Jamie Lee Curtis reveals what frustrated her about the making process Halloween H20: twenty years later. The actor has been deeply involved with the franchise since its inception, when she made her feature film debut as the iconic last girl Laurie Strode in the 1978 original. Halloween. She would later reprise the role in the 1981 sequel Halloween II and provide a speech-only cameo for the largely unrelated anthology feature Halloween III: Season of the Witch in 1982. However, she then dropped out of the franchise and appeared in films outside the horror genre, including the 1988 hit A fish called Wanda.
It wasn’t until 1998 that she returned to the role of Laurie Strode for… Halloween H20. In that film, Strode escapes her hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois and moves to a high-end boarding school in California under the name Keri Tate. Of course, masked killer Michael Myers eventually tracks her down and threatens her, her son, and his friends on a lonely Halloween night. Although the movie ends with Michael beheading, it will be revealed later in 2002 Halloween: Resurrection that Michael put his mask on an unwitting paramedic before escaping, meaning Laurie accidentally killed an innocent man. Before we move on to tell the story of a group of young people participating in a live stream from the Myers home, Resurrection begins with the death of Laurie Strode when Michael invades the mental hospital where she now lives.
screen frenzy attended a New York Comic Con panel to celebrate Halloween, which featured Curtis. The actor revealed that she never thought she would do another one Halloween movie after Resurrectionbecause she asked to be killed after being so frustrated with the making process Halloween H20. She wanted the 1998 sequel to be the definitive ending to the Michael and Laurie saga, but she found out”there was a contract, and you couldn’t kill himThe way the film teased audiences, forcing Laurie to unknowingly kill an innocent man, made her ask to be killed in the franchise as well. Read her full quote below:
So the last thing I thought I’d ever do is make another Halloween movie… You may or may not know why I’m in Resurrection. So H20 was really invented by me. I’m not a producer’s title on it. But it was my brainchild.
Laurie Strode ran away from Haddonfield… She feels safe. And of course, which was the whole conceit of the movie, if you’re on the run from fear, you’re dead inside… Of course there’s a moment when he comes back… She has to choose, “I’m going to fight with him and maybe die, but I’m a little bit dead already. And if I win, I’m still alive.” But it had to end him. We talked about that. I signed up for that. And it all went great. And then I got the script. And it was a vague ending. I kept going back to them like: “Hey, I thought we wanted to end this. This is vague.” Anyway, it turns out there was a contract at the time and you couldn’t kill him.
I said, ‘I’m not doing it. I’m not going to tease an audience anymore…” And I said to them, “Okay, if you [the paramedic ending], and it looks like Laurie Strode has ended it, my audience will feel like it’s over. But you have to pay me a lot of money in the next movie, and you have to kill me in the first 10 minutes of the movie because now I’ve killed an innocent man. And I can’t live with that.
What would the Halloween franchise look like without Curtis?
Of course, Curtis was eventually lured back into the franchise in Blumhouse’s new trilogy of Halloween films, which ignore the continuity of each Halloween different entry than the 1978 original. However, if she had never agreed to come back, the franchise would probably look a lot different. The only movies between 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection and 2018’s Halloween were the 2007 remake of Rob Zombie Halloween and its 2009 sequel Halloween IIboth of which take place in their own continuity with Scout Taylor-Compton playing Laurie Strode.
It seems unlikely that the Zombie branch of the franchise would have continued, given that Halloween II only just doubled its $15 million budget at the box office. It seems almost inevitable that the franchise would have somehow returned to its roots, but if Curtis had committed to her post-Halloween H20: twenty years later character dead, the new movies may have relied more on an ensemble of returning characters, like the ones coming back for 2021 Halloween kills. That film featured the return of many original actors from the franchise, including Charles Cyphers, Nancy Stephens and Kyle Richards. None of these actors are big names (although Richards is known for being part of the Real housewives franchise), so it seems more likely that Blumhouse would have done their best to persuade Paul Rudd Halloween 6 role as Tommy Doyle, rather than recast him with Anthony Michael Hall.
