‘It was just a little low budget slasher movie, made in 21 days for $300,000’
As a new film is released, Jamie Lee Curtis talks to Laura Harding about horror and Halloween
Jamie Lee Curtis cannot believe she is playing Laurie Strode again. She couldn’t believe it back in 2018 too, when she reprised her most famous role for a reboot of the Halloween franchise, which had made her a star back in 1978.
But here she is, at the age of 62, facing off with Michael Myers again in the next instalment of the modern trilogy helmed by filmmaker David Gordon Green.
“The last thing I thought I would be doing is a Halloween movie in 2017, when Jake Gyllenhaal called me in June and said that his friend David Green wanted to speak to me,” she remembers. “It was not my intention to do another Halloween movie, I felt like I had done them.
“And yet what he had written, and how he told the story of Laurie, and her daughter, and her granddaughter, and all of the conflict, I felt it was really a very exciting way to tell that story. And it was a no brainer for me and I just said yes immediately.
“I didn’t know it was a trilogy when we signed up for the first one. I found that out only after we’d shot the first movie. That is when I learned we were doing more. But as soon as I understood what David was doing, to bring back not only legacy characters, but to talk about the concentric circles of grief and trauma that happened around a centralised figure, a community in trauma.
“I thought it was a really inventive way to bring back characters, get it out of now, this generational movie which we watched, an entire movie about three people, and start the spin cycle.
“Now watch these people start to reject the system, the system fails, the police officers seem inept, they cannot help. And to watch that growing tide of people was very scary and powerful.”
The daughter of Hollywood legends Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Curtis was immediately dubbed a scream queen for her star-making turn in the 70s horror film and she has returned to the role of Laurie numerous times over the years, including in the 1981 sequel, 1998’s Halloween H20 and 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection.
In between she’s had roles in box office hits such as A Fish Called Wanda, My Girl, True Lies, Trading Places and Freaky Friday, as well as turns on TV in shows including Scream Queens and New Girl.
But it’s the new trilogy, which will conclude with the upcoming third instalment, entitled Halloween Ends, that has brought in different audience to Laurie Strode.
“I think that’s when a movie becomes a universe,” Curtis reflects. “Before it was just a little low budget slasher movie, made in 21 days for $300,000.
“Then there were a couple of movies, so you could call it a franchise. Now it’s a universe. Now it feels like because you’re bringing back legacy characters, you’re bringing in a whole new group of people, audience members and young people who are seeing it for the first time. It can grow. And the amount of affection from fans can now grow and it’s really exciting.”