Jamie Lee Curtis on Her Halloween Legacy and How It Led to Her Husband and Kids: 'Dots Connected'

With the final film in an iconic franchise, Halloween Ends, now in theaters and streaming on Peacock, Jamie Lee Curtis — the O.G. Scream Queen to fans — is looking back on playing Laurie Strode for the last time. Here, in an essay written exclusively for PEOPLE, she explains how four decades of horror movies have shaped her personal and professional life.

You call me the Scream Queen. I don't call myself that, but I get it. Not the queen part. The scream part. But what you may not know about me is that I scare easily — and often.

For 44 years, I have tried to figure out why and how the confluence of a young girl (Laurie Strode) and a monster (Michael Myers) came together in the 13 films titled Halloween. And this month, as I play Laurie for the last time, in Halloween Ends, the final installment of the franchise, I am trying to figure out how to say goodbye to Laurie, who has taught me the meaning of the words "resilience," "loyalty," "perseverance" and "COURAGE."

I also need to say thank you. Everything good in my life can be traced back to Laurie. I was with the writer of the original Halloween when I saw my husband of 37 years for the first time. Debra Hill and I were on my couch in West Hollywood in 1984. I opened up an issue of Rolling Stone, saw Christopher Guest in a Spinal Tap story and said, "I'm gonna marry that guy." (I did, six months later.)

As I write this, I keep connecting the dots. If I hadn't been in Halloween, I wouldn't have met John Landis, the director who put me in Trading Places and showed the world I can be funny. That got me A Fish Called Wanda. That led to True Lies, which led to Freaky Friday. Dot connected, dot connected.

The story of the first Halloween film goes like this: In 1977, a film producer and financier, Moustapha Akkad, wanted to make a "babysitter-slasher movie."

A young director, a then-unknown John Carpenter (who would go on to define the horror genre), and his girlfriend Debra were hired to write a movie set on Halloween night in a small town. They added high school girls who strolled down tree-lined streets and teased each other about boys. They threw in children who needed babysitters and then a carnival, which led to dressing up in costumes on Halloween night. The final ingredient in that idyll: a man in a white mask who would become the embodiment of pure evil. This was a powerful recipe.

I was 19 at the time. I had been fired from the ABC show Operation Petticoat, my first real acting gig. I thought my embryonic career was over. But I was told about an audition for a low-budget horror film. I drove to an office in Hollywood. I was to do the scene where Laurie is on the phone with her friend and then looks out and sees Michael staring at her from her backyard, and she recoils. She looks back — he's gone. As the audition began, I remember being nervous. But for me, acting releases fear. I gave mine to Laurie.

I got the part. Since that day, I've come to understand that having Janet Leigh as my mother — the woman most famous for being killed in the shower in the Alfred Hitchcock masterpiece Psycho — added a certain, well, something when Halloween was released. I fully accept that. I'm very proud to be the daughter of my parents. (My father was an actor too: Tony Curtis.)

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But with some perspective — I'm now 63 and have filmed almost as many movies — I maintain that nothing can prepare an actor for the moment when the camera starts rolling and they are required to perform. In that moment, in that small room on Cahuenga Boulevard, I discovered a natural instinct, and it took over. It has carried me since. No one teaches you how to be frightened. How to cry. And, by the way, there's no acting class for screaming.

Halloween would be my first opportunity to really create a character. Laurie's name was on every page. I remember charting her stress level, scribbling 1 to 10. Since you shoot most movies out of order, I wanted to show her terror level accurately onscreen. I also wanted to make sure she looked like an everygirl. I shopped at Kmart for her "back-to-school clothes": bell-bottom jeans, over-the-knee white stockings and penny loafers.

No one knew that Halloween would become the most successful independent film at that time. I was paid $8,000 for the movie — $2,000 a week for four weeks. It's important that you know that, because we are hearing outrageous sums of money being paid to actors and sports figures and influencers. But that wasn't the case on our set in 1978, and it often isn't the case today. As actors, we work for the creative experience, the opportunity to grow and learn, to try new things. Sometimes, rarely, something is wildly successful, and we reap those rewards.

After Halloween II (and The Fog and Prom Night), I said I wouldn't do any more horror. And yet ... the first job I did next was a true-life horror story, the NBC TV movie Death of a Centerfold, portraying Dorothy Stratten, who was brutally killed by her husband. Soon, though, I would be lucky enough to go off and have those great opportunities. I got married and raised two children. They made six Halloween movies without me, none of which I have ever seen because ... I HATE TO BE SCARED. I thought that part of my life was over. I was wrong.

Two decades after the first Halloween, I did H20. We posited the question: What happens to someone when they have been traumatized and on the run their entire life? Well, Laurie was in hiding; she had to change her identity. She had fallen into alcoholism. It ends with Laurie facing Michael Myers and acknowledging that the only way to have any chance at life is to face your demons one on one.

I had my own. I had been hiding an opiate addiction and ongoing alcoholism and, although hidden to anyone but myself, it was a pervasive demon that I needed to face. I did that in 1999 when I realized I was looking at my problem in the mirror. I have been sober since then. My domestic and personal life got better.

My professional life — which by then was largely doing commercials, including a seven-year run selling a probiotic yogurt that helps you poop — improved too. In 2015 I paid homage to Laurie in Ryan Murphy's Scream Queens, which ushered in an entire new generation of Janets and Jamies, including Emma Roberts, Lea Michele, Billie Lourd, Abigail Breslin, Skyler Samuels and Keke Palmer.

Today, the fantastically creative life I get to have — I'm a director, producer; I run a company named Comet Pictures; I produce podcasts — and all the wonderful films I've done recently (Knives Out, Everything Everywhere All at Once), all of it is because of Laurie. And a filmmaker named David Gordon Green. My godson Jake Gyllenhaal introduced me to David, who had an idea for what had happened to Laurie. He gave her a family — a broken and bruised one but a family nonetheless — led by Judy Greer and Andi Matichak. The final three movies became a trilogy, films about female trauma and empowerment. Dots connected AGAIN!

I still can't tell you why people like to be scared. I certainly don't. I can't tell you why people flock to horror films. (Is it feeling the collective fear and experiencing release through screaming?) I can't tell you why Laurie Strode became O.G. Final Girl. I assume it has something to do with her intelligence and strength of character, quick mind and profound bravery.

I have tried over the years to inculcate those aspects of Laurie's character into my own, to carry that mantle and represent survivors of all types of unimaginable horror and trauma, pain and suffering, who stand up to tyranny and oppression — real and imagined. (Okay, cue the "JLC trauma" memes. Yes, I've seen, laughed and shared.)

It's now the end for Laurie and me. I'm weeping as I write this. I'm going to miss her. Movies are make-believe, but this is my real life. Mine has been made better by her. What I can tell you is that I now know the reason why I'm so good in horror films. It is because I'm not acting. When I look scared in a movie it's because I am scared. I am scared right now, as I hang up my bell-bottoms and say goodbye to Halloween. Life is scary. But Laurie taught me that life can also be beautiful, filled with love and art and life! Thank you all for MINE!