"By the time you meet Laurie Strode, she has gotten help,” Jamie Lee Curtis tells Total Film in the new issue of the magazine, headlined by Halloween Ends(opens in new tab). "Help to process the level of violence that has been perpetrated against her and her family. She’s done the work. And there’s a moment at the beginning of the movie where you actually meet Laurie – I’m not going to say she’s as innocent as she was back when she was a 17-year-old girl – but she has a layer of hope about her. That’s a beautiful place to start a really tragic, incredibly violent ending.”
Laurie and Allyson are living together when we’re reacquainted with the surviving Strodes, and "have a good relationship" according to Matichak, having dealt with their "shared trauma and loss together", though Allyson hasn’t committed to the work quite as wholeheartedly as Laurie. For Green, the opportunity to evolve and even reinvent well-established characters was a key reason to move the story forward in such drastic fashion. But there’s a big question the time jump inevitably raises: where has Michael been for the last four years?
Green bluntly acknowledges, "We don’t really explain that," arguing, as with
all things Myers, that the mystery is better left intact. "It’s like: I don’t want to see where Jaws goes to sleep at night when I’m watching a shark movie," the director says. "I want to see him when he pops up, and he’s got an appetite!"