One of the hardest COVID-19-related movie delays to swallow for fans has been Halloween Kills, which was pushed back a whole year from this October to next. It was especially crushing as Blumhouse is hyping the follow-up to its 2018 rebootquel as what could be one of the best entries in the 40-year saga. Now, star Jamie Lee Curtis has pointed out how Kills would have been such a timely film for 2020 as it accidentally touches on one of the biggest events of the year.
While speaking on SiriusXM’s The Jess Cagle Show, Curtis talked about something that’s been teased before, that this movie is less about Laurie’s personal trauma and more about the trauma felt by the town of Haddonfield, Illinois as a whole, as Michael Myers’ murdering antics have affected the local citizens at large, not just the Strode family. Curtis explains, then, that Kills is about what happens when a mob mentality takes over.
“[Halloween] 2018 was about Laurie’s trauma, right? It was focused on Laurie Strode, but you know, there are a lot of other people that had the result of Michael Myers in 1978,” Curtis explains. “…Halloween Kills movie is about a mob. So what I will tell you is that what we were seeing around the country of the power of the rage of voices, big groups of people coming together enraged at the set of circumstances, that’s what the movie is. The movie is about a mob. And so it’s very interesting because it takes on what happens when trauma infects an entire community.”
To the actress, this story choice turned out to be eerily prescient of all that went on over the summer with the #BLM movement and the associated rioting and clashing of groups of different ideologies that took place primarily in the States but also in many other countries around the world. Curtis believes that Kills reflects the societal attitudes that we’ve all seen play out in real life of late.
“We’re seeing it in action and Halloween Kills weirdly enough, dovetailed onto that proceeded it, it was written before that occurred, but then of course, so when you see it, it’s a seething group of people moving through the story as a big angry group, it’s really, really, really intense… because the trauma isn’t just Laurie’s…. And again, I want to remind everybody, it was pre Black Lives Matter movement, and yet the same activity takes over in Halloween Kills.”
It’s not just its unintended social commentary that the movie has going for it, though. Curtis also gave a brief overview of her thoughts on David Gordon Green’s second Halloween film and she made clear that she’s a fan: “It’s a masterpiece,” she said. And the actress has been in enough Halloween flicks to know the different between a good and bad one, so this is a pretty ringing endorsement.
Sadly, we didn’t get to catch Halloween Kills this October, but it’s coming next year instead. And luckily, there are a bevy of other films in the franchise to watch this Halloween night in its place.
