Michael Myers was a menacing stalker before stalking was “cool”
A monotonous creep wearing a distorted, expressionless William Shatner mask keeps popping out at you at unexpected times, to do you nothing but harm: and you realize it’s that season—no, not just election season, but Halloween.
Subsections in this entry:
Broad trends among horror-film styles, 1960 and after
My personal “entre” to this film
Some coarse stats and facts
The film’s treatment of mental illness is pretty lowbrow, but we excuse it
The effective music
The Steadycam adds limited state-of-the-art gloss
Clever horror techniques abound
Funny moments, despite the filmmakers’ intentions
Jamie Lee Curtis, last but not least
Broad trends among horror-film styles, 1960 and after
Among the watershed horror films of the past 50-55 years, there have been two basic ways to go: with subtlety, sophistication, and class; or with simplicity and a certain canniness that goes with that.
When Psycho (1960) came along, it was revolutionary in the horror movie genre for several things: not using the stock monsters like the Frankenstein monster, Count Dracula, or Invisible Man type characters of the old Universal films; no goofiness like James Arness in a carrot suit (or whatever it was) for the Howard Hawks–directed The Thing from Another World (1951); and nothing like the giant pods of the Cold War paranoia–picture Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Psycho tapped into deep-psychological sources of fear (family relations, as between an apparently mentally ill mother and her mild-mannered son), indirection in depicting violence (the shower scene has been studied probably more than any other quick-edit, masterfully composed suggestion of awful violence in film history), and specially composed music carrying a lot of the message of the film (Bernard Herrmann’s celebrated score, which is colorful but, in ways, surprisingly simple for him). Throw in the creepy set design (Norman Bates’ office with the stuffed birds; the richly decorated Victorian house; the slightly menacing touches for the hardware store where Sam Loomis works) and glimpses of mischievous or macabre humor (Norman’s mincing walk up stairs; the woman customer in the store talking about wanting to kill pests in a painless way), and you have horror done in a richly indirect, “upscale” way. So much of the horror is suggested by what we merely fear or infer from things, not from geisers of blood or decapitated heads lying around.
This approach seems a sine qua non for the indirect horror of Rosemary’s Baby (1968; see my February 10 review), and to some extent the more gore-featuring The Shining (1980).
The other style of horror films, which seems the main type (in number of films and amount of earnings) for the past 30 years and is largely aimed at young audiences, is predicated on the well-enough understood fact that a lot of people don’t go to horror films for a viewing of sophistication; horror films are often taken as a sort of porn, something that very predictably can elicit a rather brute-emotions response out of people. Maybe someone doesn’t want to feel the rich depressed, touched sense he or she can get from a sophisticated drama featuring deep emotional conflict and complexity, even if the film doesn’t end its story on a downer note. Some viewers just want a passing sort of entertainment that gives a trusted response that they know is just a temporary sensation, with the comfort of their real life lying outside the theater (or home-viewing setup). Especially for teens and twenty-somethings, horror can fulfill this easily sated desire.
Halloween (1978), a career breakthrough for both director John Carpenter and actress Jamie Lee Curtis, is the granddaddy of the slasher/simple-because-independently-made films, which modest film turned out to be a headwater for franchises that deal not in indirection and subtlety of horror, but a turn toward alarming, disgusting, repulsive displays—in later films, as much blood as possible, torture as sick as can be allowed in an R film, premises as crazy as could be (e.g., a plot to murder millions of children on Halloween). Horror has gone, on the one hand, from being largely for adults to being primarily for the young, and on the other hand, from espousing frights based on a film setting up, but not fully depicting, the mental “premise” for being scared—frights based on suggestion, leaving a lot up to audience imagination—to being a sort of pornography that aims toward disgust or sheer awe: “I can’t believe they showed that.” Thus, today, we have the Saw franchise (2004 and after) and, even more awfully, the unspeakable Human Centipede abomination (2010?) (sorry, I’m an old fart; maybe younger critics can stand up for these). And between Halloween and these latter-day wonders are strings of Halloween sequels, many of which have low ratings (sometimes the lowest) from the likes of Leonard Maltin; the Friday the 13th series; the Nightmare on Elm Street sequence; and even the parodies—like the comic Scream and Scary Movie franchises.
