But Patricia doesn’t stop there. Having learned her lesson, she walks up to the Boogeyman and keeps the shotgun trained at his head. Next, we’re treated to a montage of the Boogeyman being loaded into an ambulance, being pronounced dead by a medical examiner, and then loaded into a cremation oven, all with Patricia holding the shotgun to his head. Only when the oven opens to reveal the killer’s ashes does she finally lower her weapon.
It’s an incredible joke, a perfect example of the knowing, character-based humor that has made Widow’s Bay such a delight. Further, the scene challenges the conventional wisdom around horror movies, that too often assume people need to make dumb decisions for scary scenes to happen.
The paradigmatic example is, of course, Halloween, where Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) repeatedly drops her guard and turns her back to Michael Meyers, even after he’s recovered from a seemingly-fatal injury. But Laurie has had just as many imitators: the Camp Crystal Lake counselors in Friday the 13th, the Woodsboro teens in Scream, the citizens of Elm Street. Time and again, even the final girl survives not by their wits or ingenuity, but by luck and determination to finally beat the killer in the end.
Of course, Widow’s Bay is both an homage and a comedy, and thus doesn’t have the same demands as a straightforward horror movie. While the show can sometimes be scary (remember the possessed people in the last Patricia episode?), viewers come to it primarily to laugh and to identify the way it plays with horror tropes. Laurie and Sidney don’t have that luxury.
Still, the joke at the end of “Your Baggage” shows that horror writers have too often relied on stupidity as an excuse to put their characters in danger, and it’s just as tiresome as tropes about losing cellphone service. Widow’s Bay issues a challenge for horror writers: let your characters be smart. Or else Patricia will come for them.
