On the Soullessness of 'Halloween Ends'
"You're just a man in a Halloween mask."
The following essay contains Halloween Ends spoilers, obviously.Is it glib of me to open with, “Halloween Ends, but where do I begin?”
Like so many horror fans a couple weeks back, I saw the new (and “final”) Halloween film, and I’ve been harboring a pretty itchy opinion on it since. (As they say, I have a “take,” hot or otherwise—a phrase that’s expedited the woeful reduction of pop culture criticism to touch-and-go sport, but more on that later.)
Look, it’s bad.
But Halloween Ends isn’t just bad. It’s a cellular affront to a character and a franchise that, despite being convoluted and inconsistent, sits atop the pantheon of classic slashers all the same. This film is, in a word, soulless.
When we’re talking Halloween, the concept of soullessness is one of great importance, and one of two distinct meanings. We can (and I will) discuss the narrative soullessness of Michael Myers—which is at odds with the more cynical soullessness that for me pervades the entire production of Halloween Ends. (Basically, David Gordon Green should be in jail.)
Some Context: Everyone’s Entitled to One Good Movie
Before we get into Ends, we’ll have to look at the impact of the original film.
The magic of Michael Myers and the DNA of John Carpenter’s seminal 1978 masterwork, though picked at and prodded ad nauseum by studios and consumers alike for decades, remain definitive of a certain Western aesthetic fixation on evil to which all the other Second Golden Age franchises just cannot measure up.
Yes, the arresting Texas Chainsaw Massacre came first in 1974—but Leatherface and Co. (especially over the course of the increasingly comic sequels) evoke a pastoral menace that could sooner inspire a lecture on real-world class disparity than a meditation on the soul. The Nightmare on Elm Street series comes next-closest to tapping into the ethereal nature of evil, but again beefs it if only by virtue of Freddy Krueger being a chatty, often very funny dude you kind of want to get a beer with. Friday the 13th (notably from Part 2 on), the most detestable of them all, is a blatant cash-in on Halloween; a flaccid attempt to “level up” its own mute boogeyman to sell more seats in a crude sort of Slasher Space Race. (This would prove literal in 2001’s Jason X.) The other iconic movie killers are either cheeky novelties (Chucky); vehicles for social or cultural commentary (Candyman, Ghostface); or . . . Cenobites.
Michael Myers, in the first Halloween, is a subliminal study in evil. This is a character appearing in Carpenter’s and Debra Hill’s scene directions only as “The Shape.” He doesn’t speak, he doesn’t run, and he elects to wear a terrifyingly nondescript mask when he’s out hunting babysitters for no apparent reason. Michael’s stark lack of soul is what ironically makes his character (and the movie he inhabits) the most soulful of the slashers. His entire being begs a deeply human question: “Why?”
Much of Halloween ’78 is preoccupied with the idea of Myers as a random force. It’s a device expertly spun into spiritual phenomenon by way of Donald Pleasence’s captivating turn as the film’s other psycho, Dr. Samuel Loomis. In a monologue that seamlessly marries plot exposition with sobering nihilism, Loomis calls Myers “purely and simply evil,” highlighting among his murderous patient’s other features, his eyes—“the blackest eyes.” Here we can draw a line straight back to three years prior, in 1975’s Jaws, wherein Captain Quint (Robert Shaw) intones the “lifeless eyes, black eyes” of a feasting shark (“like a doll’s eyes”) in his own iconic U.S.S. Indianapolis aria.
If Michael Myers is a shark, it was only a matter of time before they jumped him, as it were.
No serious discussion of Halloween can gloss over how this great, minimalist film about “simple evil” became a messy, maximalist franchise about a Gaelic cult. The string of sequels, requels, and reboots that turned Carpenter’s accidental art piece into a schlocky institution of good old American capitalism are a major part of the Michael Myers story by now—both externally in our world, as the character has become a cultural trope, and internally in The Shape’s own world, as focus groups and studio execs have ground him into such a moldable putty that he’s lost the on-screen formlessness that made him a uniquely affecting monster in 1978. Not for long would Michael be the mysterious, shark-like figure who’d kept us awake on Halloween night: Now, he was a not-so-subtle cartoon stuntman, and he had a belt to defend against Friday’s hulking Jason Voorhees.
