Jamie Lee Curtis shares tearful embrace with fan who says the Halloween movies literally saved his life
Most people wouldn’t hold up the Halloween movies as a go-to guide for surviving an encounter with an armed intruder; Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode might be tough, brave, and resourceful, but she still makes a lot of rookie slasher movie protagonist mistakes (at least, at first—she’s a fucking badass by the time H20 rolls around). But at least one fan, identified by Getty Images as Jeffrey Scott, told Curtis today that her movies literally saved his life, recounting a story at Comic-Con about how an armed intruder once broke into his home, and how the thought “What would Jamie Lee Curtis do?” helped him to escape and stay alive.
According to Scott, one night several years ago, he discovered that his phone wires in his home had been cut, and that there was someone else in his house. Terrified, he grabbed the nearest possible weapon to hand—a pair of knitting needles—and ran straight for the door, displaying a sense of self-preservation that he says he derived from the John Carpenter films.
Curtis responded to the story—told during the Q&A portion of the panel for the new Halloween movie—by leaving the stage, talking quietly with Scott, and then embracing him. Later, she told the assembled horror fans, “The gentleman that spoke earlier? That kind of emotion is real. These are movies and we love to come to a movie and get scared, it’s exciting…but it all has to be based in a reality and something you can believe in.”
Curtis also declared that “Laurie Strode is the greatest part I’ll ever get to play,” linking the character’s inspirations and legacy to the modern-day moment. “This is a woman who has been waiting 40 years to say… I’m going to take back my narrative and you don’t own me anymore. And that, weirdly enough, seems to be a bit of a thing in the world today.”