How Laurie Strode Has Changed Since The Original Halloween, According To Jamie Lee Curtis

For Haddonfield and Laurie Strode, in particular, it was only a matter of time before Michael Myers returned.

Thank the heavens, then, that Laurie has spent the past 40 years preparing for his second coming. It’s for this reason that the Laurie Strode of Halloween (2018) is a far cry from the naive, fear-stricken teen from 1978.

It makes for a pretty exciting character development, not least because director David Gordon Green (and Danny McBride!) have chosen to retcon all Halloween sequels so that only the original classic is considered canon – albeit with a slight adjustment to John Carpenter’s seminal horror pic. Spoilers: The Shape was apprehended on that fateful night from ’78.

And soon after the film’s impressive (read: blood-curdling) showcase at SDCC, Jamie Lee Curtis addressed this significant time jump during an interview with ComicBook.com.

Laurie Strode had something happen to her that no one in our lives should ever have happen and she just reacted in her intelligent way to save her life. Period. End of story, the movie ends. This new movie picks up 40 years later and what happened is, 40 years later, there was no trauma therapy. No one went in and gave her mental health services. She was raised by Midwestern, simple people who said, ‘Baby, you’re okay,’ and she went back to school two days later with just a little scar on her arm and that’s it.

Not unlike H20 before it, the Blumhouse-backed Halloween movie dabbles in Laurie’s mental trauma, and how she’s focused all her energies on remaining at the tip-top of her game so she’s ready and willing to kill Michael should the opportunity ever arise. And after 40 long years, it seems everyone’s favorite Scream Queen is about to get her chance.

Curtis continued:

Laurie Strode was a 17-year-old high school student who nobody paid any attention to. And now she is demanding a moment, and that’s who we meet 40 years later. It’s powerful. And that’s what [co-writer/director] David [Gordon Green] so beautifully has woven back and you’ve left this woman with nothing but, she’s become the boy who cried wolf. She is that persevering woman who has spent every day of her adulthood…she was 17. Every day of her adult life has been spent preparing for when [Michael Myers is] coming back, where he’s coming back.

Halloween creeps into theaters the world over on October 19th.