(Quick Thread) With everyone revisiting the HALLOWEEN movies a bunch the last few weeks, I’ve seen a lot of discourse on here about Laurie & her trauma, particularly in relation to the RZ films, H20 & the 2018 film.

First of all, yes the filmmakers around HALLOWEEN 2018 spent a great deal discussing how this film dealt w/trauma & why that aspect was so important. And I do believe it’s important to note that most of genre writers knew it wasn’t the 1st HALLOWEEN film to do so.

What I think is interesting is to look at how these films ended up approaching trauma because when you do that, you can understand why those approaches are so different. H20 is a portrait of a very damaged woman 20 yrs later who has had to live out her life under false pretenses.

In the case of HALLOWEEN 2018, we’re seeing a character who has had to live with this trauma for 40 years. And because of what this trauma has caused her, and how her own family (her daughter mainly) treats her, there’s a quiet desperation & determination to this Laurie.

She’s still a wreck but she’s had to find a purpose in her trauma because it’s the only way she can function. But she’s still a mess. The scene in the truck as she watches the bus leave/subsequent dinner scene proves just that. It’s the only time we see Laurie emotional.

With the RZ HALLOWEEN movie (specifically part 2), the wounds of Laurie’s trauma are still fresh. They’re still festering. That Laurie is a young woman who hasn’t figured out how to deal with her trauma & so she’s incredibly reactionary & totally out of control.

As she should be. That Laurie can’t process what has happened because she hasn’t really lived with it yet, and so she’s just a mess. Sloppy even. And it rings true. There’s no perspective to her Laurie yet because it’s still all so immediate.

So in their own ways, all of these depictions of Laurie’s trauma are accurate in their own ways, because they capture this woman at various stages in her life. 2018 Laurie wouldn’t act like RZ Laurie because we’re seeing her at a different stage of her life.

And for me, I relate a lot to all of these depictions of Laurie’s trauma. I was the functioning alcoholic Laurie who wouldn’t let anyone know the real me & I’ve been the messy & self-destructive Laurie who couldn’t cope & acted like sloppy drunk.

But also, I’m mostly like 2018 Laurie these days, where I’ve been living with certain things for 30 years now & I’m just doing what I can do to get by. I’ve built my fortress & I just do what I need to do to move forward. It wears you down but you have to just keep going.

So anyway, the moral here is that obviously HALLOWEEN 2018 wasn’t the 1st depiction of Laurie living w/trauma (not sure why they were saying it at the time either) but it is an intriguing & wholly relatable exploration of living with trauma for an extended period of time.

There’s so much more to this discussion that a thread of tweets can’t get into adequately, but it just struck me that so many people have been comparing these Lauries to each other & you really can’t.