Jamie Lloyd
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Jamie Lloyd (1980-1995) is a fictional character in Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989), and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995). Jamie Lee Curtis was asked to return as Laurie Strode for the fourth film, but declined for another film project. She asked that the writers just write she had died in an automobile accident. Instead, the fourth film introduced Laurie's daughter. Jamie Lloyd is named after actress Jamie Lee Curtis and the character's father Jimmy Lloyd, Lance Guest from Halloween II. As the daughter of Laurie, she is also the niece of superhuman killer Michael Myers. She was played by Danielle Harris in Halloween 4 and Halloween 5 and by J.C. Brandy in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers.
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[edit] Early life
Jamie Lloyd was born in Haddonfield, Illinois in 1980, Her biological parents were Jimmy Lloyd and Laurie Strode. She was the first of Laurie’s two children and the older half-sister to John Tate.
It is vaguely implied (in H4) that in November 1987, both of Jamie's parents died in an automobile accident.
For the next eleven months, Jamie would suffer from nightmares about her uncle Michael; whom she had never met. She gradually comes to love her surrogate family- her foster parents Richard and Darlene Carruthers, and especially their daughter Rachel, her seventeen-year-old foster sister.
[edit] Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers
Jamie suffers from nightmares about her feared uncle, Michael Myers (George P. Wilbur). She is also tormented by schoolmates because she is related to Haddonfield's notorious "boogeyman." On October 30, 1988, Michael is being transferred out of Ridgemont Federal Sanitarium back to Smith's Grove. While in the transfer ambulance, he recovers from his ten-year coma upon learning the existence of his niece. Accordingly, he kills the two medical attendants and the two drivers. While making his way back to his hometown, he also kills a mechanic and a waitress. In Haddonfield, while on the trail for Jamie, he manages to kill 12 more people and the Carruthers' family dog, Sundae.
Escaping from town, Jamie cowers in a pick-up truck as Rachel hits Michael head on, throwing him off the road and knocking him out. Jamie goes over to him and holds his hand. After ordering her to get away from her uncle and drop to the ground, the police shoot Michael many times, causing him to fall into an abandoned mine shaft, which then collapses on top of him. Later, back in her foster home, Jamie is possessed by Michael's spirit and stabs her foster mother, though not fatally. When screams are heard from downstairs, Dr. Loomis walks over to the staircase seeing Jamie poised at the top holding a pair of bloody scissors. Sheriff Ben Meeker (Beau Starr) restrains Loomis from shooting her. Jamie is now apparently consumed by Michael's rage.
[Donald Pleasence reportedly favored taking the series in a new direction by having Jamie become the Shape in the next sequel, but the producers opted to stick with a proven formula.]
[edit] Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers
One year later, Jamie is housed in the Haddonfield Children's Clinic. She has now been rendered mute and suffers from nightmares and seizures. Early in the film, a brick, bearing a note reading, "The evil child must die," is thrown through her window. When Michael (Donald L. Shanks) awakens from a year-long repose, she develops a telepathic bond with him. Sensing when he is near someone, Jamie goes into convulsions when he kills. Michael kills Rachel (which places the title of Jamie's protector into Tina's hands.), four of Rachel's friends (including Tina.), Two dimwitted cops, and the Carruthers' new dog, a Doberman named Max, while in pursuit of Jamie. Towards the end, Loomis takes Jamie to Michael's childhood home. Despite the doctor's pleas to Michael to fight his rage and seek redemption through a positive relationship with Jamie, the Shape tracks down his niece in the house. By addressing him as "Uncle," she gets him to pause and remove his mask. Upon seeing his face, she says, revealingly, "You're just like me." However, when she moves to wipe away his tear, he retreats from this baring of his apparently still partially human soul, puts his mask back on, and tries to attack her.
Using Jamie as bait, Loomis catches Michael in a net, shoots him with tranquilizer darts, and beats him into unconsciousness with a wooden beam. Michael is manacled and locked up in the local jail, awaiting transport to a maximum-security facility, where, Meeker says, he will remain "until the day he dies," to which the wiser Jamie responds, "He'll never die." After Jamie is escorted out to be taken home, the mysterious "Man in Black," glimpsed briefly earlier in the film, arrives at the police station and begins firing a machine gun. Jamie goes back inside to find that eight police officials have been gunned down and that her uncle has escaped. The movie ends with Jamie saying 'No...No..."
[edit] Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers
It is apparent that the Man in Black had kidnapped Jamie immediately after the shoot-out and has kept her in captivity, along with her uncle Michael (George P. Wilbur), for the past six years. He is revealed to be Loomis's former medical colleague Dr. Terence Wynn (Mitchell Ryan). He is also the leader of a Druid cult headquartered in the subterranean levels of the Smith's Grove Sanitarium. Jamie, now age 15, gives birth to a boy on the night of October 30, 1995. [The father is unknown, but it is implied in the producers' cut of the film and widely suspected among fans to be Michael, presumably via artificial insemination.]. Loomis and Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd), whom Laurie was babysitting on Halloween 1978, attempt to rescue Jamie after hearing her plea for help on a local radio station. In the meantime, she hides her baby, whom they find. However, in the theatrical version, Jamie dies relatively early in the film when Michael impales her on a corn thresher. [In the producers' cut, she survives most of the film only to be shot in the head by a silencer by a disguised Dr. Wynn].
