The sequel to 2018’s Halloween is one of the year’s most highly anticipated movies, and not just within the horror realm. Halloween Kills, in theaters Oct. 15, will bring Laurie Strode face to face with her brother, Michael Meyers, once again.
So what does being part of a franchise like Halloween look and feel like? What makes horror successful, and what can we expect to see from Halloween Kills? Jamie Lee Curtis and David Gordon Green recently shared answers to some of those questions and then some at the Venice Film Festival.
Deadline reports that Curtis said, quite simply, that what makes her so successful in horror is that she sees it as horror. “If you really boiled it down, the thing that made me successful in this genre is that I scare easily and naturally,” she explained. “I do not like to be frightened.”
Green, on the other hand, enjoys the horror genre and the intense thrills it brings. “The opportunity to scream, to be in an environment with people and let it out a little bit,” he said. “What a wonderful roller coaster to go into a room with friends and strangers and scream your ass off.”
Green was able to bring Curtis into that realm because of the way he frames the story in Halloween. Curtis might not love being scared, but she loves how people can relate to the characters in the series. She thinks the films stand as more than just horror classics. In terms of Halloween Kills, she sees the movie speak a little more to what we’re living through politically and what we’ve been living as we struggle to stop evil from winning.
“We’re a divided world, in the U.S., we’re are a divided country. Evil is seeming to win a bit, it doesn’t mean it’s going to happen always, but evil has won many times through history… What David has created in these three films will be very much a view into these times we live in.”
Those “three films” include the upcoming Halloween Ends, currently set to release in 2022.
Green spoke to the idea of 2018’s Halloween as well, saying he hoped it would connect, but if not, he wanted it to stand alone and tell a story. As Deadline quotes:
“The immediate goal in 2018 was to make something that if it didn’t connect for any reason it would feel like its own contained movie… Upon the success, we were very thrilled to be able to activate the second chapter” which builds to “operatic chaos.” Halloween Ends, he said, will be “our version of meditation and resolve.”
Fans are thrilled at the idea of the upcoming films and the stories that will be told. Curtis hopes, in telling some of those stories, that viewers can find healing.
“I think that what David has done, particularly with the 2018 movie, was to explore something deeper. We’re actors, so the deeper you want us to go, the deeper we will go, but also it was prescient what David and company figured out: We were on a verge of a wave of women understanding their own trauma and voicing it. The collision between the reality of life and the reality of Laurie’s life… happened in a pretty profound way.”
It was a profound way, indeed. While some may not see a sense of healing coming from horror films, it actually makes a lot of sense. Seeing someone overcome trauma can inspire you to take steps to stand up against your own – even if your experiences aren’t exactly the same.
Halloween Kills hits theaters Oct. 15.