in which surviving a car accident leaves church organist Candice Hilligoss feeling unattached to this world. We never get to spend any quality time with the character Mary Henry before the car in which she is a passenger plunges off of a bridge and drowns her friends. Afterwards, she proves an ill fit in middle America, uninterested in the theological bromides of her employer or the pinch-brained tendencies of her friends and neighbors. Mary Henry is one of the most interesting characters in American cinema at this time, not just horror cinema. She’s a true independent, wanting to go it alone and do it alone. I’ve long nourished the speculative notion of Mary and Marion Crane running into one another on their respective journeys through the night (and the desert). I’d like to think they might stop off at some highway greasy spoon and have a cup of coffee together before going their separate ways. There’s something very Thelma and Louise about these two, both feeling devalued and underestimated. Unlike Marion and Nan, Mary Henry doesn’t have a boyfriend and doesn’t want one. She doesn’t need a man in her life for security, affection or context. And yet she is haunted… hagged by the recurring specter of a whey-faced man (director Harvey) who keeps popping up like a house detective to harsh Mary’s mellow and by an intuitive connection she feels to a disused resort pavilion jutting up out of the desert sands like a rotten tooth. Mary is drawn to the place, though others try to warn her away. When things seem to be going sour in her new position, in a new town, she drives back to the pavilion to satisfy her curiosity, her longing for connection, and where she makes the fateful mistake of getting out of the car.

CARNIVAL OF SOULS bears an eerie resemblance to a movie made in Hollywood at the end of World War II. Produced by Republic Pictures and directed by Walter Colmes, WOMAN WHO CAME BACK (1945) stars Nancy Kelly as Lorna Webster, an unmarried, unattached woman (“I have no relatives”) who fled her hometown of Eben Rock Massachusetts years earlier but who returns as the film opens. Traveling by bus, she is disturbed from a catnap by an old woman (the delightfully creepy Elspeth Dudgeon) who plomps down on the seat next to her and begins to gas on about Eben Rock history and Lorna’s great-great grandfather (thrice removed), an infamous magistrate “responsible for condemning eighteen women to their fiery deaths.” Meanwhile back at the steering wheel, the bus driver loses control of his vehicle, which smashes through the guard rail and drops down a sheer cliff face to plunge into the depths of “beautiful Shadow Lake.” The only survivor of the crash, Lorna staggers into Eben Rock proper, where she is greeted somewhat coldly by the locals… except for the kindly country physician (John Loder) she left at the altar many years ago.

Though Lorna never again hits the road after the unfortunate mishap with public transportation, she belongs in this company by virtue of her essential dissatisfaction. Like Marion Crane and Mary Henry, Lorna is an ill-fit, a square peg. She doesn’t want the small town life (Eben Rock seems to consist of little more than a tavern and a church), she can’t deal with the hypocrisy and xenophobia, the superstition and stupidity. Through the film, she suffers from an acute identity crisis, attempting as she is to be a modern woman governing her own life but pulled back inexorably to the violent past that is her heritage. Whereas Marion Crane has entertained voices in her head as a means of working out her problems, Lorna hears accusations, which drive her ultimately back to her narrative point of origin — Shadow Lake. As does Mary Henry, Lorna winds up back in the water and her lifeless body borne out again in the arms of a doctor and a pastor whose respective ministrations (reason and faith) had done so little to sustain her. Mary’s desperate scramble through the woods to Shadow Lake in the final reel of WOMAN WHO CAME BACK brings to mind the first reel of George Romero’s NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968) and the female protagonist Barbra’s similar scramble for sanctuary after her brother is killed in a cemetery by a seeming madman and she is forced to abandon their car. Barbra (Judith O’Dea) is a pure soul who would be happy watching the lilies of the field but she’s stuck in a world of assholes like her brother Johnnie. Although Johnnie died defending her, he was otherwise a braying braggart and a bully, typical of the acquisitive, get-ahead types who always run the show. Overwhelmed by her emotions when the cemetery attack is revealed to be part of an occult uprising of the recently deceased, who not only want to kill the living but eat them to boot, Barbra retreats into catatonia and spends the bulk of the film sitting on the couch, spouting nonsequiturs and simply taking up space. I always though Barbra’s abandonment of Life As We Know It was one of the great horror film reactions, a refusal to play with others that doesn’t get nearly the credit it deserves.

