SCREAM QUEEN’S LAST STAB
As Jamie Lee Curtis exits ‘Halloween’ franchise, actor feels certain kind of peace in bloody resolution
Jamie Lee Curtis was about to depart Santa Monica, California, on a lengthy trip to promote “Halloween Ends,” her final film in the long-running horror franchise, while also doing awards-season press for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” the indie hit she co-starred in this past March, and the supersized itinerary had her worried: What would all those weeks away mean for her rescue dog, a sweet-natured terrier-poodle named Runi?
If you have ever packed a suitcase and watched your dog’s tail droop, you can understand why Curtis, 63, had gone to such great lengths to conceal her upcoming trip.
“It really got crazy,” she said. “I needed to pack the big hanging bags, so I put Runi in his crate in my bedroom, I turned on the air conditioning, I turned on Boston — loud — and shut the door so he wouldn’t hear the zipping of the suitcases in the other room.” She paused for effect:
“That’s how completely obsessed I was!”
Curtis has been a star for 44 years, but she wields that power in a bracing way: Where other female actors can be cagey, she is forthright, whether the topic is aging (she stopped coloring her gray hair years ago), addiction (Curtis speaks openly about a decadelong Vicodin addiction she kicked in 1999), or plastic surgery (after experimenting with Botox and liposuction, she has since decried cosmetic procedures). As the daughter of actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, Curtis is Hollywood royalty, and since her husband, Christopher Guest, hails from a British family with peerage, that technically makes her a baroness, though you’d never catch her using the title. (Besides, Guest’s other titles — he directed “Waiting for Guffman” and “Best in Show” — are much more impressive.)
Curtis never meant to be the face of horror. She hates to be scared, doesn’t like to watch violent movies, and for all of her strongly held opinions, she tries never to argue. “My husband and I have probably had two or three fights in 38 years,” she said. “I like things nice and fragrant and quiet. I like a nice soft dog, you know what I mean?”
But when a 19-year-old Curtis was cast as the menaced babysitter Laurie Strode in John Carpenter’s
1978 classic “Halloween,” a path was slashed straight through the center of her career. This was a genre that she would return to again and again, even as she made detours into drama (“Forever Young,” “My Girl”), action (“True Lies”) and comedy (“Trading Places,” “A Fish Called Wanda,” “Freaky Friday”).
In early films like “The Fog” and “Prom Night,” she extended her horror-movie reputation; later, in Ryan Murphy’s campy series “Scream Queens,” she parodied it. Along the way, she reprised Laurie several more times, though her attempt to put a definitive end to the series with 1998’s “Halloween H20” fell apart due to producer interference. “There was a contractual inability to really end it,” said Curtis, who still agreed to star if she could die at the beginning of its 2002 sequel, “Halloween: Resurrection,” and collect a big payday for her
10-minute cameo.
Curtis thought she was done with “Halloween” after that, but a good horror franchise never lets its heroine escape that easily. In 2017, after a Rob Zombiehelmed take on “Halloween” had petered out, director David Gordon Green pitched Curtis on a return to the series that would wipe away every movie made after the 1978 original. This time, Laurie was a hard-drinking, PTSD-stricken survivor who had spent decades preparing for a rematch with the villain that terrorized her so long ago. Curtis agreed to come on board, and the back-to-basics 2018 film broke box-office records for a slasher, grossing over $255 million worldwide.
That movie was made pure, she said, with no intention of spinning things into a trilogy. But on the eve of its release, Green sat Curtis down and pitched her two sequels that would finally allow Curtis to exit on her own terms. The following entry, “Halloween Kills,” from last year, is about the town’s collective response to Michael Myers and how mob violence can arise from their collective fears. And the third film, “Halloween Ends,” subverts expectations by playing more like a tragic drama than a slasher movie: Even before her final, inevitable clash with Michael, Laurie has to put in the work to heal her long-held wounds.
Curtis was eager to dive into all that additional context.
“I’m sure you saw that meme of me saying the word ‘trauma’ over and over again,” she said, referring to an internet supercut where she repeatedly told journalists that, actually, the new “Halloween” trilogy was all about “TROWMA,” a word she pronounced with theatrical bombast. “But do you want to know where that came from?” Curtis asked. She pointed toward a Comic-Con appearance she made in 2018, when an audience member said he managed to survive a home invasion by asking himself what Laurie would do in that situation. “I’m here today because of the way that you portrayed Laurie Strode,” he told Curtis. “I’m a victor today instead of a victim.”
Check her arm. Goose bumps. “I don’t like these movies, but it’s about something much bigger than me,” she said. “And I’m not trying to paint this as higher art than it is, but something happens to people when they watch it, and then I get that from them. It’s wacky and really emotional.”
This past spring, Curtis read some marketing copy for “Halloween Ends” that stated, “Horror lets us confront what we can’t control,” an idea that further resonated for a woman who likes everything to be neat, organized and just-so. Still, it doesn’t hurt if you can confront horror and control it: When Curtis watched “Halloween Ends” for the first time in a private theater, her seat came with a volume toggle that let her mute the movie when things got too visceral. “It was muted for easily half the movie, if not two-thirds,” she said. “I muted it so quickly, it would make your head spin around like ‘The Exorcist.’ ”
But amid all that mayhem, she felt a certain kind of peace in the film’s bloody resolution. Making the movie had been incredibly emotional, but she decided that everything Laurie had been through, and everything Curtis had endured alongside her, had all been worth it in the end.
“They can go off and make however many ‘Halloween’ movies they want to make now and create a whole new narrative,” Curtis said. “But our four movies can be played as a perfect quad — these three movies and 1978 — and I feel very good about the completion of that.”