Why Halloween Kills is ‘the perfect sequel’ in horror franchise for Jamie Lee Curtis

Jamie Lee Curtis elevates the slasher genre to an ‘art form’ in her latest Halloween outing.

Jamie Lee Curtis won’t take credit for the cinematic dance played out on screen in her latest Hollywood slasher. But there is one major aspect of developing enduring film heroine, Laurie Strode, in the latest Halloween movie that she will take credit for.

“I was involved in trying to figure out a way to get me out of a f...ing hospital gown because the way it was written, Laurie was in a hospital gown the whole movie,” she tells Insider.

“I said to (director) David Green, I’ve been there, done that, I am not going to run around a hospital with my bare arse hanging out. I said, we’ve established Laurie as a warrior … she a wounded warrior, but she’s a warrior.

“I said, if you put Arnold Schwarzenegger in a hospital gown, he looks like a wimp. If you put Vin Diesel in a hospital gown, he’s going to look like a wimp. If you put Angela Bassett in a hospital gown, she’s going to look wimpy.

“And I said, Laurie Strode cannot be wimpy this whole movie. That was my biggest contribution to the movie — the fact that I get back in my clothes. I’m just letting everybody know.”

Jamie Lee Curtis at the Venice Film Festival premiere of Halloween Kills. Picture: AFP

With that in mind, Strode spends just a short amount of time in a hospital gown as the film gets underway.

Halloween Kills, in cinemas this week, is the latest outing for Curtis in the role she first played 43 years ago and the second in the current trilogy.

Mask-wearing serial killer Michael Myers also returns in the new film which picks up right where 2018’s Halloween ended, with Strode, her daughter, Karen (Judy Greer), and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) taking on the monster.

The Halloween movie franchise villain Michael Myers.

“It is an art form,” she says of the slasher genre as it plays out in this latest offering .

“It is a combination of light and dark and cameras and actors. I told David when I saw the first cut of the movie, that the last 20 minutes are sort of opera, high opera. It feels very satisfying what’s happening and yet at the same time, I think it’s quite beautiful. It’s stylised in a way that certainly a traditional slasher film is not stylised. I’m very happy with it. It feels next level in so many ways.”

Curtis flew to Sydney in 2018 to promote the last film in the franchise. This time she is on Zoom.

“People are really liking the new movie,” she says.

“I think it surprised a lot of people. It is the next level of sort of intensity, violence, the kills are incredibly vicious but also quite beautiful from a cinematic standpoint so it is lovely.”

The relationship between Laurie Strode and her family is explored heavily. In the past, they’ve struggled to believe her about Myers.

“This movie, these two women step up into the role of Laurie Strode because Laurie is the wounded warrior,” Curtis explains.

“To watch them step forward to me is the passing of the torch, the generational strength. I like to remind people that Laurie Strode on October 31st in 1978 did not wake up a heroine, she woke up a quiet, introspective virgin, repressed a little, a little romantic brainiac who her biggest concern was getting a boy to kiss her.

“And by the end of that movie, she was a warrior. But she was an unwitting warrior, an unprepared warrior, she did not want to be a warrior. She wanted to be a doctor.

“There’s something tragic about being forced into a warrior mode and then being misunderstood.

“So for me, the tragedy of Laurie Strode is that she was an unwitting warrior who was then misunderstood for 40 years and in my opinion, she was like a pinball and pinball machine.”

Like Strode, Curtis explains, we as humans are all wounded.

“That is why watching a woman who we’ve watched walk wounded through a movie after movie for 43 years, you relate. Don’t you want to relate to that? I do.”

Jamie Lee Curtis in a scene from Halloween Kills.

Another film in the franchise, Halloween Ends, is slated for release in October 2022.

“The next one goes even deeper,” she says.

“I can't say much about it yet, we are just about to shoot it, we have been talking a lot about it, but it is about the very nature of it.

“I have been in recovery for a long time from opiate and alcohol addiction and we have a phrase, ‘when you are looking in the mirror, you are looking at the problem’. I think the next movie is about a lot of looking in the mirror.”

Halloween Kills brings the total number of movies in the global hit franchise to 12. There are also comic books, novels, video games and a raft of merchandise.

Why a 13th?

“This was the perfect sequel and I really do feel that the closing chapter of this trilogy will leave people very surprised, some people very angry, some people really excited and it leaves asking questions that we need to ask,” she says.

“It is important and to that point, why another one? I really believe that in 20 years from now or 30 years from now, we are going to look back on this trilogy of movies made by one filmmaker at the centre of the whole thing and we are going to have a better sense of who we were as a society based on these three movies than any novel, any nonfiction, any documentary could tell about this period of time 2018 through 2022 and the social justice and the mob violence and the level of rancour and hatred and division and split in this world right now fuelled by Covid, fake news, misinformation, all of the rest of it.

“I think you will just be shocked that David got it all right.”

Halloween Kills is in cinemas from October 28.