Andrew Eccles/Universal Pictures(LOS ANGELES) — Probably one of the biggest horror movies to open this year — Halloween — opens nationwide on Friday. A direct sequel to the 1978 original, Jamie Lee Curtis returns as Laurie Strode, still dealing with the violent attack she suffered 40 years earlier.
Curtis tells ABC Radio that the new film is more psychological thriller than slasher movie.
“What we’ve made is a movie about the generational aspects of trauma — how one generation’s trauma carries on into the next and into the next,” she explains. “And we explore it, and unpack it, and then we flip it and reverse it and face it.”
Adds the 59-year-old actress, an attack like the one she suffered in the first movie stays with its victim forever.
It’s a thief of your life. Violence against women, that kind of tremendous trauma that she suffered, it robs you of a life. You’re frozen in time. And this movie allows us to explore that in a very terrifying and interesting way.”
Written before the #MeToo movement began, Curtis says the film parallels what many women are going through today.
“Our movie is about PTSD and shame and no one coming to the aid with understanding. #MeToo is about shame, no one coming to the aid, no one standing up for ’em,” she says.
For Curtis, who’s known as the original Scream Queen, you might say scaring people is in her blood. She’s the daughter of Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh — whose character in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1960 thriller Psycho met her demise in the film’s classic shower murder scene. Truth is, Jamie Lee doesn’t like watching horror movies.
“I do not. There’s nothing– Aladdin was scary to me. I don’t watch– nothing,” she admits.
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