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Pullie into the driveway of Jamie Lee Curtis' house on the west side of Los Angeles, I'm putting her dog to the end of a run, a terrier-poodle rescue that bounds down the stairs like an animated fluff ball, tail wagging. Curtis is not far behind, we are already old friends. She's tall and trim, and her gauze is intense-in a good way. Upstairs in her kitchen, she looks at a cappuccino and looks at me. She brings up her new film Halloween, a new imagining of the granddaddy of the contemporary horror movie, and the book she's reading about World War I, America and the United States of America before I even think to turn my tape recorder on. Everything she says is absolutely sincere-about herself, the world we're living in and her very long career.
It's a career that spans four decades of movie and television roles. The original Halloween was a one that made her star back in 1978. Her performance as Laurie Strode, a teenage babysitter being hunted by the killer Michael Myers, and the thong of horror movies in which she subsequently starred earned the title Scream Queen, though she's also Oscar-nominated heist comedy A Fish Called Wanda and James Cameron's thriller action True Lies, in which she delivered a iconic striptease, and Disney's 2003 remake of Freaky Fridayin which she body-swapped with Lindsay Lohan. Along the way she did many other things too: she wrote 13 children's books, became an accomplished photographer, and was openly talking about it, invented a diaper with a built-in pocket for wipes (seriously) and started a family, marrying the beloved writer-director Christopher Guest (Waiting for Guffmanwith whom she has two children. All of this help make an icon, at once outspoken and relatable.
Goal Halloween is what started it, which makes this new telling of the story a full-circle moment for Curtis. It might have seemed risky to exhume what was, to some, a tired franchise. But Jake Gyllenhaal, Curtis Godson, encouraging her to do it; David Gordon Green, whom he has worked with on the movie Stronger. Green feels Curtis the script for this new Halloween. "I understood right away what he was trying to do," she says. "This did not begin as a franchise-that word did not exist! It's a little horror movie about babysitters. "Green's vision was to wipe the slate clean, as if the many other sequels and spin-offs from the Halloween Curtis and those that did not, never happened. In this universe, something has happened 40 years ago, "Curtis says," and 40 years later, we're going to see what happened to that girl. "Now Strode is older and wiser, though her daughter Karen ( Judy Greer) Laurie thinks is paranoid and hysterical to still be convinced that the man will be terrified of having sex. Even Laurie's granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) is a little wary of her. But when a bus carries the since-incarcerated Myers crashes and he escapes-on Halloween night, of course, exactly four times since the events of the first movie-her worst fears are confirmed.
For Curtis, who's not a fan of horror movies – "I do not like them at all!" She says-this new Halloween represented a way to tell a story about trauma, especially the many kinds that women endure. "The movements of #MeToo and #TimesUp, all of it, is a result of generational, systematic abuse of women, and the trauma that abuse generates in a person," she says. Yes, it's a slasher flick, and one in which teens-as well as adults-get gutted by a masked, knife-wielding psychopath. But it is also a film that is curious about how people cope, even when they are traumatized, and about the nebulous boundary between anxiety and paranoia when you have a very good reason to be afraid. When Laurie booby-traps her house in anticipation of an attack, she's not crazy: she's just steeling herself for the inevitability that a bad guy will come back for her.
It helps that, unlike many horror movies-including several in the Halloween franchise-this new one to be cheeky, smart and genuinely scary. The script is laugh-out-loud funny. Yet there was also room for the future of the "final girl" -the horror-movie heroine who finds a way to survive. During filming, Green called it one day to the next, it was a shot of what it was, and asked Curtis what he thought Laurie would be doing in that moment. "And I went like this," Curtis says, and she snaps her fingers. She's making Nesquik strawberry milk. Because it's still frozen at 17, when it's used to make something better. "I came back from this movie remembering-this can be super fun and creative and collaborative!" It energized her so much that she came across a screenplay, for an eco-horror movie that she plans to direct. "It's kicked me into a creative space," she says.
Creative spaces are familiar for Curtis, who grew up in Hollywood, the daughter of legendary actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh. But she's talking to me when discussing her other interests. The answer to the question: what do you think about the most important things in the world? children's book, Me, Myselfie & I: A Cautionary Tale, about a mom who becomes obsessed with documenting her family's life. "I'm terrified by social media-obsession with our curated lives," she says. "I do not proselytize, because I cop to it too! How quickly you can hit the booster button that brightens you up. The idea that we can not look at our unvarnished selves at all. A selfie is by nature self-loving, but it's becoming self-loathing. "I leave her house with no fewer than four books that she wants me to read, including that World War I book, Wade Davis' Into the Silence. (She bought multiple copies to give away to friends, as she does with many books she loves.)
A few weeks later, Halloween $ 77.5 million topping up over the box office, earning over $ 77.5 million. It marks several milestones, including the biggest horror-movie opening with a female lead and the highest-grossing film opening with a female lead over 55. When Curtis posts on Twitter about these record-breaking stats, her tweet goes viral. She writes me from Australia, where she's doing press for the movie. "It's a story with a happy ending," she says. "In my industry this does not happen very often, if ever, and that I am getting this chance as I am kissing 60 is beyond my wildest dreams. I'm the girl in the world. "And she sends me a selfie with the Sydney Opera House in the background. It does not look overly filtered, but she's still glowing.
This appears in the November 05, 2018 issue of TIME.
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