Halloween in a sense is the best of this type—which features, as the source of evil, a monster of some sort that is nothing like the type derived from old, non-pulp literature as were Frankenstein’s monster and Count Dracula. The monster of the Halloween type seems synthetic, made only to be a “whatsit” in movieworld that does nothing but cause mayhem, and seems unkillable; and, paradoxically, once accepted on its screenwritten terms, it becomes the center of a sort of fan cult. In a way, with this sort of premise, the real world is left far behind; the monster keeps on coming in ways that sometimes go beyond preposterous—how many bullets can Michael Myers take and still get up and continue with his “business”? And, as a key element (showing how these films address adolescent sensibilities), so often the monster is stirred to wreak his havoc by the sight of young people partying it up, drugging and sexing…and this trope itself has become a cliché, something fans can both be ironic about and yet accept as a key stepping-off point for more fun frights: you know the couple rolling under the covers is Michael’s next target. In a way, the monster seems like a means for kids to address what they might feel in the deep background of their minds, guilt or mixed emotions about their epicurean tendencies and accomplishments.
My personal “entre” to this film
I must have first seen Halloween on TV years ago, because I know I’ve seen it before, but it was a long time ago, and I seriously doubt I first saw it in the theater, when I was in high school. When I was a young amateur movie critic, when I first saw it I thought it was surprisingly simple in its exploitation of the Halloween holiday for horror-movie purposes; it seemed definitely second-rate. The one really memorable thing about it was its music, which I later found had been composed (and played, as I find today) by John Carpenter.
Today, I would say that while it is obvious as to how crudely made it is, within the bounds of what it tries to be, and considering how it set up a template for so many similar films (and many millions in box-office harvest) to come after it, it is surprisingly good—to this old viewer who could smile at some of its corny moments, it still gave solid scares. As the first of a long line of slasher movies, which proved a sort of headwater the way Psycho did—and which obviously exploits Psycho in some way—it is the tamest of its post-1978 type in terms of not using very much blood. And it boils down to essentials what makes a horror movie, somewhat as Psycho does: you work with a lot of suggestive elements—darkness in corners, an unwitting kid bumbling into a darkened washing-machine room, or an uncertain figure across a street; you don’t need so much graphic spectacle that you feel ready to throw up at a butcher shop.
Some coarse stats and facts
Halloween was cowritten by director Carpenter and producer Debra Hill. (Both cowrote the immediate sequel Halloween II [1981], but Carpenter didn’t direct that one.) The movie had a small budget—a little over $300,000; among the numerous original makers who comment on the 20-year anniversary DVD are Moustapha Akkad, the producer/financier, and Irwin Yablans, the executive producer. I mention them because, not that I am a diehard fan of the film franchise, but their names are associated with not only the original but various of the sequels, and in a sense, they could be recognized for being the prime movers of what was an unusually profitable film franchise, illustrating the important element that keeps the increasingly hollow sequels of this (or any similar horror) franchise cranking out, profitability: according to the review of the 1995 Halloween [6] installment in the Videohound review compendium (2013 edition), the whole franchise’s cumulative budget was $20 million, but the cumulative earnings have totaled $200 million—a good rate of return for any business “scheme.” Of course, this profitability has as much to do with audience taste (or the filmmakers’ knowing the mind of the average adolescent horror fan) as anything else; and it doesn’t hurt that the original premises and components of the first Halloween were, in their own terms, ingenious.
The film’s treatment of mental illness is pretty lowbrow, but we excuse it
Another genre element that pay turn off those who champion the mentally ill is how Michael Myers’ character is presented. I have to say that, being long a champion of psychology as a general field, I also know that having a sense of humor for things psychological, and being able to allow “exploitation” of this in popular-culture entertainments, especially films, is very healthy. If you get too serious about psych stuff, it can begin to make you a humorless bore, almost like a religious fanatic. And our society does happen to have a range of attitudes toward mental illness, some of which are simply stupid and unenlightened; being able to “communicate” with some of this mentality is part of what it means to set up conditions for breaking down bounds between different mentalities at all, with maybe the hope of enlightening those who need it.
