Halloween (the holiday) and Halloween (the film franchise) are both upon us once again, but there’s one thing we don’t have to fear this spooky season: Jamie Lee Curtis being anything but the best ally and mom.
While on a press tour in Madrid for her new film Halloween Ends, Curtis opened up to Spanish broadcast network SER about the global surge in violent transphobia and anti-transgender rhetoric peddled by pundits and politicians alike.
“I have a trans daughter. There are threats against her life, just for existing as a human being,” Curtis said. “There are people who want to annihilate her, her and people like her. The level of hatred is as if we had not learned from fascism, as if we hadn't learned what the result of that is: the extermination of human beings.”
X content
This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.
“So Jamie Lee Curtis is scared, and so should you be,” the actor continued. “And Jamie Lee Curtis has a voice, and she's trying to use it, and you should too. And that's how we change things: by thinking about them, learning about them, and then using our voices to draw attention and fight them.”
Last year, Curtis announced that her daughter Ruby is trans and that she and husband Christopher Guest completely support her, so much so that she officiated Ruby’s World of Warcraft-themed wedding in May. Ruby, a video editor and aspiring virtual YouTuber according to her Twitter, has mostly kept away from the public eye but was photographed holding hands with her mother at the Halloween Ends premiere Tuesday.
Speaking to SER, Curtis reflected that the “real monster” in modern life, of which her film’s iconic slasher Michael Myers is “just a symptom,” is the way technology enables people to enact violence on others. “What this new movie is talking about is that we are all monsters,” Curtis explained. “That is scary, especially in this time where fascism is resurgent, particularly in Italy, or with what is happening in Iran, where women's rights are in doubt. It's a scary time.”
Curtis seems to be thinking along the same lines as famed theorist Judith Butler, who stoked indignation from the trans-exclusionary set this time last year by correctly linking anti-trans sentiment to fascist ideology, frameworks by which violence is acceptable against those “who have become cast as demonic forces and whose suppression or expulsion promises to restore a national order.” What is it about October and our faves hitting the nail on the head?
Get the best of what’s queer. Sign up for Them’s weekly newsletter here.
