It is 44 years since she first played Strode in the film that wrote the slasher flick template. As the franchise comes to a finale, Curtis and directors John Carpenter and David Gordon Green discuss growth, trauma – and closure
She is the hardy perennial of all-American horror, its blood-drenched prom queen, the so-called “final girl”. In the closing minutes of 1978’s Halloween, teenage Laurie Strode is stabbed in the arm and flipped over the stairs. She’s attacked in the closet and brutalised on the landing. Laurie gets out alive – that’s Halloween’s happy ending. So far as the film is concerned, her story wraps up there.
“Now here’s what I think happened immediately after that,” says Jamie Lee Curtis, who has now played Laurie Strode in no fewer than seven Halloweens. “I think she went straight back to school on 1 November. I think people bandaged her arm and figured they’d then done enough. No discussion, no therapy; this was the 70s, after all. I think the expectation was that everything returned to normal again.”
