With Halloween Ends, David Gordon Green and his merry band of Southern stoners puts a definitive period on the end of this slasher franchise’s sentence. Those looking for the traditional Halloween experience of following the Shape as he makes mincemeat of folks he encounters will find themselves sorely disappointed. Green and his team step away from John Carpenter’s relatively bloodless 1978 vision for multiplex-friendly gouts of gore and a plot stuffed with a weird love story, and more heavy-handed messaging about trauma and healing and second chances.
All that self-important jazz played into Gordon’s previous trilogy entries, 2018’s Halloween and 2021’s Halloween Kills, where it was stuffed in among the murders and Easter eggs. But here, the pacing is also uneven. Whereas Kills began right where 2018’s Halloween concluded, Halloween Ends begins a year later, before taking on another time jump. From there, the mythology is muddled. Still, there’s something to be said for how viewers are kept on our toes until the very end. After over 40 years of a franchise and a slew of cast-aside sequels, that Halloween Ends isn’t boring is nothing to sniff at.
Halloween Ends begins with another babysitter.
It’s Halloween 2019, and Michael Myers was never found after the events of the first two movies. Everyone in Haddonfield is on edge. So, when babysitter Corey (Rohan Campbell) gets locked in a room by his bratty charge, he understandably freaks out. Then, he pushes a little too hard on the door to escape and sends the kid flying to his death.
Corey is set up as diametrically opposed to Laurie, who protected her charges from Michael. Well, that was until Halloween Kills, when Anthony Michael Hall’s goony adult Tommy Doyle gets murderized by Michael after the mob tries (and fails) to kill him. (Another muddled message from this franchise? Mob justice is maybe not that bad sometimes!)
A new time jump thrusts Corey into the present, where his life — to be frank — sucks. He works at a dump/garage. He’s alternately browbeaten and worshipped by his overbearing mom (serial killer vibes much?). When he meets Laurie Strode, he’s cowering from a group of high schoolers, who beat him up for not buying them booze.
“Are you the psycho or the freak?” she says, offering him a hand up. Laurie may be a Final Girl par excellence, but she’s also a grandmother who’s concerned with the love life of her one remaining blood relative, Allyson (Andi Matichak). So, she brings Corey to the hospital where Allyson is a nurse to get him all fixed up. It’s a bloody weird meet-cute that leads to some mutual twitterpatedness between these two traumatized young adults… but soon Laurie’s beginning to doubt the good intentions of her dark doppelgänger.
Halloween Ends is about second (and sometimes third) chances.
Meanwhile, Laurie is writing her memoir, and she also enjoys the occasional flirt with Officer Frank Hawkins (Will Patton), who is learning Japanese and hoping to visit the cherry blossoms now that he’s retired. Even though there are still plenty of people who still blame Laurie for Michael Myers’s return, there are slivers of hope. Of love, even. Which theoretically and thematically work, if only these messages — like all of the messages in DGG’s trilogy — didn’t feel so freaking strident.
On one hand, you have Laurie and Frank doing the work to heal themselves in the hopes of enjoying their later years, despite the frisson of melancholy that follows them both like the Muzak rendition of « Don’t Fear the Reaper » that plays over their supermarket conversation. On the other, you have Allyson and Corey, who seem to be headed down a much darker and more destructive path. (You can tell because they ride a motorcycle!)
Yet there’s wild swings in tonal shift. In one scene, Allyson, Laurie, and fellow survivor Lindsey are having a cute girls’ night moment with tarot cards and whatnot. Laurie tells Allyson that she has to rip her shirt open and shake her tits at grief and laugh or something — I’m paraphrasing here! — which is totally a line I can see Danny McBride coming up with after four consecutive bong hits. (Lindsey is played by Kyle Richards, who was in the original Halloween and is now a Real Housewife! OK, sure.) Yet Curtis sells it, she believes it, and we love her for it! Her chaotically healing trauma queen is a crone icon for the ages.
Honestly, it’s Green’s filmmaking and Curtis’s whole deal that we’re here for. Don’t forget that Green’s wild oeuvre includes writing and directing the quietly shimmering intimate dramas All the Real Girls and George Washington, as well as the broad stoner comedy Pineapple Express. Then, there are the admirably batshit cable shows he concocts with McBride: Eastbound and Down, Vice Principals, and The Righteous Gemstones. Across the board, Green brings the same craftsmanship and somewhat off-kilter sensibility to his projects, no matter how obscure the topic or how big the IP. At the very least, his Halloween trilogy cannot be accused of not taking the franchise seriously.
As for Curtis, it seems like she’s finally come to some sort of hard-won peace over her role in horror herstory. It’s not hard to see why she’d sworn off Halloween in the past — nor why she was drawn back in to have one last go at it, in the dexterous hands of a writer/director like Green.
Trauma? Trowma!
It’s been several decades since I first saw Michael Myers creeping out of the shadows on my tiny dorm room television. The remastered VHS finally cleared enough to reveal his ghostly William Shatner mask lurking in so many more scenes than we’d realized.
Back then, the Halloween franchise was a satisfying scare that we hung our own meanings on like clothes on a hanger. The resilience of Laurie Strode and Curtis’s pontificating on her plight was not yet a thing of morning television-made memes. Although that may be just because we didn’t have access to those words and theories just yet.
There is a risk of over-intellectualizing horror. To me, horror is much more interesting in how it reveals what we didn’t mean to, what’s only obvious upon reflection, like finding a photo of yourself from a different time. There’s a pleasure in the messiness of discovering the meaning on our own.
This iteration of the franchise is absolutely guilty of taking itself too seriously, but I feel a bit protective it and its frankly feminine messiness. There’s a scene at the end of the 2018 Halloween where Laurie, Karen (Judy Greer), and Allyson are huddled in the back of a truck, exhausted and bloodied from their battle with Michael that they think they’ve won. It recalls the ending of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre, when Sally’s screams turn to hysterical laughter as she leaves Leatherface in the dust. But it also satisfyingly illustrates one of the major talking points of the trilogy, which is epigenetic trauma. And who better than Jamie Lee Curtis — daughter of Psycho’s Janet Leigh and Tony Curtis, who struggled with addiction — to speak out about the intergenerational traumas of Hollywood? And who would stop her? Not me, that’s for sure.
In the end, Halloween Ends has some silly plot developments that I won’t reveal for the sheer pleasure of letting the reader find out on their own. However, when push comes to shove, Green et al don’t flinch. Laurie Strode remains a powerful Final Girl. Allyson breaks the cycle of living and dying in Haddonfield. And Michael Myers is dead and buried, as advertised, and he’s not coming back.
At least until the next time John Carpenter is approached by a young upstart director with a bright idea. And hey, I’ll probably go see that Halloween too. And so will you.
Halloween Ends opens in theaters and streams on Peacock Oct. 14.
