For Haddonfield and Laurie Strode, in particular, it was really just matter of time before Michael Myers returned.
Thank the heavens, then, that she’s spent the past 40 years preparing herself for his second coming. It’s for this reason that the Laurie Strode of Halloween (2018) is a far cry from the naive, fear-stricken teen we saw back in 1978.
It makes for a pretty exciting character development, not least because director David Gordon Green (and Danny McBride!) has chosen to retcon all Halloween sequels so that only the original classic is considered canon – albeit with a slight adjustment to John Carpenter’s seminal horror pic. Spoilers: The Shape was apprehended on that fateful night from ’78.
And soon after the film’s impressive (read: blood-curdling) showcase at SDCC, Jamie Lee Curtis sat down with Variety to speak more about Laurie’s development and how different she is now than she was four decades ago.
“I know it’s the thing that people say about women who fight back, is that we kick butt — you know, if you look at the first movie, Laurie wasn’t anything like those women. Laurie was a repressed, intellectual high school student with sort of romantic delusions. And she was forced, by circumstances way behind her control, to face her deepest fear, which is surviving a madman with a knife.
And then the woman you meet 40 years later is a woman who survived that trauma, for 40 years, trying to convince everybody in her populace that [Michael Myers] was coming back. She only kicks butt when again she is forced to, by the confrontation with Michael Myers.”
Continuing on, the actress touched on the Time’s Up and #MeToo movements, and how they tie into the film, saying:
“And so it’s tricky, because any woman who fights back is a survivor and a champion, and we have a world right now where women are finally saying, ‘Enough is enough, Time’s Up, #MeToo,’ and Laurie Strode is one of those women. It’s just she’s not an ass-kicker, she is a survivor. And it’s different, I think. I think it’s a movie about trauma. I actually think surviving trauma is the sort of underpinning of the story.
I think somehow, the way all of it lined up, was this sort of perfect moment coinciding with #MeToo, Time’s Up, and all of this female empowerment, where women are taking back their narratives and saying, ‘Enough is effing enough, and it’s my turn to write the narrative.’”
Finally, Curtis promised that the next chapter in the franchise will be very powerful, but also “scary as all heck,” explaining:
“And that’s what Laurie Strode has been trying to do for 40 years, by saying, ‘He is coming back, he is coming back, he is coming back.’ And so, it feels like the confluence of that frustration and that rise of empowerment, has come together in this movie in a beautiful way. Simple, classic, scary as all heck, and yet very powerful.”
I don’t know about you, but I’ve already got October 19th marked in my calendar, as Halloween is sounding like a respectful love letter to one of the greats of horror cinema and I wouldn’t miss it for the world.