The Oscar-winning classic Jamie Lee Curtis was too scared to watch: “I would cover my ears, close my eyes”
Throughout Hollywood history, certain actors have become inseparably linked with specific genres. Think of the western, and names like John Wayne or Clint Eastwood likely spring to mind. Rom-coms? Meg Ryan is a natural choice. For action films, Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone are hard to overlook. When it comes to horror, though, one name towers above the rest: Jamie Lee Curtis.
Known as the ‘Scream Queen’, Curtis became synonymous with the genre as the undying ‘Final Girl’. The irony? She actually hates horror movies and was too terrified to watch a classic thriller that swept the Academy Awards.
In 1978, Curtis starred as Laurie Strode, a virginal babysitter who is stalked by Michael Myers, the personification of evil. Over the next five decades, she would portray Strode a further six times, including in a recent Blumhouse trilogy directed by David Gordon Green. However, Halloween is far from Curtis’ only sojourn into the horror realm. Between ’78 and ’81, she rattled off The Fog, Terror Train, Prom Night, and Roadgames, and she would return to the genre in 1999’s Virus and the 2015 television series Scream Queens.
All this is to say, Curtis’ horror credentials are real, and she’ll always be a rock star at Comic-Con or horror conventions. Amusingly, though, she has forever been open with the fact that she is the furthest thing from a horror fan. In 2021, she told Fox 32’s Jake Hamilton, “I’m 62-years-old. I’ve not seen any horror film ever, except for the ones I’m in. Because the last thing in the world I want to do is see a horror movie.”
Hilariously, even though Curtis has seen the horror films she is in, she has to watch them in very specific conditions. When it came time for her to view a cut of Halloween Ends in 2022, she admitted, “They screened it for me in an empty movie theatre, and I had the volume control. As soon as the scary music started, I’d turn it right down.”
Even though this might shock dedicated horror fans everywhere, Curtis has always been quick to stress something important. While she mightn’t love what they love, she deeply values and understands their passion for it. In 2021, she stated, “I am a fan of the fans of the genre. I love that people love them. I don’t have to love them…I can appreciate the genre without being a fan of it.”
Curtis thinks some people believe she plays up her dislike of horror to get a laugh, but she insists that isn’t the case. In 2019, she told The New York Times that she has been a scaredy cat ever since she was a little girl. She claimed, “Loud noises scare me, suspense music scares me.” She also confessed that the people in her life will often warn her to stop seeing certain movies because they know they will frighten her.
There was one film that Curtis was warned to stay away from in 1991, though, that she went to see anyway. Throwing caution to the wind, she talked to the makeup artist working with her on the set of My Girl. He had worked on a thriller dominating cinemas at the time, a thriller that would go on to win in all five major categories at the Oscars. Curtis didn’t want to be the only person in Hollywood who hadn’t seen the film, so she asked him to prepare her for what she was about to experience.
The film was, of course, The Silence of the Lambs, which is truly terrifying in places – but Curtis was ready for it. She chuckled, “He wrote me a crib sheet, which I took with me into the theatre with a little flashlight, and I sat in the back row by myself. It read, ‘When Jodie goes to the storage locker, close your eyes and ears and wait for the second scream.'” Curtis duly obliged, and it got her through the movie, although she did add an extra layer of protection against the horrors of “Hannibal the cannibal” and Buffalo Bill.
She smiled, “I would cover my ears, close my eyes, curl up in a little ball, and sing ‘Au Clair de la Lune’ in my head.”
