In slasher movies, it tends to be one killer versus one victim at a time. Rarely does the horror spill out into the streets in a significant enough manner that the victim can recruit other people to help them fight back. In Halloween Kills, though, that’s exactly what happens, and Jamie Lee Curtis thinks that’s what makes the film especially poignant in 2021.
Halloween Kills is the second film in a planned Halloween sequel trilogy directed by David Gordon Green and starring Curtis. Originally scheduled for release last year, it’s now coming out October 15 and the star explained how this new Michael Myers film has larger social implications, much like the 2018 original. “We got to see in the 2018 movie that Laurie had become the personification of trauma,” Curtis told Variety. “It [arrived] at the time when the Me Too movement was at its ascent. Here you have a movie about a woman traumatized for 40 years and she is now rising up. And it collided with what was happening globally.”
At the end of the first new film, Curtis’ character Laurie (whom she was reprising from the original iteration of the franchise) teamed up with her daughter (Judy Greer) and granddaughter (Andi Matichak) to lock Michael in the basement of her burning house. In the trailer for the new film, we see that Michael gets out (of course), then all hell breaks loose and Laurie is able to get some people from around Haddonfield to help in the battle against pure evil.
“And what they’ve done with the second part of the trilogy was, ‘What happens when the rest of the people in that town get angry?’” Curtis said. “We made the movie and the uprisings that started to happen where people were taking to the streets—it was all happening with what was to be the release of our movie. Which is about mob violence. So somehow they intuited in understanding that the next wave of trauma is rage. They wrote a movie about mob violence and five months later, the mobs started to gather. We were supposed to come out a year ago.”
While Curtis is seemingly speaking about the very warranted protests that occurred in 2020, she also believes the film continued to gain resonance in 2021 as a result of the Capitol riot. “And then January 6 happened—this was supposed to be released in October of last year and now we’re watching a mob descend on the U.S. capital,” she said, “That’s what the next movie is about: the town of Haddonfield, all of the people in the town who were also victims of Michael Myers. There’s a group of people who are very angry at the authorities and are going to take the law into their own hands.”
Will the townspeople defeat Michael? It seems unlikely, considering there’s still a third part in the trilogy left to go: Halloween Ends, which will be out in 2022. Halloween Kills arrives on October 15.
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