Halloween II (1981), for my money, marks the last gasp of the O.G. Michael. Even with a new, stockier guy behind the mask (literal Kurt Russell stunt double Dick Warlock), this is still our shy king. Though Carpenter famously pieced together the screenplay while sloshed, the result is a bold direct sequel that at once maintains the spirit of Haddonfield, Illinois in ’78 and imbues itself with some potent ’80s energy. With Jamie Lee Curtis’ final girl Laurie Strode laid up in Haddonfield Memorial Hospital following Michael’s first attack, we meet a staff of randy nurses and paramedics who are all but begging to get brutally got. And when Michael checks in, he’s noticeably more cruel and creative with his kills. But he’s still quietly creeping, he’s still stalking, and a fully crazed and gun-toting Loomis is even more infatuated with “the evil.”
Of course, this is also where the character’s arc takes a hard turn. Halloween II is best known for its plot twist: Laurie Strode is actually Michael’s last surviving sister, and that’s why he’s coming for her. It’s a polarizing moment that, for many, undoes the antagonist’s mystique and renders him less scary. Arguably, The Shape becomes Michael Myers in earnest; he’s a flesh-and-blood man with a motive.
Though I’m hesitant to forgive Halloween II for this choice, I tend to look the other way, especially in our current Halloween Ends timeline. The original sequel at least feels indebted to ’78, and ties things up neatly by its finale. Loomis gets Myers in a room with Laurie, who manages to escape, whereupon the doctor triggers an explosion that seemingly kills both of them—poetic! We get one last glimpse of The Shape, impossibly exiting the room with a ghoulish calm whilst engulfed in flames, only to collapse in silence for what we assume is the end.
But the market would demand that that couldn’t be curtains. Following 1982’s commercially unsuccessful standalone Halloween III: Season of the Witch (more on that one later), the unsinkable Michael Myers (and, hilariously, Dr. Loomis) return for three more films together: Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988), Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989), and Halloween 6: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995). Many fans know this stretch of the franchise to be a particularly dubious rehash with no Laurie Strode (or Carpenter, for that matter) to ground it, and it’s unofficially called “The Thorn Trilogy.” Myers, once a force of evil, is now not just a man, but the uncharacteristically sympathetic victim of the ancient Druid Cult of Thorn that had cursed him from childhood to murder his family, thereby sustaining their secret Samhain society. (To borrow an -ism from a favorite podcast, We Hate Movies, “OK, Movie.”)
Fast-forward to 1998, and with the return of Curtis as Strode, Halloween is retconned again in Halloween H20: 20 Years Later. With a snappy story taken from a treatment by Scream’s Kevin Williamson and co-starring then-heartthrob Josh Hartnett, this one’s our first clear example of “Halloween for the next gen,” a trend that continued in 2002 with the baffling Halloween: Resurrection, helmed by Halloween II director Rick Rosenthal. After faking his own death, Michael catches up with and finally dispatches Laurie, before going on to terrorize the cast of a reality game show in which contestants spend a night in the derelict Myers home to unlock the truth about why Haddonfield’s native son was a killer. (It all ends with a duel between Michael and rapper Busta Rhymes.)
Add to the pile one Robert Zombie’s two-chapter hellbilly spin on the troubled Myers bloodline (Halloween in 2007, and Halloween II in 2009) and we have before us an absurd range of tellings and retellings. What they all have in common, though, is that inclination to solve for the “Why?” Is Michael Myers pure evil, or do “hurt people hurt people?” Is he connected to Laurie or not? Is this guy human at all? (Loomis, in ’81, says not even remotely.)
To answer any of these questions (particularly those that humanize The Shape) is a betrayal of the original vision of Halloween. It’s a vision that Carpenter was maybe never so committed or even privy to—he’s long said he was just trying to make a popular movie on the cheap. But the fact is, even if by mistake, the final product of Halloween stirred something in the collective consciousness. The Shape’s design is an art department homerun for the ages. Add to that Carpenter’s direction and revolutionary synth score; Debra Hill’s contributions to a script that painted teenage girls as three-dimensional people; cinematographer Dean Cundey’s god-mode camera work; Curtis’ career-making performance—it’s alchemy. The film changed the horror genre and American indie filmmaking forever, proposing in the process that what’s scariest and most threatening to the mortal being is that which is inexpensive, barely there, and that eschews emotional definition.
We can create an evil without even defining it.
In his own, much broader and more intelligent treatise, Reclaiming Art in the Age of Artifice, the Canadian writer J.F. Martel discusses how the creation and appreciation of an aesthetic work is what makes us human, recalling English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s belief that the imagination is “the living power and prime agent of all human perception.” It’s an elementary concept, though we may often forget it. With this idea can come a sense of pride that we hold a monopoly on such intangible matters as good and evil, despite the fact that we’re the only creatures on Earth thinking and communicating in those terms anyway. Such is the tradeoff that in the first place compels us to make and analyze art, the natural byproduct of the imagination—to use an old cliché, our blessing and our curse. True art, really, is the question as much as it is the answer.
