The New Halloween Movies Are Actually About ‘Trauma,’ Okay?

Trauma. Generational trauma. Family trauma. Female trauma. Collective trauma. These are some of the things the current trilogy of Halloween movies are about, according to franchise star and O.G. Final Girl, Jamie Lee Curtis. For much of the promotion for the 2018 sequel (simply titled Halloween) and the new release Halloween Kills, Curtis has laid on the trauma horn, as the supercut below of her discussing the trauma felt by her iconic survivor character Laurie Strode as well as the citizens of the movies’ setting of Haddonfield, Illinois, over and over and over and over again attests.

On one hand, I get it: Journalists ask the same questions repeatedly when an actor is promoting a film, and there’s only so much a person can say. People have their talking points and they stick to them. On the other, it’s kind of funny to watch someone try to fit the 12th film in a horror franchise—which largely exists to thrill via brutal depictions of death—into the current cultural moment (in one of these clips from 2018, Curtis refers to “trauma” as “the buzzword of the year”). Like…these are just dumb Halloween movies? If they seem somewhat reflective of the times, well, that’s any movie’s job, and trauma is hardly uncharted territory for horror. It’s actually what the genre is all about.

You’ll see that things take an operatic turn toward the end (one nearly as overblown as Halloween Kills itself) of this montage, when Curtis starts directly referencing current events that she says “has something to do with this movie.” Larry Nassar and Bill Cosby survivors? Huh? MeToo in general???

“But you see, time’s up, and it’s time’s up all over the world,” she told SYFY WIRE in 2018. “And who better to represent that right now that Laurie Strode?” Uh, literally any non-fictional person?

“I truly believe when you go look at these movies 20 years from now, you will look at this trilogy of movies and it will be a history lesson under the guise of a slasher film, but it will be the best history lesson of any movies being made I’m including even documentaries,” Curtis told Hey U Guys more recently. Guess we’ll just see about that!