By the end of David Gordon Green’s Halloween, Laurie Strode (played by Jamie Lee Curtis) is left in a complicated place. On the one hand, her attempt to trap Michael Myers in her burning bunker has succeeded… but on the other hand she has taken a knife to the gut and received what would be a fatal wound if not immediately treated. As we see in Halloween Kills, she does indeed survive, getting rushed to a hospital and having emergency surgery – but the way that Curtis see things, Laurie would have died a happy woman if she didn’t survive her long anticipated fight with the boogeyman.
I had the wonderful pleasure of interviewing Jamie Lee Curtis, David Gordon Green, and producer Jason Blum earlier this month during the Halloween Kills domestic press day, and I began the conversation asking about where the sequel starts with Laurie Strode compared to the 2018 film. Curtis discussed that dichotomy, adding the fascinating insight of where her mind is at the start of the new movie:
If Laurie Strode died in the back of that truck, she would have died the happiest woman because she was in the arms of her daughter and her granddaughter, and she killed Michael Myers. So for her taking the hit, any of us would step in front of anything to protect our children. So I feel like the nobility of Laurie, her intelligence, and the planning of this trap worked, and we got him.
Because 2018’s Halloween ignores basically all elements of the previously established franchise canon and operates solely as a direct follow-up to John Carpenter’s original from 1978, the showdown between Laurie Strode and Michael Myers in the third act is one that is 40 years in the making. She knew the masked monster would eventually return, and when he did she decided that she would be ready. It was paranoia that unfortunately ruined her life in many ways, but she was also proven right to prepare.
Of course, this sets up the second shoe to drop in Halloween Kills. Jamie Lee Curtis noted that Laurie Strode would have been happy had the end result of their fight been both Michael and her dying – but the sequel instead presents the second worst possibility: they both live. The horror icon continued,
The challenge, of course, is that dawning realization that A) she survived, B) he's not dead. And now she is impotent in the way that she wants to be fierce. And she has to allow her daughter and granddaughter to do it for her. She has to allow Tommy to avenge the deaths that are happening. I think that's hard for her; to pass it over, to hand that over is very difficult for the Laurie Strode we met, as you said, in 2018.
The fact that Halloween Kills is set in the immediate aftermath of the last movie and begins with Laurie Strode getting live-saving surgery means that her role in the story is vastly different than what fans previously witnessed. She is forced to take a backseat role, recovering in a hospital room, and the responsibility of leading the fight transfers to the other survivors of Michael Myers’ reign of terror in 1978.
When you think about it, the fact that she gets stabbed at the end of the 2018 film very much defines much of Halloween Kills, and recognizing that made David Gordon Green ponder what the movie would have been like had he and his fellow screenwriters not written themselves “into a corner.” Said the filmmaker,
I wonder what the movie would have been like if we hadn't put the knife in the gut in the last movie. In a lot of ways, we, my co-writers and I, wrote ourselves into a corner with, 'Okay, she's got a knife in her gut; she's kinda debilitated. And we've got this guy in a flawless trap of Laurie Strode's brilliance.' How do we get her to survive and him to survive became part of the obstacle, but also a lot of the fun.
The awesome fun of Halloween Kills is now yours to be witnessed, as the film is coming off a mammoth opening weekend at the box office. You can see the movie in theaters everywhere, and it is also available to stream at home with a Peacock subscription.
