Now Laurie isn’t just a fighter–she’s a freaking warrior. Then everything changed once again for the series’ 40th anniversary in 2018 with David Gordon Green and Danny McBride’s franchise reboot. Even though Laurie remains a badass final girl until the very end–snarling “I’ll see you in hell” as Michael plunges a knife in her back–Curtis never wavers on using her physicality to show the vulnerability and trauma her character has carried over the last two decades. We suddenly see this heartbreaking web of emotions fracture across her face as she relives the moment she murdered the wrong man. But after ensnaring Michael high above the hospital, victory within her grasp, Curtis’ Laurie hesitates. Curtis fills Laurie with manic, unraveling energy as we learn she’s laying a trap to finally beat her brother. If there is one saving grace in Resurrection, it’s Curtis’ performance in its opening minutes. This tragic accident lands her in a mental hospital – just like her brother before her. The Shape had surreptitiously swapped clothes with a paramedic who Laurie unintentionally murders.
#THE SON OF PROJECT HALLOWEEN FREE#
She hopes that by killing her brother–with a swift decapitation in H20‘s finale–she’ll be free from her life’s torment.īut in the follow-up film, Halloween: Resurrection, we learn that Laurie doesn’t actually kill Michael at the end of H20. The wounds Michael left are simply too deep for her to quit binge drinking. Even though her son is aware she’s a functioning alcoholic, slamming back white wines on her lunch break, she can’t stop herself.
She attempts to conceal her trauma from her son, John (Josh Hartnett), by drowning her pain in booze. She changed her name and led a relatively low-key life as a teacher at a prestigious high school. This erased Laurie’s off-screen death that occurred between II and IV, allowing the character–and Jamie Lee Curtis– to return to battle her brother, Michael Myers, once again.Īfter watching The Shape burn at Haddonfield Memorial Hospital, Laurie left her hometown.
#THE SON OF PROJECT HALLOWEEN SERIES#
After twenty years and six movies, the series retconned everything back to the first two films. The V word is what he definitely encouraged from me.”Īfter Halloween II we wouldn’t meet Laurie again until Halloween H20. Vulnerability, vulnerability, vulnerability. The only thing kept insisting was vulnerability, over and over again. I didn’t need anybody to tell me who she was I knew. “The character’s on the page, it’s right there.
As Curtis said in an interview for The Nerdist:
This was the key character trait director John Carpenter impressed on her during the production of the first film. We earnestly feel scared for Laurie because Curtis shows how vulnerable she is. And as Michael comes stalking into Haddonfield, this tenuous emotional connection transfers the terror Curtis conveys back to the audience. This allows the audience to project their own high school experiences onto her character. As she gossips on the phone with her friends, she conveys bubbly vitality that feels completely authentic.īut Curtis’ Laurie is also like a blank slate. Across these first two films, Curtis is able to ingratiate us to Laurie through effective naturalism. She goes to high school, hangs out with her friends, and gossips about boys. The Laurie we meet in the original is a typical teenager, blithely enjoying a normal life in Haddonfield. The first two Halloween films track Laurie Strode’s initial encounter with The Shape, Michael Myers. This has inadvertently created a twisted web of timelines Curtis has had to wade through as final girl Laurie Strode.Īt the start, she had it easy. The series has rebooted itself multiple times over the past forty years. Jamie Lee Curtis really had her work cut out for her creating a consistent character across the Halloween franchise.
In this entry, we examine Jamie Lee Curtis’s performance in the Halloween series. Welcome to The Great Performances, a recurring column exploring the art behind some of cinema’s best roles. Acting is an art form, and behind every iconic character is an artist expressing themselves.
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