There’s a moment in the Halloween teaser trailer, not long after we visit Michael Myers in Haddonfield’s maximum security mental asylum, when Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) admits that, for 40 years, she’s been praying for Michael to escape.
Why, you ask? So she can kill him, and bring an end to the reign of terror that began with John Carpenter’s original classic back in 1978. But whereas the first Halloween left Michael’s fate on a cliffhanger, David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride have dreamed up a retcon of their own so that The Shape winds up in police custody after killing three innocent teenagers on Halloween night four decades ago. And that’s where Blumhouse’s sequel begins.
But as Jamie Lee Curtis revealed to the folks at Dread Central, the Strode Family is prepped and ready for Michael’s inevitable return, and it’s all thanks to Laurie’s unflinching determination.
I don’t think she has left Haddonfield in forty years. This is a woman who knows exactly where [Michael] is and she knows, even though they all are convinced that he’s somebody who they can maybe manage, work with drugs, rehabilitate, all the rest of it. She is the only one who knows exactly who he is, and that’s who we find.
Frankly, Laurie Strode has seen some scary shit and lived to tell the tale, so even at 59 years young, Curtis’ protagonist is a force to be reckoned with – particularly when her daughter (Judy Greer) and granddaughter (Andi Matichak) come under threat.
You know, when trauma happens you freeze. We can look at it through history. When something really bad happens, you calcify emotionally. The Laurie we’re going to meet is fifty nine is in a weird way seventeen, so I think she actually responded much better with a granddaughter than her own daughter. She’s Laurie, Laurie loved kids, Laurie was fantastic with children, probably better with children than adults. I think with her own daughter she was dysfunctional in her raising of her because of this obsession of safety but because her granddaughter wasn’t raised by her, she can connect.
Halloween finally returns home on October 19th, and when it does, horror fans will be on the lookout for cute nods and references to the franchise’s rich history, beginning with a callback to Season of the Witch.