Further, when it comes to pop art, utilizing the issue of mental illness as a premise amounting to a “monster” that sets action in motion is acceptable enough, as would be for any “exploitative” art. The few stereotyping or grossly derogating characters that we can think of in formerly embraced pop art that later become considered beyond the pale are the likes of Amos and Andy in their radio and TV shows (or any old-time minstrel show depictions); and some object to the character of so esteemed an author as Shakespeare, Shylock, though it has been noted that some Jews still admire (for its more enlightened aspects) and readily view The Merchant of Venice despite this squirm-making character. If any of the fans of such films really wanted to competently and sensitively address mental illness (say, in a family member), he or she could easily say that Michael Myers, or Jason from the Friday the 13th films, or Jack Torrance from The Shining are just goofy Punch ’n’ Judy puppets designed for purposes of calculably titillating entertainment.
Interestingly, such characters have very little said about them that pinpoints their qualities as mentally ill characters the way we would discuss flesh-and-blood people today. Even Norman Bates in Psycho is never fully discussed even in clinical terms that were around at the time the film was released; at one point, the psychiatrist at the end says “when the mind houses two personalities,” which accords with the general notion of Norman being a case of multiple personality disorder (or dissociative identity disorder, as it is more recently called), but little more is said to root him in any competent clinical-type understanding. The movie basically relies on folk ideas (inherently a bit stupid) about “split personality.”
The “boogieman” concept
With Michael Myers, the mythological use of mental illness is even more obviously crude, a bit obscurantist, but even that’s OK. He spent 15 years in a mental institution. Even though he looks like a cute boy when he is caught at the start of the film after having killed his sister, from then on he is talked about as if nothing but a soulless monster, and in the film’s “present day” he is glimpsed as a cypher, something rather unearthly to the extent we see his face, and often seen in partial views. He is, quite simply, “the boogieman,” as one boy in the film talks about, first in terms of the kiddie idea that he and his friends entertained in the perfectly normal way early on, which he wonders about as if such a monster might be something to watch out for.
Later, when he, in his understandably naïve way, refers to what he has seen of Myers as “the boogieman,” as if “Can that be him?,” this shows a kid can only comprehend such a monstrosity via the mythological kiddie terms he and his friends bandy about—but it is also the film’s way of addressing the youthful mentalities it is banking on in pursuing an entertainment-business prospect: Yes, kids, there is a boogieman, and here he is—a maniac who escaped from the funny farm, is going around in stolen clothes and an eerie mask, is adept with a large knife, and is unstoppable.
Dr. Loomis adds his own hokum
Perhaps more pause-making is the doctor, Sam Loomis (named, in another nod to Psycho, after Janet Leigh’s Marion’s boyfriend, Sam Loomis the hardware store clerk). This doctor was on his way to the hospital to prepare Michael to be transferred somewhere else, and he was to be brought to a court, and blah blah blah—I couldn’t get all the facts, didn’t need to. Riding with a nurse, Dr. Loomis points out that Michael will be on Thorazine for his court appearance (Thorazine is one of the first-generation antipsychotic medications, and if audiences knew what this was, they could suitably respond, “Ooooooo! Myers is a real psycho!!!!”)
Donald Pleasance, the British-born actor, plays Dr. Loomis, and amazingly, he appears in many of the Halloween installments (he died shortly after the 1995 one), even after Jamie Lee Curtis and John Carpenter had long gone from the proceedings. This goes to show that even for an elder, respectable enough actor, sometimes—as in many of the other media and arts worlds—you need to slum around for years in a backwater or a decidedly lesser form of an art to scratch up a fund of money for retirement. It’s hard to imagine Pleasance felt that this was the defining role for a laudably grand actor. At one point, when he is talking with a policeman in the abandoned Myers house, he gives a long, portentous soliloquy that is one part important exposition and one huge part mythologizing hokum, the type of stuff that shows how unapologetically low-minded these films can be—which, for our adolescent viewing pleasure, doesn’t really matter: the doctor ruminates, “I met him [Myers] 15 years ago. There was nothing left. … [He had] the blackest eyes, the Devil’s eyes.”
This doesn’t tell us anything more than that the film’s putative good doctor, with Myers dumped into his lap as a hapless boy who had tragically killed his sister, found a deeply psychopathic youth; the boy’s only option for his life was to remain in an institution indefinitely. Today, in real life, if a six-year-old boy had killed a family member and were seen as deeply disturbed, there would be talk of treatments, questions as to whether he could be rehabilitated (and of course, today, issues of insurance, funding for special programs, yack yack yack, would be par for the course); the genetic source of his illness would be referenced (and hadn’t Aunt Sophie suffered from bipolar disorder? Wasn’t cousin Jim hospitalized for a breakdown in the 1960s? Weren’t there a few alcoholics three generations back?).
