Jamie Lee Curtis on Halloween Ends: ‘Laurie Strode is a feminist hero’

It is 44 years since she first played Strode in the film that wrote the slasher flick template. As the franchise comes to a finale, Curtis and directors John Carpenter and David Gordon Green discuss growth, trauma – and closure

She is the hardy perennial of all-American horror, its blood-drenched prom queen, the so-called “final girl”. In the closing minutes of 1978’s Halloween, teenage Laurie Strode is stabbed in the arm and flipped over the stairs. She’s attacked in the closet and brutalised on the landing. Laurie gets out alive – that’s Halloween’s happy ending. So far as the film is concerned, her story wraps up there.

“Now here’s what I think happened immediately after that,” says Jamie Lee Curtis, who has now played Laurie Strode in no fewer than seven Halloweens. “I think she went straight back to school on 1 November. I think people bandaged her arm and figured they’d then done enough. No discussion, no therapy; this was the 70s, after all. I think the expectation was that everything returned to normal again.”

This, typically, is the fate of the final girl – the sole survivor of the monster’s killing sprees, be it Sally Hardesty in The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, Ripley in Alien, or innocent Laurie, arguably the brand’s market leader. If the film is unsuccessful, they’re abandoned, left hanging. If the movie’s a hit, they’re scrubbed down and reset to be menaced afresh. Slasher films are meat grinders. The process is industrial. Except that Halloween Ends serves as a corrective of sorts. The clue’s in the title: it’s about healing and closure.

Curtis was 19 when she made the first Halloween. She’s now 63, a survivor herself, vigorously promoting the franchise from her London hotel. She points out that the very last shot of Halloween Ends (a front porch, a pumpkin) is a deliberate echo of the original movie’s first scene. This, it transpires, was Curtis’s suggestion. She says that it brings the entire story full circle. “It at least holds out the possibility of a realistic good future.”

The future – good or otherwise – was the last thing on director John Carpenter’s mind when he made the first Halloween. He envisaged it as a piece of “trashy exploitation”, co-wrote the script alongside his producer, Debra Hill, and shot it across 20 days on a $300,000 budget. But the film struck a nerve and took on a life of its own. It spawned myriad sequels and endless crass copycats (Friday the 13th, Chopping Mall, He Knows You’re Alone). “So for me it’s the strangest experience,” Carpenter says. “It’s a film that feels like a long-ago distant dream. I’m not sure I can explain it, even to myself.”

The film, at its root, is a pitch-black fairytale, dropping a modern-day big bad wolf in the heart of picket-fence USA. It’s the story of an imperilled babysitter in sleepy Haddonfield, Illinois (largely inspired by Hill’s home town of Haddonfield, New Jersey) who’s preyed on by Michael Myers, a psychopath in a mask. On its release, Halloween was filed alongside Wes Craven’s The Last House on the Left and Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chainsaw Massacre; the three musketeers of the 70s slasher genre.

But the film’s true ancestor was Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho – and the casting bears this out. Curtis is the daughter of Janet Leigh, who played ill-starred Marion Crane, arguably cinema’s most notorious murder victim. “So I was an actress by accident,” Curtis says, looking back. “All my friends were in college and I was off making a movie. I was 19 years old and I didn’t know shite.”

Isn’t that the ideal state? Films such as Halloween are wasted on the old. Horror, I suspect, hits us hardest in our teens, as much a rite-of-passage as our first drink, our first kiss. It delivers a rush of sensation; it provides a safe space to go mad. In adulthood, though, we keep more of a distance. Surely the world contains enough horror as it is. Only a masochist or a sadist would run to a slasher film for escape.

“Actually I would argue the exact opposite,” says James Jude Courtney, who has played Myers (AKA “the Shape”) in the last three Halloween films. “I’ve met with so many firefighters and EMTs who have told me that after the traumatic events of the night all they want to do is sit down and watch these films and let off steam. That’s their value. They’re a safety valve.”

Courtney spent the bulk of his career as a jobbing Hollywood stuntman before the Halloween gig bumped him into the limelight. As part of his duties, he now attends horror conventions, mingling with the adult fans of the franchise. “They’re the kindest, most grounded people you’re ever going to meet,” he says. “If the world was populated by horror fans, believe me, it would be a much better place.”

It was the critic Carol J Clover who coined the “final girl” label, in her 1992 book Men, Women and Chainsaws. She wrote that at a horror film’s climax, the passive victim turns active; the hunted becomes huntress. They scream and they suffer, but they take charge at the end. In the 44 years since she first stepped off the porch, Curtis has carved a rewarding career and lived a rich, stormy life. She has married, raised kids, battled addiction, bounced back. But her alter ego has walked in parallel and had to toughen up, too. Laurie Strode began her journey as an innocent high-school student, a 1970s Red Riding Hood strolling into darkness. She ends it as something different, another fairytale archetype. She’s a hard-bitten old woman full of animal cunning. She’s scarred by her past and possibly a danger to others. Whatever Laurie once was, she’s not the final girl any more.

“Yes, well, she’s everything,” Curtis says. “The final grandmother. The final wolf.”

Halloween Ends is out on 14 October

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0vtbxLa-N8

(via The Guardian): https://www.theguardian.com/film/2022/oct/07/jamie-lee-curtis-on-halloween-ends-laurie-strode-is-a-feminist-hero