[edit] Erasure from the Series
In a move that rankled many fans but delighted others, director Steve Miner retconned the series with Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998). This installment reveals that Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) had faked her own death in order to avoid detection by her relentless brother and serial killer Michael Myers. Under a new identity, she then fled to Summer Glen, California, along with her only son, John Tate (Josh Hartnett). To focus more on the Laurie Strode character, the events of parts 4 – 6 are never mentioned; therefore, Jamie Lloyd does not exist. The following sequel, Halloween: Resurrection (2002), continues with this new continuity. Furthermore, the Halloween saga can be viewed in three acceptable ways- (1) Parts 1, 2, 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 (2) Parts 1, 2, 7, and 8 (3) Parts 1, 2, 4, 5, and 6.
Upon viewing every film involving Michael Myers, many fans have tried to reconcile the continuities. They surmise that Jamie and John have different fathers and that Laurie and Jimmy left their daughter in foster care (the fact that the two are at most a year apart in age complicates this and similar theories). They also speculate that civil servant and government authorities, anxious to rehabilitate Haddonfield's image, persuaded its citizens that Michael Myers died in 1978. Since Laurie was anxious for twenty whole years, the authorities could have suppressed the Shape's rampages in 1988, 1989, and 1995, before they became national knowledge.
Most fans refuse to believe that Laurie could abandon one child while favoring the other. But, some conclude that Laurie had left Jamie, and kept John instead. Because of Michael’s history, Laurie calculated that Jamie- being female- was in greater danger than John would have been. Laurie also thought that maybe Michael might come back to Haddonfield looking for her, so she thought that Jamie would appear to him as just another trick-or-treater on Halloween if she wasn't there. So, Jamie was seen as being safer without her mother. It has also been suggested that Laurie was driven to drink and pills not only from trauma because of Michael’s pursuit of her, but also from guilt upon learning of Jamie's death. John's ignorance of Jamie's existence, the events from 1988 – 1995, and believing "Michael Myers is dead," may also stem from deliberate concealment on Laurie's part.
[edit] Actresses who played Jamie
Jamie Lloyd was the first film role of Danielle Harris'. Her heart-wrenching performance was widely acclaimed and it established her as a fan favorite; a status that she enjoys at horror conventions and on Halloween series-related websites to the present. Even many fans who dislike one or both of the films have praised her performance. She was even considered the scream queen of the late 1980’s. Harris sought to reprise the role for the sixth installment, now-entitled Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers, but the producers and Dimension Films reportedly refused to pay her the mere $5,000 she requested, and she wasn't fond of the script. The role was instead given to English-born actress J.C. Brandy. This move upset many loyal Halloween fans. Harris even sought a different role in Halloween: H20, but was again turned down.
In real life, J.C. Brandy is only one year and seven months older than Danielle Harris. Despite that, some fans believe Brandy failed to attract the level of fan interest surrounding Harris. The appearance of Jamie in H6 had aged her into her early twenties, although chronologically she was about age fifteen. Of the three films involving Jamie Lloyd, only Halloween 4 has attained a sizeable following. However, no installment has matched the popularity of the original Halloween or its follow-up sequel Halloween II. But Halloween films 4 – 6 have all proved more popular than the Michael Myers-less storyline in Halloween III: Season of the Witch.
[edit] Notes
In the films, the uncertainty of Jamie’s age stems from a discrepancy between Halloween 4 and Halloween 5. In the former film, set in late October 1988, Jamie's foster sister, Rachel Carruthers (Ellie Cornell) wonders why Jamie continues staying up so late. She asks "You going for a record here; the seven-year-old insomniacs' hall of fame?" The latter film is set one year later in late October 1989. Rachel and Jamie’s adolescent friend Tina Williams (Wendy Kaplan) exclaims to Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence) that "Jamie’s a nine-year-old girl!" Some fans have tried to resolve this contradiction by speculating that Rachel may have said the wrong age due to her fatigue at 4 a.m. or that Jamie was born in November or December 1980. While Halloween is the main date setting for both films, it is assumed that Tina could have rounded up Jamie's age, while Rachel did not.
In the novelization of the fourth film, Halloween IV (1988; revised edition, 2003) by Nicholas Grabowsky, Jamie is six years old, which implicitly dates her birth to 1982. According to H4, Laurie and Jimmy legally died eleven months earlier in November 1987 and Richard and Darlene Carruthers are Jamie’s foster parents. In H5, it is apparent that Jamie had been adopted assuming the name Jamie Carruthers.
