Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, the sixth movie in the franchise, is for a number of reasons not an installment remembered fondly. A primary bone of contention is Danielle Harris not reprising her role as Jamie Lloyd, who she had played as a child in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers.
The problem was that although years had passed since the release of the previous movie, Lloyd was only 17 when filming was to begin, making her legally still a minor and thus greatly restricting the number of hours she was able to work. To get around this, Harris went through the process of emancipation at great financial cost to herself, which could have resulted in her participation were it not for further complications.
In the movie, Jamie is killed at the end of the first act, whereupon the focus shifts to Paul Rudd’s Tommy Doyle, the little boy Laurie Strode babysat in the first movie now grown to adulthood. Due to Jamie being reduced from a central character to a false protagonist, the producers were only willing to pay Harris a basic rate rather than as a featured character, making the end salary for her role less than what it had already cost her to legally perform it. This disregard for her circumstances, along with her dissatisfaction at Jamie’s all but meaningless fate, led to her dropping out of the project completely and being replaced with J.C. Brandy, who despite her enthusiasm for both the franchise and all things John Carpenter, took the brunt of fans’ disdain for Harris’ absence.
Since starting out as Jamie, Harris has joined Jamie Lee Curtis in growing into a scream queen. After dipping her toes back in the genre with a supporting role in Urban Legend, she returned to the Halloween franchise in Rob Zombie’s reboot and its sequel, and went on to take over from Tamara Feldman in the role of Marybeth in the Hatchet series and became a popular feature of multiple horrors such as Stake Land, Blood Night, See No Evil 2, Havenhurst and ChromeSkull.
The absence of Danielle Harris in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers joins a number of behind-the-scenes decisions that resulted in a really bad film, although it’s the one most commonly cited by fans in explanation for their dislike of it.
