No. I remember I got a call from Jake Gyllenhaal, who said his friend David Gordon Green wanted to talk to me about making a new Halloween movie. The conception was that 40 years have gone by since the events that took place on Halloween night in 1978. Laurie has never gotten any help or support for it. Think about it; by November 2, 1978, Laurie would have been back in school. At the time, they would have put a bandage on her arm and sent her back to school. Nobody would have ever talked about it, and Laurie would have never gotten any help.
That’s a really good point. Is that what convinced you to come back to the franchise for the first time in years?
When David suggested the new Halloween movie would be about a woman who lives behind barbed wire, who’s never had any help, whose family has been shattered, broken apart by Michael Myers, that appealed to me because that’s the truth. That’s what happens when you have untreated PTSD. That’s what happens when you don’t give someone the loving support they need. And that was the beginning of the movie.
I just thought that made a lot of sense to me. So I don’t have input because they did the input for me. If they had come up with a different storyline, I probably wouldn’t have done it. I felt that it gave respect to trauma. And I know the memes, and I’ve seen the memes. I appreciate it. But it also makes me cry.
Yes, the memes. I’ve seen them too. I’m curious — what is it about them that makes you cry?
Because Halloween gave voice to what has been going on for women throughout history. Laurie Strode is a fictitious example, but there are women all across the world in real life who are living with perpetrated trauma on them with zero support. No help. No grief counseling or familial support. And they are persevering through it. They have tenacity, courage, and a deep internal drive to exist and survive as human beings.
Yes, we can laugh about trauma and make jokes, and I totally go with it. And I’ve posted it many, many a time. But the reason I talked about it is that we were making a movie about it. And it was coinciding with the women’s rising up all over the world saying ‘me too.’ and ‘This has happened to me too.’