Martel writes:
Art discloses our own mystery even as it lays bare the mystery of consciousness and the mystery of the world. It is paranormal, an anomaly casting doubt upon our most cherished certainties about the nature of reality. We must therefore approach it as we would any other anomaly that simultaneously demands and defies an explanation, even if our faith in explanations is precisely the thing it asks us to abandon in the end.
By this logic, what Halloween succeeds in doing—demanding and defying an explanation as to Michael Myers’ evil, and his (super)humanity—makes it art, most soulfully. The in-narrative soullessness of The Shape is the essence of the story, and it’s what again so ironically fills each breathing frame of Halloween with its own soul.
The offshoots and remakes, and the fractals of sequels upon sequels of this beloved film, only seek to explain, rendering the core story utterly artless—and here then, I’d argue, utterly soulless.
With its tongue shoved almost clear through its cheek and its aim squarely on definitively shooing away the once profound character of Michael Myers to another blasé and half-baked conclusion, David Gordon Green’s Halloween Ends is the most soulless production in this property’s recent history.
Interlude: The Shape of Money
Let’s first address the most obvious element of the new trilogy’s soullessness, if only as a way to assure you that I’m not a total dumbass: I know this is all about money. So, too, does John Carpenter.
In 2017, shortly after the announcement of Green’s first stab at Halloween, Lanre Bakare for The Guardian asked the Master of Horror how he felt about other people remaking his films. Carpenter said:
I love it, if they are going to pay me money. If they pay me, it’s wonderful. If they don’t pay me, I don’t care. I think it’s unfair if they don’t pay me. I think everyone should pay me. Why not? I’m an old guy now and I need money. Send me money.
It speaks for itself.
Again, Carpenter—ever the blunt interviewee—has always been upfront about his goals and expectations in his chosen industry, especially in recent years. He has never purported to reinvent the wheel, despite having done so several times. He’s at once capable of turning in the decidedly leftist They Live (1988), and such capitalist-realist moments as the above soundbite—just one in a slush of countless other spots (see below) in which he’s said he just wants to stay inside, collect his Halloween royalties, and play Xbox. (Based.)
After two more followups to Rob Zombie’s reboot died in development (and then a bunch more outside of Zombie’s universe, including one that picked up right where Resurrection left off), Weinstein label Dimension Films lost the rights to Halloween. Enter Blumhouse, the buzzy new “it” producers behind Paranormal Activity (2007), Insidious (2010), and The Purge (2013)—all films that, good or bad, had successfully moved the needle on mainstream horror from the late aughts into the ’10s. Citing Halloween ’78 as his impetus to make horror movies, Jason Blum scored the IP by way of the Akkad family, inked a co-financing deal with Miramax, and landed Carpenter as executive producer. Soon after, David Gordon Green and Danny McBride pitched what would jumpstart a most tragic attempt to reenergize the Michael & Laurie saga.
Why even do it? Well, the PR goes that Carpenter, embittered by Zombie’s grungy take on the characters, saw this new partnership as a way to right a wrong. His goal, again per The Guardian, was to “try to make the [tenth] sequel the scariest of them all.” I tend to think he instead just saw some serious quiche in Blumhouse. And that’s fine. Their new Halloween was almost guaranteed to kill (sorry) at the box office, scary or not. And sure enough, Halloween ’18 is to date our highest-grossing slasher film.
But if every Hollywood movie sequel is inherently soulless in its design to milk the old cow, Halloween Ends doubles down as the most cynically constructed one we’ll see for a while. It uses its legacy capital and built-in hook (“the epic conclusion”) to buck its audience’s expectations, but never in a way that feels organic, exciting, or earned.
We Need to Talk About Corey
The final film in David Gordon Green’s trilogy opens in Haddonfield on Halloween 2019, a year following the events of Halloween ’18 and 2021’s idiotic Halloween Kills (Michael’s bloodiest and most hackneyed rampage yet). We meet a brand new character, a tepid teen called Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell). Corey is babysitting a mouthy little brat named Jeremy (Jaxon Goldberg), who bodies himself almost immediately by boasting that Michael Myers only kills the sitters, not the kids.
