With the trend of nostalgia proving endlessly profitable, reboots and long awaited sequels have quickly become commonplace. Just about any TV or film property has the potential to return, and this includes the currently thriving horror genre. After having a ton of hits with new horror movies, Blumhouse is now turning its head to the classics. A new Halloween is just months away, bringing back Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode in a canon-defying sequel that already has massive buzz. The writers and director of Halloween have been clear about their reverence for John Carpenter's legendary original movie, and now it looks like one line of dialogue helped shape the new sequel. As director/writer David Gordon Green recently revealed,
She has a line in the original film when she's talking to young Tommy Doyle at the climax of the movie. She says, 'Do as I say.' And she says this line with a command that she hasn't had for the entire film. Do as I say. We took that to be her mantra for our film. She's taken that pivotal moment in her life, and her recognition of facing her fears, and now has been chanting that in meditations for 40 years. She's reached a point of a perceived almost psychosis of authority and built from this ambitious, kind of romanticized academic school girl into a woman that you don't want to [mess] with.
This is definitely going to make the hardcore Halloween fans out there very happy. Laurie Strode's repeated utterance of "Do as I say" is one of the film's most iconic lines, and it's been referenced and used in other sequels. But basing Jamie Lee Curtis' entire character off that line is a great tease of things to come when Halloween finally arrives in theaters.
Laurie Strode starts off John Carpenter's Halloween as a smart, innocent girl. But as her friends are picked off by Michael Myers, she's forced to take agency and protect herself and the two young children under her care. During the final conflict she gives them instructions to run for help, while she faced off against The Boogeyman. This line is a moment of empowerment for the character, something that audiences will see reflected in the woman seen in Blumhouse's upcoming sequel.
While David Gordon Green's comments to LA Times reveals that Halloween is going to be majorly affected by the first film's dialogue, it's unclear if we'll get to hear Jamie Lee Curtis utter the iconic line in the new movie. The last time she said them was in H20, when instructing her son and his girlfriend (Josh Hartnett and Michelle Williams respectively) to escape Michael's attack. That movie and Laurie's son John is no longer canon, with her having a daughter and granddaughter in this October's pending release.
We'll get to see how much of John Carpenter's original Halloween is present in the new sequel when it arrives on October 19th. In the meantime, check out our 2018 release list to plan your next trip to the movies.
