HORROR-THON 2026 • NO EXIT
6/10
DIRECTOR: Steve Miner
STARRING: Jamie Lee Curtis, Josh Hartnett, Adam Arkin
RELEASED: 1998
RUNTIME: 1 hr, 26 minutes
WATCH ON: HBO Max, Amazon, Apple TV, Fandango at Home
SCARE LEVEL: Medium
STAYING ON CAMPUS FOR HALLOWEEN: Just leave.
Laurie Strode faked her own death. She changed her name, moved across the country, and became the headmistress of a private boarding school in California. She has a son, a boyfriend, and a prescription. Twenty years later, Michael comes to campus.
Laurie now goes by Kari Tate and runs Hillcrest Academy, a gorgeous boarding school in Northern California. She’s still haunted, still drinks a little too much, and is overprotective of her 17-year-old son, John.
It’s Halloween, and most of the students are leaving for a camping trip. A few stay behind, including John and his girlfriend. And Michael Myers, who spent twenty years looking for his sister, has found the school.
MY HUMBLE OPINION
This is the other time Jamie Lee Curtis took on Michael, and she is in the whole movie. Laurie is drinking, overprotiective and still waking up in a panic twenty years later. It’s the first Halloween to treat what happened to her as an actual trauma, and handed her an axe.
This one also completely erases Halloween 4 and 5 entirely, so Jamie Lloyd never happened. This franchise has more timelines than a soap opera.
The best scene is a cameo by Janet Leigh, Jamie Lee Curtis’ real-life mother, and Marion Crane in Psycho. She plays the school secretary, and their attention to detail, she even drives the same kind of car from Psycho.
This is also 1998. It’s Josh Hartnett’s first movie, Michelle Williams is riding the Dawson’s Creek wave, LL Cool J is a security guard, and Kevin Williamson is fresh off Scream. Some people might call that a 90s cash grab, but now it’s just a time capsule.
The first hour is slow, and all of the teens are barely characters. If you choose to stick it out, the last 20 minutes when Laurie stops running and goes looking for Michael are worth the wait.
A FUN FACT FOR YOUR NEXT DINNER PARTY:
Originally, newspaper clippings and a student doing a report were intended to be the sole acknowledgment of Halloweens 4-6, but it was cut. Planned clues included a mysterious cult that kept murders a secret in Haddonfield and Jamie Lloyd missing, dated 1989 and 1995. Ultimately, only one photo of bloody scissors - possibly from Halloween 5- remained. Another with the headline reading “Survivor of Halloween Murders Killed in Auto Accident” likely refers to Laurie’s staged death in Halloween 4, but since it left out her partner’s death, it is likely a different incident.