Actually, from the jump, we’re trained to believe that both these people are about to get merc’d by Michael, because it’s Halloween in Haddonfield and that’s when the boogeyman comes out. And everything that plays out in this opening act is a beat-for-beat leadup to The Shape’s next homecoming: Corey goes into the kitchen to cut some cake, hears something shatter in the other room, leaves to inspect for damage, can’t find Jeremy, returns to the kitchen and (gasp!) the knife is now gone. He climbs the staircase in search of the kid, sees the knife, arms himself with it, and enters the spooky attic where we assume he’ll discover Jeremy arranged in one of Michael’s infamous corpse tableaus.
But then the insufferable tyke locks Corey in, revealing himself to be quite the prankster. A frightened and humiliated Corey says he’ll “kill” Jeremy if he doesn’t let him out, and in a panic, he kicks down the attic door, which makes contact with Jeremy for a critical hit—this fragile child is sent careening over the staircase to his violent (and extremely satisfying) death. It happens just as Jeremy’s parents return home, and of course, in a sickening allusion to one of Halloween ’78’s most iconic frames, they look up to see Corey dangling over the banister, knife in hand. Cue title card. This is Halloween Ends.
As the film carries on, it becomes increasingly obvious that Green (together with his co-writers McBride, Paul Brad Logan, and Chris Bernier) is quite pleased with himself for concocting this beguiling Corey character. The allusions to Corey’s being “the New Michael” are so hideously easy to spot before he even meets Myers himself. Big ups to the casting team here, I’ll say: Rohan Campbell’s face is just disconcerting, pasty, and elastic-looking enough throughout Ends to pass for the closest thing we’ll ever get to a naturally occurring version of the Halloween mask (short of, say, William Shatner himself covered in flour).
Three years following Jeremy’s accident, in present-day 2022, Corey Cunningham is a loner and a pariah who works as a mechanic in Haddonfield (how convenient—he’s already wearing the Michael Myers coveralls). The house in which little Jeremy had his great fall confusingly acts in ’22 as the new Myers house, abandoned and primed to become the charging station for our new slasher antihero. When Corey inevitably crosses paths with Laurie Strode (Curtis, majorly phoning it in, working on her memoir) and starts up a warp-speed romance with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak, playing traumatized orphan and local nurse), the parallels to Michael Myers, to absolutely no one’s surprise, deepen.
But something even stranger is happening concurrently with all this Corey/Michael nonsense: Halloween Ends is also a 75% soft reboot of John Carpenter’s Christine (1983).
Why this might be, outside of the Carpenter connection, is not easily discerned. And it feels, as much of this film does, like Green and Co. flagrantly fucking around with their money. Mine is not a unique observation, nor one even gatekept by the gnarliest of basement-dwelling horror nerds—anyone who’s seen or perhaps even just heard of Carpenter’s adaptation of the Stephen King novel about a car that possesses a suburban nebbish will recognize what’s happening. Corey’s timid, hopelessly innocent nature at the beginning of Halloween Ends—and his resultant emo schtick following Jeremy’s death—are evocative of Christine protagonist Arnie (Keith Gordon), who we first meet in that film pathetically catching a lap full of trash when the garbage bag he’s hurriedly taking out for Mommy breaks.
In fact, Corey’s mother (Joanne Baron) is a carbon copy of Arnie’s mom (Christine Belford): intense, overly protective, abusive. Corey, a man in his early twenties, is also tortured by a literal band of high schoolers (they play in Haddonfield’s marching band); like the bullies in Christine do to Arnie, these zoomer meanies rough Corey up and break his glasses—a cogent symbol, per the age-old rules of Every Movie, that justice shall be served cold by Act III.
Before he meets Allyson, Corey’s only lifeline in Haddonfield is his caring stepdad (Rick Moose), who owns a salvage yard (again, because Christine) and gifts Corey a motorcycle to show the audience that this embarrassing virgin is about to go bad-to-the-bone.
Oh, yes, and Corey’s surname—Cunningham—is also Arnie’s surname. Clever stuff!
It’s when Corey encounters Michael Myers, at a point way too late in this tedious film, that we fully understand the insane Christine worship at play. When Corey is knocked unconscious and thrown into a sewer by children, he comes face-to-face with The Shape. Since Halloween Kills, for whatever reason, Michael’s been in retirement down there, and when Corey breaches his sanctuary, he goes for the kill—only to spare him. See, Michael notices something in Corey; in a cringey sequence that hearkens back to the old-school bargain-bin machinations of Halloween sequels past, we get a POV shot into the eye (i.e., the psyche) of Corey Cunningham. What Michael beholds there is himself, and more egregiously, an eager student he can mold in the ways of, well, murdering a bunch of people. Corey, of course, is entranced by Michael. It all verges on the laughably homoerotic, and lands plainly in Christine territory: If Corey is Arnie, Michael is his car. (Or should I say his “vehicle?” God, I hate this movie.)
