The Halloween franchise is such a fascinating oddity. Lacking the semi-coherent serialization of similar long-running horror series’ like A Nightmare on Elm Street or the more standalone, episodic nature of Friday the 13th, Halloween is instead a bizarre series of ups and downs, story arcs that ebb and flow over the course of decades.
This has resulted in the series becoming more akin to some gonzo cinematic choose-your-own-adventure series when it comes to rewatches.
Do you elect to follow up John Carpenter’s iconic original 1978 film with its actual sequel, 1981’s Halloween II, which reveals Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode is actually Michael Myers’ secret sister? Or do you elect to go straight to Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which recontextualizes it into a two-part anthology series? Do you watch the dubiously dubbed ‘Thorn trilogy’ of installments four, five, and six, despite the fact those threads (including a science-based cult and a demon child born of Michael Myers apparently impregnating his own niece, just to name few) are unceremoniously dropped entirely post-1995? Which Laurie Strode-centered anniversary-based legacy sequel do you opt for, 1998’s Halloween H20 or 2018’s Halloween?
Halloween Ends deserves a second chance from horror movie fans
These are the kinds of utterly baffling questions you face when making your way back through the Halloween series, which is all to say; the Halloween franchise is a good deal stranger than many people give it credit for. For these reasons and many more, Halloween Ends is something of a gloriously fitting, divisive, and enthralling final entry for the series.
When Halloween Ends was released in 2022, it was not exactly met with praise from fans or critics. The third and final film in director David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride’s trilogy of Halloween sequels for Blumhouse, Ends netted a slightly more positive response from critics than its immediate predecessor Halloween Kills but proved thornier for many franchise fans. While the first of Green’s films, 2018’s Halloween, was a bona fide sensation with fans and critics alike, becoming the highest-grossing entry in the franchise’s entire history, its sequels had proven far less universally beloved, ironically for radically different reasons.
David Gordon Green’s initial Halloween was an articulate, emotional take on the franchise, rooted in Jamie Lee Curtis’ gravitas-touting performance as Laurie Strode. To follow it up, Green and co. made 2021’s Halloween Kills, which featured a whole lot more bloodshed, gore, and slasher antics, but sidelined Curtis’ character and lacked anything resembling a compelling narrative plot. The tagline to the original Halloween II back in 1981 was, “More of the night he came home,” and there is no better description of Halloween Kills than this. It felt less like a new story and more of an ill-considered continuation of the prior film; a strange collection of B-sides that didn’t quite make the first record, as it were.
Many fans were delighted by this take, as it gave Michael Myers a whole lot of screen-time to slice and dice in gruesome fashion. Others (yours truly very much included) felt it was a disappointing regression compared to the prior film. Regardless, the fact that Kills ended on a cliffhanger and had an already in-production sequel coming in just a year set a pretty clear expectation: Ends would be more of the same, for better or worse. However, when October of 2022 rolled around, it became incredibly apparent just how wrong this expectation was.
When Blumhouse first acquired the rights to make new Halloween sequels, they heard pitches from dozens of filmmakers, many of whom were eager to reinvigorate the franchise in one way or another. However, the one that ultimately won out was the creative duo of David Gordon Green and Danny McBride, the creatives behind TV sensations such as Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones.
Upon reflecting on their pitch years later, McBride recalled, “We were going to shoot two of them back-to-back. Then we were like, ‘Well, let’s not get ahead of ourselves. This could come out, and everyone could hate us, and we’d never work again. So, let’s not have to sit around for a year while we wait for another movie to come out that we know people aren’t going to like.’ So, we were like, ‘Let’s learn from this, and see what works, and what doesn’t.’ But we definitely have an idea of where we would go [with] this branch of the story and hopefully we get a chance to do it.”
These two initial pitches were eventually expanded upon to include three films, but perhaps not in the way you might think. Rather, the initial pitches were what became 2018’s Halloween and 2022’s Halloween Ends, with Halloween Kills being a middle chapter that was extrapolated and added on after the first film was such a success. As such, Halloween Ends is the pitch film that McBride was worried people might find strange or divisive, and indeed he was eventually proved right. The film was a hard left turn from the established norm of Halloween films and from Halloween Kills specifically, featuring a much more thematically rich, character-centered story, and a very different take on Michael Myers.
In fact, Halloween Ends is much less about Michael Myers and Laurie Strode than it is about Corey Cunningham (as played by Rohan Campbell) and Laurie’s granddaughter, Allyson Nelson (as played by Andi Matichak). The film chronicles these two and their respective struggles with growing up in the shadow of Haddonfield’s horrific past, and takes multiple cues from other John Carpenter films, such as The Thing and Christine. The result is the most idiosyncratic and distinct film in the Blumhouse trilogy, filled to the brim with some of the most eclectic and invigorating David Gordon Green had delivered in nearly a decade.
However, this was very much not the movie fans were expecting, or had been sold in the marketing. In favor of preserving the surprise of the actual subject that Halloween Ends would primarily be focusing on, all the trailers, posters, and marketing materials for Halloween Ends simply sold the film as a final confrontation between Michael and Laurie. And while the film does ultimately deliver that in its final act, it’s in a very different way than fans were expecting. This resulted in a pretty big disconnect between fans and the film itself upon release, as many were unhappy and felt as if they had been deceived.
For what it’s worth, as someone who was not a fan of Halloween Kills, I was not at all looking forward to Halloween Ends pre-release. The idea of seeing yet another film focused on one final showdown between these characters felt incredibly repetitive and monotonous to me, so I wasn’t exactly thrilled by the marketing. However, upon entering the theater, I was immediately greeted by an opening prologue that shifted the focus entirely, establishing a pace and tone for the film that was equally subversive and unnerving.
If I’m being honest, my favorite Halloween films outside the original have always been the weirder, more off-kilter installments. Every few years, someone decides to reset the status quo with a much more familiar entry, ala Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers or Rob Zombie’s Halloween, but they are often immediately followed up by an insane installment that pushes the envelope in exciting ways. I’ve loved Halloween III: Season of the Witch since the first time I saw it, am a Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers defender, and think Rob Zombie’s Halloween II is vastly superior to his first at-bat. To this end, Halloween Ends being a Trojan Horse situation, in which audiences expected a run-of-the-mill end to the franchise and instead got this thematically-saturated ode to John Carpenter as a filmmaker? I think that kind of rules.
Halloween Ends is a batshit, gonzo finale to a batshit, gonzo horror franchise. Given expectations and the marketing for the film itself, I can completely see how some people felt unable to jibe with its more subversive sensibilities. But with the benefit of hindsight and the alleviation of those erroneous expectations, you just might find that Halloween Ends plays a bit differently, and is ultimately, the exact kind of ambitiously-minded and emotionally affecting finale that the franchise deserved.