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Despite beginning her career as one of the original Scream Queens after starring in the iconic Halloween series directed by John Carpenter (it’s about trauma), Jamie Lee Curtis is not a fan of horror movies. Her appearance in the franchise came as a surprise, with the actor being fired from her role on an ABC show and randomly having a free afternoon to audition for the film, completely unprepared for the impact that it would later have on her career.
But even when the genre had such a significant role in her later success, the actor doesn’t enjoy watching horror movies herself, besides one surprising Disney classic that she classifies as an undeniably scary film.
When describing the Halloween franchise, Curtis insists that the team did not intend to make anything groundbreaking, instead joking about how it was just “an exploitation slasher movie about killing babysitters”. The film was shot in 20 days and pulled together at the last minute, with Carpenter even composing the score for himself. The magic of filmmaking can seem like a bizarre twist of fate, as the simplistic and homemade quality of the film led it to become one of the most influential horror films of all time, with Carpenter being praised for his blood-curdling synth score that unnervingly repeats itself throughout the entire film.
After working on a film like Halloween, you’d imagine that it would influence your perception of horror movies as a whole, increasing your fear tolerance and making you a tough critic to scare. However, when asked about the horror films that Curtis enjoys, she described the 1992 Disney film, Aladdin.
Curtis further explained, saying, “I do not like horror movies. I do not say this for a joke, although it gets a laugh, I really don’t. There’s nothing I like about being scared. I’m this person [puts hands over her face]. I sing songs to myself when things are terrifying. I mean, fucking Aladdin scared me. I’m not joking! You know when Jafar becomes a dragon? With his red eyes and stuff? That shit scared me.”
Many children find themselves being slightly traumatised by the movies that are deemed as being ‘kid-friendly’. I, for one, did not find the door sequence in Monsters Inc ‘friendly’, and the whole notion of travelling in a warehouse of moving doors absolutely terrified me, and to this day, I struggle to watch it. There is something quite ominous about Aladdin in particular though, with the twisted beard of Jafar and Jasmine being trapped inside an hourglass, the film has plenty of scenes that could scare your socks off, with the classics we love as children often cementing themselves as strange, distant memories.
Curtis recently starred in the monumentally successful FX show The Bear, for which she was nominated for an Emmy award. She won her first Oscar in 2023 for the record-breaking A24 film Everything Everywhere All At Once. She has recently starred in the Freaky Friday sequel alongside Lindsay Lohan, reprising her role in the iconic 2000 teen movie.
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