Author: Audie Cornish / Source: NPR.org
40 years ago, horror fans were introduced to the masked killer Michael Myers, stalker of babysitters in a small Illinois town. The film was, of course, Halloween. And it was the debut of Jamie Lee Curtis, who played the bookish babysitter, Laurie Strode — the original “final girl” character who narrowly escapes the slaughter.
Curtis appeared in three more sequels and even died in one. She thought she’d left that character behind.“I had no intention in being another Halloween movie,” she says — but that’s exactly what she has done, reprising her role as Strode in the new Halloween. Curtis says what convinced her to return was the approach that director David Gordon Green and screenwriter Danny McBride took: Ignore the other seven sequels. Just focus on what has happened to Laurie Strode since Michael Myers first attacked her in 1978. “In this movie, 40 years later, we find really what happens when someone suffers a trauma when they’re 17 years old, and doesn’t get any help. You know, Laurie Strode, I believe, went back to school on November 1, 1978, with a bandage on her arm, having lost all her best friends, and having survived this attack.”
Interview Highlights
On Laurie’s trauma
She left school on the 31st of October a dreamer, an intellectual, someone who would have gone on to Brown and changed the world. And instead, on November 1, she went back to school a freak. And that’s what happens with trauma, it brands you. People point and go, “Oh my gosh, there’s Laurie Strode, she’s the one who survived!” And it took away her innocence.
To the extent that she has lost everything — she…
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