State of the Art

Laurie Strode screams again

by Peter Keough

LOS ANGELES -- It's been 20 years since we heard Jamie Lee Curtis's scream in John Carpenter's Halloween, and now she's eager to face the cold steel again. Halloween: H20 (the latter refers to its being the franchise's 20th anniversary, not the liquid or the number of sequels) takes up the tale of the relentless Michael Myers and the redoubtable Laurie Strode two decades later, with Laurie trying to pull together the pieces of her traumatized life. With Hollywood currently embroiled in a new generation of post-Scream teen-slasher movies, the moment seems ripe for a reprise, but why is Curtis relenting after refusing for so long to return to the genre that first made her famous?

"I didn't try to get away from it so hard," she insists. "I made a decision five years after I did Halloween that I shouldn't make any more horror movies because it would limit my doing other things. I was smart enough, having been raised in Hollywood, to understand that producers' imaginations are not that broad. It wasn't out of distaste or embarrassment, just a practical understanding of Hollywood and how it works."

Her career since that decision has had its ups and downs, the high points including acclaimed roles in such diverse films as Trading Places, A Fish Called Wanda, and Blue Steel, as well as side careers writing children's books and raising two children with husband Christopher Guest. More or less idle, since True Lies in 1994, she seems primed for a comeback.

"When I heard it was 20 years, I thought, it's nuts not to do something. We went to Bob Weinstein [head of Miramax Pictures], and he said, 'I have a movie coming out soon called Scream that's going to reinvigorate the whole market.' Scream comes out, it's a big hit, all of a sudden it now makes a lot of sense to make another Halloween movie, because Halloween is in Scream as much as Scream is in it. And it had to come out this year. I wouldn't have done it otherwise; then it would be 21 years, what's the point of that? And it was my way of saying thank you to a fan base that really gave me everything I have in my life."

It was also a chance to acknowledge a human toll of victimization that gets overlooked in the thrills and the nervous laughter of such movies. The older, not so much wiser Laurie is a mess: headmistress of a boarding school, a single mother with a teenage son, she controls the nightmares with a medicine cabinet full of pills and a bottle of vodka in the freezer.

"Everyone wants to know what happened to Laurie Strode; everyone calls her a survivor. I don't think she was a survivor at all. She had stolen from her every chance for a happy future. Even though she did everything you're supposed to do -- you have a baby, you go to college, you get your degree, you get married -- it's all null and void because any chance of trusting another human being was just snatched from her at the age of 17. This film gives her a chance to redeem her soul by facing him -- and even if she was going to die, she was going to die facing her greatest fear, she was going to get her soul back. Now to me, that was a story.

"She's kicking butt from that place. It echoes a '90s thing of empowerment and girl power. It's a message sung out loud and clear: don't fuck with me."

Halloween: H20 opens this Wednesday at theaters to be announced.