Everyone loves a good horror flick. The upcoming Halloween film from Danny McBride & David Gordon Green is rapidly approaching. The trailer for the Blumhouse-produced film was released this past weekend and was met with general praise by fans. However, they did seem to be a bit disheartened — at first — back when they found out that the sequel would only follow the original 1978 film. and ignore the subsequent entries in the franchise. This marks the series’ 11th installment, but the upcoming film will de-canonize everything except for John Carpenter’s Halloween (1978) — doing away with an unrelated anthology installment (Halloween III: Season of the Witch), six direct sequels, and both installments of writer-director Rob Zombie’s now-defunct 'reboot' series. However, this somewhat controversial decision ultimately left McBride and Green with more options when crafting the new narrative.
If you don't recall, the first
Halloween film left Myers’s fate on a bit of a cliffhanger. Well, Green and 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.
Speaking of the new film, there’s a particular moment in the trailer, not long after we see Myers in Haddonfield's mental asylum, when Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) admits that for the last 40 years, she’s been praying for Myers to escape. She explains how she and her family, daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), have been preparing for that fateful day:
"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,” Curtis explains of her character, offering insight not only into her mindset but also the way she sees Laurie over the years.
Curtis then goes on to explain how Laurie has changed over those 40 years between this film and the original one, which took place in 1978:
“I think for Laurie Strode, society has not been kind to her. She lives alone, she has tried to live in society but society has not been welcoming. There were not a lot of mental health professionals helping this young woman, she banged her way into her life, she slammed into people, institutions, law enforcement, and they hate her because she calls the police every day, says ‘Do you have somebody patrolling Smith’s Grove? I was out there, I actually sat in my car all day outside of Smith’s Grove and I didn’t see one cop car. Why is that? Why aren’t you treating him with the respect that you should treat him?'”
To be fair, Laurie Strode has seen some crazy things in all the Halloween films and lived to tell the tale, so even at 59 years old, Curtis loves the character, and has always been a force to be reckoned with. It'll be interesting to see how she has changed from the original film.
Halloween hits theaters October 19, 2018.
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Halloween features:
Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode
Judy Greer as Karen Strode
Andi Matchak as Allyson Strode
Nick Castle as Michael Myers
Will Patton as Hawkins
Jefferson Hall as Martin
Toby Huss as Ray
Miles Robbins as Dave