Halloween Ends: Jamie Lee Curtis returns to battle Michael Myers in finale of classic horror franchise

After 44 years and 13 films, the iconic slasher franchise started by John Carpenter will reach an undoubtedly bloody conclusion this week with Halloween Ends, and no one is feeling the weight of its history more than Jamie Lee Curtis.

Other than Halloween’s masked murderer Michael Myers, one of Hollywood’s greatest and most enduring serial killers, the breakout star of Carpenter’s 1978 film was Curtis, who, at 19, played one of the true OG scream queens, Laurie Strode.

Not only did Laurie put Curtis on the map as an actor, the character became the archetypal “final girl”, a term first coined by American academic Carol J. Clover in her 1992 book, Men, Women, and Chain Saws, to describe the invariably female sole survivor of a slasher or horror movie.

“Laurie sits at the head of the table, man. It’s her table. She built the table. You know, she created the table. She’s been kind enough to let other people sit at it for a long time, but it’s her table,” Curtis says on a Zoom call with The West Australian.

“It’s due to the tremendous impact Laurie Strode has had on fans, and, because of those fans, on the films … and, then, because of the success of the films, the wave of establishment for me as an actress; the top of the heap of a genre as an actress and of my financial life as a human being.

“And an ongoing, till the day I die fan base, which is reverential to Laurie Strode because of what she means to them, and by her meaning something to them, I mean something to them, and it’s this intertwined, Gordian knot of love and appreciation, and it’s groovy and overwhelming.”

Curtis has appeared in six of the Halloween films over the years, which have each offered their own tweaks to the story, but essentially all revolve around the same central premise — Michael Myers embarking on a killing spree on the American Halloween holiday, usually in the small fictional town of Haddonfield.

Wearing the now-legendary featureless mask that Carpenter originally repurposed from a Captain James T. Kirk Star Trek mask, Myers kills his victims without motive or uttering a word.

This mindless brutality is the key here, because it doesn’t allow the audience to anchor its fear in the specific psychology of a villain and instead holds a mirror up to society.

After the franchise became prohibitively convoluted due to a series of disappointing sequels, reboots and remakes, director David Gordon Green cleaned up the mess in 2018 with Halloween, the first of his so-called H40 trilogy (40 referring to the 40th anniversary).

Green cannily offered a true sequel to Carpenter’s original, with Laurie now forced to battle Myers as a grandmother, alongside her adult daughter (Judy Greer) and grandkid (Andi Matichak).

That film made $405 million at the worldwide box office, a record for a slasher film, which was testament to both Green’s direction and an epic face-off between Myers and Laurie.

Now, as she prepares to finally farewell Laurie, Curtis says she finds herself crying “on the daily”, but she won’t miss looking at a certain mask.

In fact, over the years, she’s made a point of not looking at it.

“Michael and I stay apart from each other, I don’t want to look at that mask, I don’t want to look at him,” Curtis admits.

“So, the Michael of it all, as far as I’m concerned, he doesn’t exist, because I have to stay true to just Laurie, and when we come into conflict, when we come into collision with each other, it’s a collision.”

Curtis, a bona fide screen legend who reminded us once again of her prodigious talent in this year’s sleeper hit Everything Everywhere All at Once, is confident the franchise’s legion of fans will get what they need from Halloween Ends.

And, without spoilers, what is that exactly?

“Catharsis, satisfaction, frustration, shock, fear, resolve, tenacity, endurance, perseverance, grief, love, hope, finality — I mean, let’s get it all out,” the 63-year-old said.

“I mean, it’s a big swing movie. It’s a big swing by David Gordon Green, who is an inventive and brave filmmaker — it’s a big-ass swing, and it lands, so, yeah, that’s what we’re going for here.”\

Watching movies like Halloween and Nightmare on Elm Street on VHS was once a rite of passage for kids, usually occurring at a mate’s place during a sleepover.

But, as we know, parents are increasingly wrapping their children in cotton wool and that extends to keeping them away from this kind of content.

However, Curtis believes the content modern kids are exposed to on social media and the internet is far worse than anything Michael Myers has done.

“Oh, it’s so much worse because it’s personal,” the actor says with genuine ferocity.

“Movies? Those aren’t real, but the internet is a portal into you, it’s coming at you, and the vile, bile-filled hatred that is funnelled into that portal, opening right into you, for a young person . . . it’s horrible.

“Those kids are locked in a room and being told that they’re ugly and fat, and don’t deserve to live, and there are kids who are killing themselves . . . and I hope we as a society can do something about it.”

Until that time comes, movies like Halloween Ends offer an escape and a reminder to question who the real monsters among us are.

Halloween Ends is in cinemas on October 13.