Scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis says goodbye to the role that launched her career
Jamie Lee Curtis discusses the ultimate horror movie showdown between long-time protagonist Laurie Strode and her arch-nemesis in Halloween Ends.
It’s a grudge match 44 years in the making. And, now, it all ends.
In the last instalment of co-writer and director David Gordon Green’s horror trilogy Halloween Ends, we witness the ultimate horror movie showdown between long-time protagonist Laurie Strode and her arch-nemesis, The Shape, aka Michael Myers.
This final chapter carries all the feels for 63-year-old scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis; a conduit for her to say an emotional goodbye to the role that launched her career.
Not only is the trilogy – Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021) and Halloween Ends (2022) – a blood-soaked love letter to the most revered horror franchise in film history, it’s also given Curtis something else; something she’s secretly wanted since she was a teenager.
“I’ve been a creative person my whole life,” Curtis, fighting back tears during a Zoom call from New York, says, “but I never was able to really manifest that creativity in the field of film and television, and podcasts.
“And what (Halloween) 2018 gave me was confidence. The success of that movie woke up something inside me that said ‘if not now, when? If not you, who?’ It took away the need for other people to provide me something that I secretly wanted. It has unleashed it; it’s given me a creative voice that I have longed for. The Jamie that was in a meeting yesterday pitching something … that Jamie is only because of the 2018 movie and then the 2021 movie, and then now. It has given me a creative life.”
The daughter of Hollywood greats Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Curtis landed her first leading role in John Carpenter’s Halloween in 1978 at age 19.
With a budget of just $US325,000 and shot over 17 days, Halloween helped establish the slasher genre and is lauded as one of the most successful independent films of all time.
Despite not being first choice for the role, Curtis was cast by Carpenter and producer Debra Hill as small-town, naive teenage babysitter Laurie Strode, who comes up against the essence of pure evil in the form of masked killer Michael Myers on Halloween night.
With no apparent motivation, Michael – convicted of murdering his sister on Halloween night in 1963 when he was 6 – has escaped from a sanatorium after 15 years of incarceration and returns to Haddonfield with his sights firmly fixed on Laurie.
Lurking in the shadows, his almost superhuman presence is made even more terrifying by Carpenter’s score which brilliantly tracks the ‘boogeyman’s’ every move as he stalks and kills Laurie’s friends one-by-one.
It’s the ultimate game of cat and mouse, with Michael’s doctor Loomis, (played by the late, great Donald Pleasence), in pursuit. Laurie’s survival against the odds propelled the character to horror icon status and cementing her spot in history as one of the original ‘final’ girls.
While Curtis appreciates Strode is cherished as a strong, empowered feminist hero, she didn’t set out to create her as such.
“I’m an emotional, I am not an intellectual,” she laughs. “I don’t look at Laurie Strode in any other way than reacting the way anybody would in that situation, and then all of these beautiful attributes get assigned to (her) as a final girl, as a representation of something, as a collective.
“For me, she was just Laurie Strode, in Haddonfield, on that night, walking across that street, and being confronted with something that none of us in the world would ever think we would be confronted by, that we would ever want to be confronted by, and what would we do in Laurie’s shoes.”
The masterstroke in creating Laurie as a character that viewers would so strongly identify with can be credited to Hill, who passed away in 2005. At a time when most roles for women in horror were little more than bait with boobs, trailblazing Hill gave Laurie depth and substance; the bookish girl who drew on strength she didn’t know she had to survive a monster she couldn’t comprehend.
“This would make Debra so happy,” Curtis says. “She was so proud of Laurie, she was so integral to the reality of those girls. The way girls speak, to the mundane and sort of quotidian aspects of that small town American life, it’s all Debra. The art is all John (Carpenter), the filmmaking skill is all John … the centre of it, the beating heart of those girls, is Debra Hill.”
After Halloween, Curtis – who ironically isn’t a fan of horror movies – quickly went on to star in other genre films such as Prom Night (1980), Terror Train (1980), The Fog (1980), Halloween II (1981) and Roadgames (1981).
Later she landed roles in mainstream films A Fish Called Wanda (1988) and True Lies (1994), but Laurie kept luring Curtis back. Their actor-character pairing is now one of the longest in cinematic history, alongside Mark Hamill as Luke Skywalker, Carrie Fisher as Princess Leia, and Harrison Ford as Indiana Jones.
“My entire life is because of Laurie Strode,” she says. “My personal life, my financial life, my professional life … Laurie Strode. And she is real to me. She’s as real as I am, and I owe her everything.”
David Gordon Green’s trilogy injected new life into the Halloween franchise, and the first in the series Halloween (2018), was a direct sequel to Carpenter’s classic.
A lifelong fan of the film, Green realised that to reinvigorate the franchise he had to ignore the nine films – including two by Rob Zombie – that came after Carpenter’s original and start again; the storyline had become too convoluted, contradictory, and downright weird.
And it was a true return to form; Halloween (2018) smashed box-office records, became the franchise’s highest-grossing chapter and set a new record for the biggest opening weekend for a horror film starring a woman.
Green’s second, Halloween Kills, continued the record-breaking run, having the biggest opening weekend for any horror film in the pandemic era.
Fans connected with Green’s deep respect for the franchise and appreciated his subtle nods to previous films and the recasting of legacy characters such as survivor Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards), psychiatric nurse Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), Haddonfield sheriff Leigh Brackett (Charles Cyphers), and the original Michael Myers (Nick Castle).
The trilogy’s record-breaking run is sure to continue with Halloween Ends, which picks up four years after the vicious night portrayed in Halloween Kills.
Laurie has found peace after the slaying of her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) at Michael’s hand and is living with granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak).
She’s writing her memoir and, after intense therapy to overcome past trauma, she’s no longer jumping at shadows waiting for Michael to return.
A shell of his former self, Michael (James Jude Courtney) is barely surviving in a drain below a Haddonfield underpass, like a wounded animal waiting to die. But as Halloween night draws closer, an unexpected encounter with a soul as damaged as his gives him the power to rise again and go after Laurie one last time.
Laurie doesn’t see Michael coming, and while it’s an action-packed and horrific fight to the death, the tone is surprisingly reflective and sombre.
“I think in 30 years you will look back on these movies and think that David Gordon Green was a genius, a master at taking a genre which is traditionally ‘who lives and who dies’ and making them about ‘who are we?’ as people,” Curtis says.
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“Using this monster and this innocent woman, who’s now been traumatised at 40 years into it, and colliding them and all of the people that they live around, and all the resultant trauma and tragedy that happens to those people, and make movies bigger, deeper, more impactful, more emotional, about something.”
With the outcome of their final brutal battle resting on a knife’s edge, it’s the end for one of these iconic characters. And whether you’re rooting for Laurie or Michael, the real-life survivor of the Halloween saga is Jamie Lee Curtis, the finally confident girl.
Halloween Ends is released in cinemas on Thursday
Originally published as Scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis says goodbye to the role that launched her career
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