This time, Laurie Strode is locked and charged: NPR

"I'm … Your phone number sung!": Michael Myers (Nick Castle) visits Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) at David Gordon Green's Halloween.

Ryan Green / Universal Photos

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"I'm … Your phone number sung!": Michael Myers (Nick Castle) visits Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) at David Gordon Green's Halloween.

Ryan Green / Universal Photos

The trauma is untreated and beautiful. it is not easy to diagnose, it does not go away on its own and its lingering effects can affect those around us. In the last continuation of the long and winding Halloween Traumatic series plays an important role in the narrative arc of the famous latest girl Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). You may remember her original 1978 film John Carpenter, who saw her screaming, running, discovering her brutally murdered friends, then fending off a serial killer to protect the children she was guarding.

The sequel to 2018 is several decades later and, while largely consistent with the retro sensations of the sub-genre of "serial killer on the loose," it makes something interesting with Laurie's previous experience. In this film, the trauma and guilt of the survivors are not under the rug, as often happens in the aftermath. Instead, Laurie's experience shapes her behavior and relationship with her loved ones and with the world.

Horror movies played slightly with the trauma of a character for a dramatic effect before. At Neil Marshall LoweringSarah (Shauna Macdonald) tries to cope with the loss of her family in an accident by meeting with friends and traveling on a girl's trip. The group's underwater adventure has gone terribly wrong and her daughter's memory and her survivor's guilt haunt her as she battles cannibal monsters. Wes Craven & # 39; s Yell Sidney Prescott (Neve Campbell) struggles to cope with her mother's murder. When a similar murderer starts attacking his classmates, it brings his worst fears to his door.

But in the present Halloween, directed by David Gordon Green, trauma is not just a plot; it is the explicit subject of the film. Laurie became a virtual hermit, closing herself into a world that saw her more as an abnormal spectacle than as a survivor. She does not hesitate to exclude journalists who are trying to make her experience a sensational story. In this timeline, which omits all other sequels, Laurie arms in case the serial killer Michael Myers returns. She teaches her daughter how to survive, how to shoot and how to get in the family room. She tries to make sure that her daughter fully inherits her trauma, such as when we teach young women to walk up to their car, the keys between their fingers. This Halloween proposes to explore the emotional cost of seeing a monster in each shadow.

Laurie's insistence that her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) learns to protect herself and to check each corner causes a breakdown in their relationship: Karen is angry at her mother for her life-long training and for her life. expose to paranoia second hand. She is content with a passive husband and refuses to train his own daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) as the mother raised her. She naively considers that her mother's trauma is his alone and is actively trying to dissociate Laurie from spending time with her granddaughter. In the movie, trying to break the cycle of fear makes them vulnerable to the man who caused the fear.

We see why Karen so violently pushed Laurie into a particularly tense dinner scene: Laurie, visibly shaken, comes late to meet the family in a restaurant, upsetting the superficial jokes. Granddaughter Allyson tries to calm her down, while her daughter Karen becomes confrontational, angry that her mother has come forward. Curtis' performance is moving – she is clearly uncomfortable just seconds after sitting at the table. She continues to watch nervously in front of others, while Karen's body language expresses her frustration at the challenges of caring for someone with mental health issues.

Trauma manifests itself in ways that we can not control, often when it is not appropriate to cry or shout. Laurie's instability in these moments is palpable and helps explain why she took such drastic measures against a killer (probably supernaturally motivated).

Laurie's story could have taken many forms. She could have buried her trauma by reliving it only in nightmares. She could have moved to another part of the world. If it is disappointing to see Laurie Strode transformed here into a gun survivor into a standard revenge plot, the actress' own words could clear up that decision.

Speaking at the Fantastic Fest in Austin last month, Curtis told the crowd: "Laurie Strode returned to school on November 1 with a bandage on her arm and left school on the 31st of this dreamy girl. intellectual and insane, and she came back on November 1, a monster, where everyone talked about it, nobody helped her, and that's what I thought was the reasoning behind the initial trauma. I'm really happy they did it. "

It would have been nice if more women had had a say in Laurie's narrative trajectory, instead of the all-male screenwriting trio of Green, Danny McBride and John Fradley. However, this Halloween highlights an issue that horror films so often ignore: how does a genre that unleashes so much violence in its characters attack post-traumatic stress disorder, trauma and grief? The horror filmmakers will always terrorize their characters at the moment, of course, but hopefully we'll see more and more movies ready to explore the lingering costs of living with fear every day.

While the latter Halloween may not accomplish all that it proposes, it shows how difficult it can be to get ghosts out of the trauma of the past.