As far as female characters in horror films go, Jamie Lee Curtis’s role as ‘final girl’ Laurie Strode in the 1978 original Halloween is about as iconic as it gets.
In the 2018 sequel she is back with vengeance to take down not only the masked murderer Michael Myers, but also the damsel in distress narrative that plagues the horror genre.
The sequel picks up forty years after John Carpenter’s original, ignoring anything that went down in any subsequent franchise iterations and with director David Gordon Green at the helm.
Now 59 years old, Curtis returns as the older, fiercer Laurie Strode, who is ready and waiting to kill her escaped attacker.
“I’ve been preparing for this for a long time,” she says in the newly-released trailer. “He is a killer, but he will be killed tonight.”
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0ggRsbFQ8B0
This is a character we rarely get to see in horror films, or any genre for that matter.
Slasher movies have been infamously synonymous with young female characters that happen to be attacked while half-dressed, which is tiresome when you see the trope played out repeatedly for decades.
So having Jamie Lee Curtis return as an empowered middle-aged-woman who won’t let a man dominate her life with fear is epic. We need more heroes like this on screen.
“The first movie I was running more, and in this movie I’m hunting more,” says Curtis. “[You] watch this woman take back the narrative of her life.”
The sequel is set to hit theatres in the US on October 19 just in time for the Halloween season, so hopefully they keep that in mind and release it in Australia soon after.