But the film isn’t concerned with an educated, respectful regard for mental illness; it is just setting up premises for what would be the “boogieman” for 18-year-old Joe (and Jane) Averages: Ooooooh, a psycho—he was istic when he was six, they put him away; then they were going to, I don’t know, take him to another place, and that rainy night, the patients were wandering around on the lawn like zombies, and that psycho Myers leaped up onto the doctor’s car like, shit, the Alien—and he drove off…. Shit! That’s why I don’t like mentals, man…they, like, all carry knives and shit and “have the blackest eyes, the Devil’s eyes.”
The effective music
The soundtrack music is probably the second-most-famous horror film music to that of Psycho, and is about as effective. Done apparently with just a piano and synthesizer, it is about as simple compared to Bernard Herrmann’s score as Halloween itself is somewhat derivative of, pays homage to, and even expands on Psycho. This is, of course, a film of which suspense is an important part—and in this film, the most suspenseful scenes are when “the Shape” (Michael Myers) is stalking (and kills) Annie, and later when he tries to finally vanquish Laurie Strode. With suspense, you are extending an audience’s interest, and a tension, over time. With music, the best way to do that, without distracting viewers with elaborate melodies or any other changing elements, is with a rhythmic or sustained set of sounds. Herrmann could use components of an orchestra to produce music, in suspenseful scenes, with basically repeating figures (never mind the weirdly screeching violins during the shower scene of Psycho, which actually comprised the most simplistic part of Herrmann’s Psycho score or of any of the scores for all the Hitchcock pictures for which he wrote).
Carpenter’s score for Halloween seems (to some extent) to pay homage to Herrmann, while simplifying his sound: rhythmic playing is here, and lots of minor chords and occasional changes of key. The one unusual component is 5/4 time for the famous piano figure, a trademark of this film. All this, plus an occasional blast of what I guess is a synthesizer noise, which sounds like letting air squeal out of a balloon or the type of horns you hear blown at large sports events, is quite effective for underlining moments in the film. When a DVD commenter says that kids he saw watching the film would cover their ears sometimes because the music added too much intensity to the suspense/fear, you could understand this, because this film is one of the best examples of the music helping the horror approach.
The fact that the score sounds like cheesy synth stuff from the 1970s, I think, also helps. In fact, rather than seeming like a 1980s film—as so many of the horror franchises became (Friday the 13th especially)—this seems to me like a 1970s film, with all the glory that can imply: in its way of rooting things in blithe middle-class America, paranoia seeping in (a sort of late Vietnam/Watergate aesthetic), and synthesizer music adding a sort of harlot makeup to the lurid picture.
The Steadycam adds limited state-of-the-art gloss
One interesting technical feature of this film is that it uses the Steadycam, a new invention in the late 1970s. This is a movie camera with gyroscope-like anchoring features, so that as it is attached to a cameraman who moves around, the individual little movements of the man are compensated for and nullified, so that the camera’s movement through a spatial zone is smoother than it would have been for something on wheels. Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining (1980) was the first major horror film that did as much as it did with the Steadycam; and coincidentally production for it and for Halloween started in the same year, 1978, but Halloween came out first. The most notable scene in Halloween for how the Steadycam adds a new high-tech way of dramatizing a situation is the opening one, where—from Myers’ viewpoint—the camera approaches the Myers house, eventually goes in and upstairs, and is Myers “in our visual position” while his visible arm plunges a knife horrifyingly into his sister. Then the camera takes us (with Myers) outside, where Myers’ crappy Halloween mask is taken off and we are surprised to find he is a young boy.
Clever horror techniques abound
What’s remarkable after all these years is how many techniques of horror films this one uses, and to good effect. Some of it means playing with the idea of a scare, and other uses simple humor. For instance, when the two children are in one house watching TV, and the boy tries to scare the girl in a kiddish way, this seems charming, but when he witnesses an actual creepy event outside—Myers carrying Annie into her house—this strikes us as all the scarier after we have seen the kids’ “play-scare.”
Similarly, when Dr. Loomis is waiting outside the abandoned Myers house, and kids are engaging in a “dare” to go inside it, Loomis sensibly scares them away with a British-voiced ploy. This seems amusing, then we are all the more startled when a policeman suddenly puts his hand on Loomis.
