STACK #207 Jan 2022

FILM FEATURE

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even though it’s a slasher trilogy.” As Curtis talks about co-writers John Carpenter and Debra Hill – who originally created the Halloween story together – she unexpectedly tears up. “Debra was John’s lover at the time and she was one of my best friends. And she’s gone. But I think her legacy is the Strode family. Not that she predetermined that, some 40 years later, somebody would write a movie about Laurie Strode and her daughter and granddaughter, but I think that’s what David intuited from the original text that gave birth to this relationship between Laurie, Allyson and Karen. “So I think it’s all due to Debra Hill’s contribution, and I’m really sad that she’s not here. It makes me cry because she was political, she was a feminist, and I think she would have loved these movies,” she says. Leaning heavily on nostalgia, using elements from earlier Halloween films – most notably Halloween II – it did seem like a curious move to sideline Curtis’s Strode to a hospital bed in this sequel when it was surely her remarkable performance in the 2018 film that revitalised the entire franchise. In his defence, Green says, “The idea was to honour the legacy. In terms of Halloween Kills , we did recreations of the 1978 Michael Myers The final chapter in the new Halloween trilogy is set for release in October 2022. Here’s what we know so far… Jamie Lee Curtis will of course return as Laurie Strode, declaring this will be the last time. Andi Matichak will also be back as Allyson, who will have a bigger role to play in the final film. David Gordon Green has teased that the story will pick up four years after the events of Halloween Kills , while Curtis hinted to Cinemablend that the third film is “going to make people very angry and it’s going to be shocking.” Production is set to commence this month.

Halloween Kills star Jamie Lee Curtis ponders an unanswered question raised in the new trilogy and remembers the original’s co-writer and producer, the late Debra Hill. Words Gill Pringle

• Halloween Kills is out Jan 12

O ver the course of making six Halloween movies, Jamie Lee Curtis’s indomitable Laurie Strode has become a mother and grandmother – Judy Greer and Andi Matichak, respectively, playing daughter and granddaughter – allowing her plenty of time to ponder the possible identity of who her baby daddy might be. “I don’t think Laurie has a baby daddy. I don’t think she even knows who the baby daddy is,” muses Curtis during a chat with STACK . “I think Laurie was a very troubled young woman who banged around the world like a pinball machine, banging into people without any support. But I feel that the reason why she has a very tender scene with Will Patton’s Officer Hawkins in [ Halloween Kills ] is because in the 2018 movie, there was a moment where Will and I stand outside the Strode house and I tell him how, every night, I dream that Michael

Myers would live so I could kill him myself. “So I had this thought that maybe Officer Hawkins was Karen’s father. We

talked it through and then David [Gordon Green, director and co-writer] wrote this connection between Laurie and Hawkins. So I think Officer Hawkins is the closest thing to a male contact that she has had.” If many horror films are male-centric, Curtis is proud that this trilogy has a female psyche at its core. “I think David and Danny [McBride, co-writer] are prescient in that they understood that female trauma was going to be an issue in the future,” she says. “They must have intuited this somehow, in the same way that they intuited that the collateral damage of a town and the mob violence that creates was going to become a thing. “So I feel like it’s art imitating life, it’s the natural progression.

I’m not a film historian or an intellectual who waxes poetic about film theory, but I promise you that in 20 years when a film class looks back at this David Gordon Green trilogy and then looks at what happened in the world at the same time, it’s going to be a social statement about who we are as human beings at this moment in our lives,

house and we bring legacy actors like Kyle Richards and characters like Tommy Doyle and Nurse Marion into this film to be able to expand on the concept of terror and fear. “So it’s not necessarily a good vs. evil, Laurie vs. Michael butting of heads here, but it’s how fear and terror permeates the entire community of Haddonfield, so we reached into the legacy to expand on that and create a fully realised community,” he adds.

FURTHER VIEWING

12 JANUARY 2022

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