The horror movie Jamie Lee Curtis was banned from starring in: “It was too obvious”
She might be an Academy Award, Golden Globe, and Primetime Emmy-winning actor who’s fast approaching her 50th anniversary in the business, but Jamie Lee Curtis‘ lasting legacy will always be that of the slasher genre’s original scream queen.
As far as legacies go, it’s not the worst one in the world. Thanks to John Carpenter’s Halloween, Curtis both launched her career and defined the ‘final girl’ archetype that would become a staple part of every murder-happy horror flick that followed, and she continued dining out on it for 40 years.
Five of her first six feature-length credits were horror movies, and you could technically make that six and lump Roadgames in with The Fog, Prom Night, Terror Train, and Halloween II, since it’s about a serial killer who butchers and dismembers women, even though it isn’t strictly an out-and-out horror in the truest sense.
The rising star knew that she was in increasing danger of being permanently typecast and stuffed into a box that she may never have been able to escape from, which is why she opted to lend support in John Landis’ Trading Places, which paid dividends when the picture became a box office smash and showed audiences that there were many other strings to her bow.
Around the same time, though, she was under consideration for yet another scary story. Not just any old scary story, but the first follow-up to one of the most iconic and unforgettable horror movies ever made, and the only reason she was on the short list for a part was to add a metatextual layer to the proceedings.
Nobody was asking for it, but Richard Franklin’s Psycho II turned out a lot better than it had any right to be. There was no real need for it to exist, but the sequel nonetheless justified that existence, with Quentin Tarantino a noted fan. Anthony Perkins’ Norman Bates returns, with Marion Crane’s niece, Mary Loomis, the resident ‘final girl’.
Psycho II‘s producer, Hilton A Green, thought it would be ideal for Curtis to play the niece of the character her mother played in Alfred Hitchcock’s original, and on paper, it wasn’t the worst idea, as far as stunt casting goes. However, Franklin disagreed, thinking it would have been too on-the-nose and distracting.
“I remember when I made Psycho II, a lot of people asked why we didn’t use her in the lead,” he recalled to Eros Magazine. “The answer was, it was too obvious. And I screened, one of the first screenings I had of the film was for Jamie and Janet, who came and saw it.”
Instead, after Curtis was ruled out of the running, Meg Tilly was hired instead. You can understand why she was floated as the obvious candidate, but that was the exact reason Franklin didn’t want her, with the filmmaker insisting that Psycho II stood on at least one of its own feet instead of endlessly tethering itself to its predecessor.