Sometimes the humor is Hitchcockian, just there to offer “comic relief” amid the more dire proceedings. When Laurie and Annie are driving around, sharing a marijuana joint, and we see Myers’ station wagon following (as they don’t know), the rock group Blue Oyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper” is playing on the radio.
The extended sequence when Annie is about to be killed is an example of how, in a horror film, the plot material leading up to the first death can be extended, because the audience hasn’t been shocked by the killing of a character they can identify with yet, and the film can afford to stretch out suspense until it has spent its first major clump of ammunition on an audience-galvanizing killing. Now, Annie, typical of these adolescent-audience killing fests, is a smug, too-fun-loving sort, so we know she’s going to get it. But the hints and little jokes leading up to her final demise are like a long set of teases in a strip-tease act.
At one point, she is on the phone, and the family dog is making noise. The little girl at home is too enthralled to the TV to hear her big sister call to come get the dog. The dog goes outside, and encounters Myers. The dog is really barking/growling now. Annie calls to the girl to tend to the dog. Myers (who seems to have been working out) chokes the large dog while holding it well off the ground. Barking had subsided into something like whimpering; Annie calls while she is still on the phone [possible paraphrase], “Never mind! He stopped! I think he found a date or something.”
Later, when Annie is taking off her clothes after she has spilled food on them, we see Myers looking in the window at her getting naked. Since we know what seemed to set Myers off as a boy was his sister getting it on with a male friend, sex is a “trigger” for him—he has this thing about it, man, and…shit, he just sees some cool kids partying and getting loose, and he’s going to snap, man, and use that knife….
So we know Annie is going to get it. At some of the hints and such, we almost laugh today—such as seeing Annie taking off her clothes while Myers is outside watching. It is part of what makes these low-concept films still fun to watch that, as much as some of the plot vignettes, red herrings, and so on seem corny or sometimes not well enough done, we laugh a bit and still go along with the film, because it rewards us with more effective, unexpected scares later.
Funny moments, despite the filmmakers’ intentions
Sometimes plot holes, or implausible bits, are fun to pick out because, again, these films aren’t meant to be clear Oscar contenders. For instance,
* Myers has driven the hospital station wagon 150 miles from the hospital location to Haddonfield, Illinois, the fictional town where the mayhem will ensue. Then he seems to drive it all over Haddonfield. If he doesn’t speak, and we’re not sure if he stole money from the pickup-truck driver he apparently killed (whose truck Dr. Loomis discovers), how does he have enough gas for his car?
* The fake-sounding thunder when the doctor is heading toward the hospital seems like it was lifted from an old Universal monster film.
* When Myers lifts the boyfriend up off the floor as he’s choking him, then thrusts the knife through well enough to keep the boyfriend impaled against the wall, isn’t that a physical impossibility, just given the angle of how Myers is to him—even if Myers seems as if he had been making liberal use of the hospital gym?
* The blonde girl in bed, waiting for her boyfriend to come back up with a beer (though as she doesn’t know, Myers has offed him)—do you notice how, the way she files her nails with an emery board, she seems like she’s sanding wood?
* When Laurie and Annie have been riding around in a car smoking a joint, and they see Annie’s father, a policeman up ahead, they realize they have to get rid of the joint, etc. Later, they worry, Do you think he smelled it? or such. (Why did they even feel obliged to stop to talk to him?) But isn’t it something how the cop didn’t even notice a smell when they opened the car window just after they doused the joint? Granted, he didn’t know the smell of marijuana (really? A cop from the 1970s?). Couldn’t he even have said, “Hey, girls, is your car burning brake fluid or something?”
Jamie Lee Curtis, last but not least
This film, among its distinctions, is what introduced Jamie Lee Curtis to the pantheon of accomplished actors.
The daughter of film stars Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, she was considered by its makers (as is suggested in the DVD) a casting coup in the sense that, with the film’s trying to carry the standard of slasher horror that Psycho had started, for a new generation, Jamie Lee was the daughter of the actress, Leigh, who played the key victim of Psycho. But Jamie Lee Curtis’s Laurie Strode is a new type of leading lady for horror: she is relatable and in some sense a naif, but she also ends up being smart and tough: she finds ways to stave off Myers and survives his numerous attempts to kill her (he must have been losing his physical strength by that point, after having killed the more physically powerful male and two women), though of course Myers is still on the loose as the film ends, showing not only that evil never dies, but that neither does the prospect of sequels.
