Fear and now
‘Halloween Kills’ keeps moving the fright as trilogy midpoint
VENICE LIDO, Italy — When “Halloween Kills” arrives next week, it means Jamie Lee Curtis has just one more chance to reprise the career-defining role of Laurie Strode that she first played in 1978.
Strode, a teenage babysitter, was the sole survivor of a massacre by masked Michael Myers, a knifewielding sociopath. Curtis triumphantly returned to the role in the hit 2018 reboot, titled simply “Halloween.”
“Halloween Kills” rates as this trilogy’s centerpiece; Curtis will say Adieu to Laurie in “Halloween Ends” which is scheduled to film in January.
“In 2018 our immediate goal was to make ‘Halloween’ feel like its own contained movie,” David Gordon Green, the trilogy’s cowriter and director, explained.
“We could invite the original fans and old fans. Upon the success of it we were thrilled to activate the second chapter and now close with the third.
“For this film,” Green continued, “it’s finding a new context to ‘What generates fear?’ and ‘What keeps fear alive?’ You can always kill the bad thing but can you kill the wake that the bad guy leaves?
“That’s one of the creative challenges we find really rewarding. How do we keep fear alive? Keep it fresh? And have a conversation why we subject our characters to fear.”
“What David, particularly with the 2018 movie, explored was something deeper and that’s why it was such a satisfying experience,” Curtis, 62, said.
“This is a movie.” She continued, “about communal trauma. That entire town has been traumatized, not just Laurie and her family.
“Watching this is to see David expand in concentric circles. All of them have had horrible lives because of Michael Myers.”
“To expand the community of Haddonfield,” Green said, “we took characters we introduced in the 2018 film. How much fun to bring back Sheriff Bracket or Nancy Richards and look at the ensemble the (original) John Carpenter-Debra Hill film introduced and ask, What would happen if we dared introduce them?”
“What David and company figured out was we were on the verge of a wave of women understanding and coming into their power and voicing it. The reality of Laurie’s life which is harsh and brutal collided in a profound way in the 2018 movie.
“All over the world we are seeing community rage against a system. I read the third one and I did not sleep afterwards. It’s an extraordinary way to finish this trilogy.
“There’s a line in ‘Halloween Kills’ saying, ‘The system is broken’ — and the next movie expands that thought to an existential level to an nth degree.”