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In 1978 Jamie Lee Curtis faced a serial killer named Michael Myersin the movie Halloween. 20 years later, they had a rematch, but Meyers wasn’t the only person Curtis had to face. When it came time to film Halloween H20: 20 Years Later, Curtis had some conditions, and she wasn’t going to budge on them.

“H20 was conceived really by me. I’m not titled as a producer on it,” Jamie Lee Curtis says during a spotlight panel at New York Comic Con 2022. “It was me calling John [Carpenter] and Debra [Hill] and saying, ‘Hey, in two years the movie is going to be 20 years old. Nobody has ever made a movie 20 years later using the actor, writer, director, and producer. Let’s do it.’ And that began.”

“Kevin Williamson wrote the script. So, John ultimately didn’t write it, Debra ultimately didn’t produce it. I was in it, and it was conceived as what happens when you run from fear. The conceit of the movie is that Laurie Strode has run from Haddonfield. She has escaped, she has changed her name, she’s living in an assumed identity somewhere else, and she feels like she’s safe. And of course, the whole conceit of the movie was if you’re running from fear all the time, you’re dead inside.”

“You can’t be alive if you’re running from fear all the time. And so, the conceit of the movie was that there’s this moment where he comes back, and there’s this moment where she has to choose. I can fight him and die maybe, but I’m kind of dead already, and if I win, I’m going to be alive. And that was the conceit of the movie. But it was supposed to end him. Like end him.”

However, as it goes with Hollywood, executives tinkered with things.

“That was the conceit. That’s what we talked about. And that’s what I signed up for, and it was all going along great, and then I got this script, and it was a vague ending. It was like a car going off a cliff in a fire or whatever. And it just kept happening. I kept going back to them going like, ‘Hey, I thought we were ending this. This is vague.’ Anyway, it turned out that in that moment there was some contract. I don’t know what it was, the Weinsteins were involved, and you couldn’t kill him.”

This wasn’t the project Curtis agreed to, so she threatened to walk. “I said, ‘I’m not doing it. I’m not going to tease an audience again.’ I said I came up with this idea to end it. I’m not going to tease you guys.”

“I said I won’t do the movie. I won’t do it. Laurie Strode has to kill Michael. Done, or I’m not going to do the movie. I don’t need to. What happened is that Kevin Williamson came up with an idea. There was one of those moments of this – what if between the scene of the house and the body being brought out – anyway, you know the answer to this. It turns out not to be Michael in the thing. It turns out to be a paramedic who is actually in the mask, so I ultimately kill an innocent person.”

This was enough for Curtis to stay. “I said to them, ‘Okay, if you’re going to do that, and it looks like Laurie Strode has ended it, my audience is going to be feeling like it’s ended, okay, I’ll do it. But you have to pay me a lot of money in the next movie, and you have to kill me in the first ten minutes of the movie because I’ve now killed an innocent man, and I can’t live with that.’ And that’s why the end of H20 is what it is, and why I’m in the beginning of Resurrection.”

Curtis got her wish, and Laurie Strode was killed in Halloween: Resurrection. However, thanks to diverging timelines and film reboots, Curtis has reprised the role in other installments of the Halloween franchise, including the 2022 film Halloween Ends.

It just goes to show you that you can’t keep a scream queen down.

For more on Halloween, check out our Halloween guide and learn how to watch the horror franchise in release and chronological order.