Though she has a long and accomplished resume, with gigs as varied as A Fish Called Wanda and True Lies, for many fans she remains one of the horror genre's greatest "scream queens".

At the age of 19, Curtis - the daughter of actors Tony Curtis and Janet Leigh, herself a Hitchcock heroine, and the star of the iconic 1960 horror masterpiece Psycho - was cast in the film Halloween playing schoolgirl, and textbook victim, Laurie Strode.

When the film was released in 1978, the role turned the younger Curtis into a household name, and forever knitted her fame to the horror genre.

"We are all trying to get our footing in show business, I don't care who you are." Curtis, now 56, says. "When you're young, you try and get your footing in show business. And for me, I landed on a mountain-top at 20 and what supported me was a genre that I don't particularly like. I am not a horror film fan.

"But the genre supported my work, so for as long as I have been working, I understand that without them I wouldn't have a career. And I am grateful. I am grateful to this loyal fan base, this gentle fan base."

Curtis has come to Comic-Con in San Diego to sell Ryan Murphy's highly anticipated Scream Queens. Not a hard task, to be honest, given his success with American Horror Story.

"It's like going home again, going home to your big, crazy extended family who loves you. And that's how I feel," says Curtis.

Created by Ryan Murphy, Brad Falchuk​ and Ian Brennan - the creative team behind Glee and American Horror Story - Scream Queens is an anthology horror series, which means each season will (mostly) feature a self-contained story. The first season is set inside the fictional Wallace University and deals with a series of disturbing murders.

Curtis plays Cathy Munsch, the dean of the university's faculty; the series also stars Emma Roberts as Chanel Oberlin, thepresident of the Kappa Kappa Tau sorority, as well as Skyler Samuels, Lea Michele and Abigail Breslin. In the sense that it deals with secret sisterhoods, a two-decade old murder and some disturbing goings-on, the series nods loudly to classic campus horror of the 1970s, such as Satan's School for Girls.

One of the major elements of the series is the clash between Curtis's Dean Munsch and Roberts' Oberlin. Munsch is determined to shut down the sorority culture on campus, while Oberlin - as its designer clothes-wearing demigoddess - very much wants to hold on to the status quo.

Curtis has only praise for her co-star. "The first scene I have with Emma Roberts is in my office and it's a six-page dialogue scene, a ping-pong match between the two of us," she says. "[And] it was literally, hello, I'm Jamie, hi, I'm Emma, and Ryan is like, sit down, let's shoot this. And boom, this girl starts hitting ping-pong balls to me. No warm-up and she was firing. I had to really be on my game."

To some extent, Curtis says, nothing should be accepted at face value in the series. "I think on any Ryan Murphy show you're going to see someone you think you know, and then you don't know them at all," she says.

It also doesn't help that the US studio Fox has created a marketing campaign which features various members of the cast with blood on their hands. It is, Curtis is quick to reassure, purely a metaphor. "Everybody in the show has blood on their hands because everybody has a motive," she says. "And that's the metaphor some genius at Fox came up with."

Though she declares loudly that she is not a fan of the genre personally, Curtis concedes it has been difficult to let it go, particularly the character of Laurie Strode, the high-school girl terrorised by a psychopath in the original Halloween, which gave rise to countless sequels, spin-offs and even a reboot.

The two films in that series which matter most are the original, for obvious reasons, and its sixth, titled Halloween H20, in which Curtis agreed to return to the role 20 years later because she was genuinely fascinated by the question it posed: if someone has suffered such a deep trauma, how do they face that fear, particularly after two decades have passed? It also allowed her to turn the former victim into a fighter.

And although her mother starred in one of the genre's most beloved masterpieces - Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho, about a woman (Janet Leigh) on the run, whose chance decision to pull into a roadside motel in a rainstorm comes with horrific consequences - Curtis says the pair never discussed the genre at length, nor the role it played in both their careers. "No, never," she says, simply. "She was always grateful for it. I am grateful for it."

Scream Queens, she says, is a departure from those classic tropes of horror. "It is a wild ride, and it has no reflection in classic horror tropes. It is wickedly funny and deeply dark and a little violent, and everything you think about a character does not add up. You think you know Dean Munch and by the end of the episode you're like, what? It's not classic horror at all."

WHAT

Scream Queens

WHEN

Ten, Wednesday, 9pm