Editor's note: The following contains spoilers for Halloween Ends. Proceed with caution.
Going into this year’s Halloween Ends, we were promised a final battle between the ultimate final girl, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), and The Boogeyman himself, Michael Myers, where only one would survive. Fans speculated about what would happen. Would The Shape finally die or would Laurie Strode lose her life at his hand? We now know that it was the former, with Laurie Strode and her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) working together to kill Michael Myers once and for all. Laurie survived, but if she had died, it wouldn’t have been the first time. Twice in Halloween’s convoluted timeline, Laurie Strode has been killed off.
After the surprising success of 1978’s Halloween, Jamie Lee Curtis became a big star. Throughout the early 1980s, roles in other genre films like Prom Night, Terror Train, and Halloween II helped turn Curtis into horror’s Scream Queen. As her popularity rose, she moved away from fright flicks to more mainstream Hollywood fare, finding acclaim in non-horror films such as Trading Places and A Fish Called Wanda.
Why Didn't Jamie Lee Curtis Return for 'Halloween 4'?
By the time The Shape returned for 1988’s Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers, Jamie Lee Curtis had quit horror. At the time, acting in horror films was seen as low art. It was something you did to make a name for yourself, and if you became famous for it, you moved up to more respected work. To write off the character of Laurie Strode in Halloween 4, it’s briefly mentioned that she was killed in a car accident before the events of the film. This film would follow her young daughter, honorably named Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris). A picture of Curtis is as close as we would get to seeing her in this chapter of the franchise that made her a household name.
No one held it against Curtis for leaving horror in her past, but everyone was shocked and excited when in 1997 she announced that she was coming back to fight Michael Myers one more time. It wasn’t as if she had to do it. Jamie Lee Curtis continued to be one of the most famous actresses alive in the 1990s with films like My Girl and True Lies.
1998’s Halloween H20 promised to get back to the scary basics of Michael Myers versus Laurie Strode, with the crazy Cult of Thorn shenanigans of latter films retconned. The film played out as a swan song, with the character of Laurie Strode seen twenty years later, still dealing with the trauma she experienced one Halloween night long ago. Having faked her death and moved to California, Laurie lives in fear that her psycho brother will one day find her. When he does, Laurie must confront her trauma and fight back. The satisfying finale sees Laurie Strode decapitating Michael Myers. She is now free. The nightmare is over. Michael Myers is as dead as he could possibly be. Except that he wasn’t.
So Why Did She Return for 'Halloween H20'?
Jamie Lee Curtis envisioned Halloween H20 as the last in the franchise. Producer Moustapha Akkad had other ideas. He had always said, no matter how a Halloween film ended, that Michael Myers must always come back. It created a clash with Curtis, who has recounted her frustrations a few times over the last twenty years, mostly recently at this year’s New York Comic Con. “I said, ‘I’m not going to do it, I’m not going to tease the audience again. I came up with an idea to end it. I said I won’t do it."
Curtis had seen her return as a way to kill off Michael Myers for good, but instead learned that it would be just another movie in an endless franchise that would continue right along without her. Still, she went along with the plan because it would give her a chance to tell her own story first in H20, where, at least for a while, everyone would think Michael Myers was dead. Curtis told the New York Comic Con panel, “I said, ‘OK if you’re going to do that, and it looks like Laurie has ended it and my audience feels like it’s ended, OK I’ll do it.”
Famed screenwriter Kevin Williamson, known for penning the masterpiece Scream as well as writing the story for H20, came up with a way to kill Michael Myers and yet bring him back for a sequel. Laurie Strode and the audience would think that Michael is dead, but the next film would reveal that, at the end, Michael had put his mask on an ambulance driver, and Laurie had killed an innocent man. Curtis reluctantly agreed to the proposal, but as she explained at the panel, “You have to pay me a lot of money in the next movie, and you have to kill me in the first ten minutes of the movie because I’ve now killed an innocent man and I can’t live with that.”
With that option agreed upon, Halloween H20 was filmed and released. It was a huge success, racking up $55 million at the box office. Minus some awful decisions on the multiple masks for Myers that were used, critics and fans were both happy with the outcome, one which saw Michael Myers headless and very much deceased. For a few years, fans would accept that the series was over, until Halloween: Resurrection was announced.
But Then... 'Halloween: Resurrection' Came Around
That film opens up with Laurie Strode in a mental hospital. She has beheaded an innocent man, and it has caused a complete mental breakdown. Still, she’s coherent enough to build a trap to catch her murderous brother when he once again comes for her. The first act finds the brother and sister on the hospital’s roof, with Laurie catching Michael’s leg in a snare, Scooby-Doo style, and The Shape now hanging off the building’s edge. As Laurie goes to cut the rope and send Myers plummeting to his death, the events of H20 stop her. She needs to take off the mask and make sure it’s really him. At this point, Michael grabs her, pulls her close to him, and stabs her. With them both now hanging over the edge, Laurie gives Michael a kiss, tells him, “I’ll see you in Hell,” then lets go, falling in slow motion through the trees to her death.
It was a shameful end for horror’s most quintessential final girl, one that felt forced upon Curtis by producers who refused to let a franchise go after she had already signed on for a movie with the setup being that this would be the end. Halloween: Resurrection was a creative and box office bust. After Laurie dies, Michael Myers goes back to Haddonfield and kills some forgettable kids staying in his house for an internet show, while also getting beat up by Busta Rhymes. The film was a directionless mess. It was so bad, that with nowhere else to go, the decision was made to reboot the franchise, with Rob Zombie helming a reimagining of Hallowen in 2007 followed by a sequel in 2009. His creative direction, especially with the controversial Halloween II, led to the franchise going dormant for almost a decade.
Jamie Lee Curtis Was Done With 'Halloween' Movies
Jamie Lee Curtis was done with making Halloween movies, until a surprising name helped to change her mind. Curtis told NME, “It wasn’t even a thought in my head to do another Halloween movie. I didn’t want to, but then I got a call from Jake Gyllenhaal, my godson who I’ve known since he was a little boy. Jake had worked with David Gordon Green (he starred in his film Stronger) and he said David wanted to speak to me. So I told him to pass my number along and the phone rang again just a minute later…David had hidden an indie drama in the middle of a horror film. He made something intimate that was layered in bloody tissue and exploding heads. I read it in about an hour and called him back immediately: ‘OK, let’s go.'”
2018’s Halloween was a massive hit, making a whopping $255.6 worldwide. It would go on to become a trilogy, followed by Halloween Kills in 2021 and this year’s Halloween Ends. While the latter two films weren’t as well received as the 2018 story, and you can argue that the tale of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers should have stopped there, the films were still successful and entertaining. Just as important, it gave the saga an actual end, as Michael Myers died for real this time, with his maskless body fed into an industrial shredder. It made him coming back yet again due to some cheap explanation or fake out impossible.
While The Boogeyman is sure to be reincarnated in some fashion, this version of Myers is dead and not coming back. As Jamie Lee Curtis says goodbye to Halloween again, we shouldn’t forget that we were only blessed with these films as a way to fix Laurie Strode’s demise in Halloween: Resurrection. Without that disaster, this new trilogy would have never happened.