I must confess that the first, I don’t know, thirty times I watched NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD I never really paid attention to Barbra’s relatively short span of time behind the wheel or on foot. Lately, though, when I’ve gone back to the movie I’ve been reminded of Cloris Leachman’s scenes at the top of Robert Aldrich’s KISS ME DEADLY (1955). Introduced running on the highway at night, wearing a trenchcoat similar to Barbra’s and shoeless (as Barbra winds up), Leachman’s Christina Bailey has escaped from an asylum and like a plague carrier she brings the plot to the front door (well, driver’s side door) of Ralph Meeker’s bullish private detective Mike Hammer. (Interesting too that both Christina and Barbra are introduced to the men who fail to be their saviors through the glare of headlights.) Leachman (in her film debut) takes up very little of KISS ME DEADLY but Christina haunts the film for the duration. Long after her agonized screams have faded, we bear the heartache of having known her — Hammer, too, though he would be loath to admit it. Part of Christina’s appeal is that, though she is clearly desperate and half-crazed (from wrongful incarceration, not genuine mental illness) when she begs a ride from Hammer, she clearly has his number, figuring him out without very much detective work — purely by intuition. Traditionally, women who manifest that level of keen insight have to die… but only after they have been labeled “difficult.”

Horror movie heroines don’t come much more difficult than Julie Harris in Robert Wise’s THE HAUNTING (1963). As Eleanor Lance, a thirtysomething spinster forced by the death of her mother to move in with her sister and her family, Harris plays it twitchy and pathetic, which is appropriate for a veritable shut-in who is invited, out of the blue (which she never sees, being a veritable shut-in) to participate in the paranormal investigation of a purportedly haunted house. “Nell” really divides the room as far as horror fans are concerned. Most find her whiny, needy, childlike ways oppressively precious and prefer Claire Bloom’s catty and cruel lesbian psychic Theo but the story belongs to Nell and there would be no Haunting of Hill House without her. The character’s arc takes her from a custodial role in the illness and death of her mother (as explained in the backstory) to permanent residence as a shade, a shadow, a presence in Hill House, “where whatever walks… walks alone.” The best time of Nell’s life is the car ride she takes when she cuts out on her own (in the vehicle of which she owns precisely half – how sad is that?) and makes the drive to her new assignment, her destiny and her doom.

From Eleanor Vance, it’s only a hop, skip and a shriek to the protagonist of the eerie 70s horror movie LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH (1971), directed  by John Hancock. Jessica (Zorah Lampert) doesn’t do any of her own driving but she’s in the right sorority here. A high-strung New Yorker who has spent some time in the care of a doctor for what we might assume is schizophrenia, Jessica decamps to the country with her cellist husband and a hippie friend with the hope that the less pressurized environment will be a tonic for her troubled mind. And we all know how that goes. (Does anybody from the country ever move to the city with hope of healing their troubled mind?) As in WOMAN WHO CAME BACK and CARNIVAL OF SOULS, this film begins and ends on the water, on an eerily placid rural lake at sunrise though in this case the bookends are not meant to connote a karmic closure so much as a tale folding back on itself. Sadly, Jessica is not only an ill-fit in the sticks, among the arthritic V.F.W. set (whose dues paying members all seem to sport fresh wounds) but also with her loved ones. The genius of LET’S SCARE JESSICA TO DEATH is that Duncan (Barton Heyman) is not depicted as a Madison Avenue stuffed shirt but as a sensitive, Liberal, peace-and-love dude who really wants Jessica to get better but knows, down deep, it’s a lost cause. Hearing voices and guided by spirits or demons, Jessica is too fragile for this world, which seems to be inhabited by monsters. Jessica sees things nobody believes are there, hears things nobody thinks exist outside of her brain. She has aspirations towards artistry but no true medium other than her sensitivity. Jessica embarrasses, which is the contract-breaker. Whether Jessica’s husband really turns to the affections of another woman or she just thinks he does, whether there are vampires in New England or she just thinks there are, it can’t end well for Jessica. And in fact it doesn’t… although the fact that Jessica survives while many of the women discussed above do not may be the cruelest twist of fate.

We have in recent years gotten away from the Woman Driving Alone with Only Her Terrible Sensitivity as Copilot template and I’m sorry to see it go. Oh, women occasionally climb into cars in contemporary horror movies and even take the wheel from time to time (as seen in this moment from the final frames of Hideo Nakata’s J-horror classic RING), and they occasionally have occasion to wonder if they might be going crazy might be going crazy might be going crazy crazy crazy but it’s not the same and I guess that’s as it should be. As women have attained a kind of parity with men as horror film protagonists, they have been allowed to wield axes and chainsaws and kick ass like regular Van Helsings and Father Karrases and Ashes and I know those are important and empowering milestones. We all need a win every now and again, even in a genre that brokers in unfortunate results and unpleasant fates. But I hope we never lose our capacity to see ourselves, male or female, as lonely travelers on that dark, dark road where every exit leads to Hell but all the lights are green.