With the new Halloween finally making its premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival, Jamie Lee Curtis was on hand to supply a few last-minute thoughts, and it seems that the actress has no regrets about wiping the series timeline clean (again) for David Gordon Green’s new slasher movie.
Though the Blumhouse production is the eleventh installment in the long-running horror franchise, Halloween essentially throws out every entry since the classic 1978 original, reducing their presence to brief nods at best. While the move has proven controversial with fans – especially the eradication of Halloween II’s famous sibling twist – Curtis seems pretty pleased with the arrangement, telling Deadline that the cumulation of plot points from the various Halloween sequels was getting a bit much to deal with.
“You have to remember, all of the other storylines were really just inventions of other writers and other directors needing to add on to the story that was told before them, and it just got complicated. Even the invention of [Myers] being [Laurie’s] brother, that was in a writers’ room somewhere,” the actress told Deadline, appearing in Toronto today with Green and McBride. “What I loved was the cleanliness of honoring the original movie and just building on that story with a very delicate hand.”
It’s a fair argument, seeing how much of the appeal of the franchise’s first instalment was the purity and efficiency of its execution. And as the new film’s co-writer Danny McBride previously observed, there’s a frightening randomness to Michael Myers’ decision to go after Laurie without a sibling connection to inherently tie these characters together.
You can expect the first reviews for the Green’s Halloween to hit the web very soon, but for what it’s worth, director John Carpenter has already said that this new flick is the franchise’s best since the first movie. Better yet, you can decide for yourself how well the film stacks up against the Carpenter-helmed original when it comes out on October 19th.