Curtis is hard to figure out as to her career, though she’s sympathetic enough. On a subjective level, I was aware of her by the 1990s, and when I found out her big breakthrough role was in Halloween, which I might have seen only once by that point, I was a little surprised. She had appeared in a few films of note, including A Fish Called Wanda (1988), but did not have the stellar career, in terms of roles and number of star turns, as have, say, Meryl Streep, Debra Winger, Jessica Lange, or others who came on the scene about when she did. The one notable film I’ve seen her in, I think, is the remake of Freaky Friday (2003), in which she appears as the mother to Lindsay Lohan as the daughter, and they switch roles. This Disney-style lark is fun, and actually allows Curtis and Lohan to show their stuff in terms of occupying different roles within the same film—Lohan as daughter more-than-pretending to be mother, and Curtis vice versa.
Curtis also has a flavor that is exactly the sort that inspires such Internet grandstanding as some blog entry or such I got a glimpse of recently where it was opined, or playfully speculated, that Curtis had been a hermaphrodite at birth. This struck me as a little mean, and I decided not to pursue my own joking spiel, that if you compared Curtis as she appears today, in her fifties, to her father Tony Curtis when he played the cross-dressing male in Some Like It Hot (1959)….
She comes across, and I don’t mean this is any sort of snide or bitchy way, as somewhat lesbian-ish—never mind her short hair of recent times, in which she often appears in advertisements. But more to my point, she looks (and sounds) like someone who would make a lovable teacher, say of social studies or math—“Mrs. Curtis, she teaches Western Civ and she tutors me in study hall and she’s great, and she has such a good sense of humor….”
In Halloween, her hair is long and bushy, and of course she looks younger—she’s roughly 20. She has a face that is a cross between a horseface look and an ingenue type. This plus her acting as a sincere good-student type peg her as exactly the sort of character that Carpenter would have wanted her to be: relatable, and maybe a studently nerd who could answer the teacher’s question even after having been gawking out the window at Myer’s car outside—but, importantly, the strong person who could be resourceful and alert, so that even after Myers had started his assault on her, and she’s been crying, she can still jab a knitting needle into his neck, or in the closet can poke a wire clothes hanger into his eye (yes, we’re still talking slasher movie).
What helps her character is that Curtis is the only one who is really acting in the film—both before and after she has reason to cry and scream in fear. Her friends act like cardboard-cutout high school drama types (and her two best friends smoke cigarettes, while she doesn’t); even the adults seem corny-acting types. Only Pleasance seems, among the adults, like an experienced actor, and all he has to do is mutter explanatory hokum and portentous warnings. Curtis is the only one who seems sane and almost as if she isn’t in a cheap horror movie. This obviously helps her part, because in any such movie, we need a levelheaded hero or heroine to invest in.
What seems sad is that in the DVD making-of doc, Curtis, in ~2000 with short hair like today, says the Laurie Strode role was one of the few best she had, and that she stands up for her work in Halloween as having given her her big break. Now imagine if Meryl Streep said one of her proudest items of work was her small part in The Deer Hunter (1978) or even in Woody Allen’s Manhattan (1979), or if Debra Winger said one of her few high points was in her TV work as Wonder Girl on Wonder Woman (the show ran 1975-79 but I think Winger wasn’t there the whole time).
Curtis was willing enough to honor the Laurie Strode role that she appeared in the immediate sequel, Halloween 2 (1981), and not again until what from the ads seemed to me “too ridiculous”—Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998), where she is Laurie Strode 20 years later, who apparently is finally able to kill Michael Myers for good. And this installment—which apparently wasn't so ridiculous after all, and included the Weinsteins among the producers, and which John Carpenter almost was going to direct but did not, over an issue regarding pay—was among the very best-rated of the eight or so installments (this does not count the very recent remakes).
As we who work in the arts and the media find, as “life is what happens when you make other plans,” let he who is without weird career developments throw the first stone. I never saw A Fish Called Wanda, which seems to have shown Curtis is effective as a comic actress (she was also nominated for BAFTA and Golden Globe awards for this role), but I would say that the original Halloween and the remake of Freaky Friday, for me, show Curtis as an interesting actress of some range and depth who can find ways to connect with you other than via sex appeal. And while even sexy actresses are not always just about sex, Curtis’ non–sex-centered virtue among actresses through our film history is not too common, and should thus be savored.
