New York Magazine’s latest cover features Jamie Lee Curtis, star of the new Halloween (“the #MeToo hack-’em-up”), photographed by Robert Trachtenberg and profiled for the issue by David Edelstein. New York culture editor Lane Brown says that, as Edelstein argues in his cover feature, “horror movies are the ones that speak best to our current moment, giving us a less scary way to process our fears of all the real-life horrors in the world. Jamie Lee Curtis’s new Halloween was designed to be timely, but she and its other makers couldn’t have known how much we’d all need it right now.” Edelstein writes in the issue, “Things are so bad that we’re turning for uplift to horror movies, which tell us how not crazy we are to be paranoid in a world of predators, some in high office.”
Curtis’s horror movie roots run deep–her mother Janet Leigh starred in Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho, and Curtis found her first Hollywood success in the original Halloween (and Prom Night, Terror Train, and Halloween II). She tells Edelstein that getting her start in horror movies along with a lack of formal acting training made her feel “illegitimate.” “I did not go to acting class,” Curtis says. “I did not go to film school. I did not study with great teachers. The illegitimacy that I felt as a young performer carried for a long time, and it probably has informed my whole life.”