Corey’s first solo kill is in the sewers, when he stabs a whacked-out bum, and he returns to the above-ground Haddonfield a changed man. He takes his flirtations with Allyson to a Facebook-official level after luring a pushy ex of hers (Jesse C. Boyd) to Michael’s dojo, feeding Ally’s former flame to The Shape and taking it all in with wonder. When Allyson is denied a promotion at work in favor of another nurse who’s shtupping the boss, Corey somehow Bat-signals Michael to join him on the mainland and kill the adulterers. Adorably, Corey even wears his own Halloween mask to this first tag-team outing: a smiley scarecrow previously loaned to him by Allyson. Of course, the way in which Michael sends off this unfortunate bimbo, Deb (Michele Dawson), is a direct reference to his physics-defying murder of Bob (John Michael Graham) in Halloween ’78: He pins her to the wall with his knife and takes a second to admire his work like the savant he is. (The tired recycling of this perfect scene almost merits an entire essay in and of itself.)
Things ramp up when Laurie magically intuits that Corey has been possessed by Michael. At, once again, too late in the film, Laurie mounts a campaign to break up Allyson and Corey, and she’s met with the angst du jour of young lovers in a vice-like trauma bond. Allyson sees the brooding, “misunderstood” Corey as her only ticket out of depressing old Haddonfield, so she resents that her grandmother would want him gone. Corey, meanwhile, realizes that to get the girl, he has to kill Laurie Strode. In a particularly groan-worthy scene, Laurie finds and confronts Corey in Jeremy’s family’s old house (in which, sure enough, Corey’s been camping) on a hunch. He responds by invoking Michael Myers and warning of his return, then offering this old chestnut re: Allyson: “If I can’t have her, no one can.”
They should have just called this film IvG: Incel vs. Girlboss.
At the crux of this trash fire is Corey’s tipping point: On October 31st, he takes to the sewers, literally wrestles with Michael, subdues him, and runs off with his mask to kill everyone who’s wronged him. Michael Myers has never seemed punier, or more human, than in this moment. In the scuffle, a melodramatic Corey blatantly says, “You’re just a man in a Halloween mask”—a line that violates the soul of Halloween in mere seconds. This would be less offensive if Green and McBride hadn’t pitched from the get-go that their Halloween story would honor that original idea of Myers as a sublime force of evil with no motive, and if Carpenter hadn’t made clear his intention to oversee the scariest chapters of his infamous character to date.
Corey first dons Michael’s mask at the junkyard, where he finally picks off his bullies, who manage to kick over his motorcycle (remember, this is Christine) before they all bite it. The kills here are at once brutal and utterly forgettable, in the spirit of Jason Voorhees.
Next, Corey kills his mom, and then a local DJ named “Willy the Kid” (Keraun Harris), a grown-ass man who had earlier in the film harassed Corey and Allyson. (The radio station’s receptionist, a complete innocent, also gets it.) The way this jockey goes out is again reminiscent of some serious Friday shit: After Willy quotes Nietzsche on the air (c’mon, man), Corey in Shape-mode aggressively bashes the DJ’s head in, then chops off his tongue in a nauseating and meritless middle-finger to the First Amendment. Reader, this movie is dumb.
After a fight with Allyson, Laurie calls in her own suicide and readies herself to face off against the pursuant Shape one last time. The final showdown between Michael and Laurie that had been teased for months in those Halloween Ends trailers is actually between Corey and Laurie—so cute, it even rhymes.
It’s Corey, dressed as Michael, who takes a bullet from Laurie, just as Allyson and the local authorities (led by an underused Will Patton as the returning Deputy Frank Hawkins) are alerted to Casa Strode. Before any of them get there, though, a wounded Corey echoes the vomit-inducing “If I can’t have her, no one can” line and stabs himself in the neck. Very stupidly, Laurie dislodges the knife, and even more stupidly, Allyson enters the home at that precise moment. Grandmother is caught red-handed, and Corey has staged his own murder.
But Corey isn’t dead! You know, because he’s Michael Myers. That is until Michael himself shows up rather farcically, only to mercy-kill Corey (so that was it, huh?), reclaim his mask, and play his greatest hits by hunting around the house for Laurie.
Laurie and Michael tussle, she cuts his throat, and then she crucifies him on her kitchen counter. He does that Michael thing (that Corey thing?) where he’s seemingly dead, only to lurch upward for one last scare. That’s when Allyson, who has somehow put aside her hatred for Laurie, comes in and makes the killing blow. It’s called girl power, folks.
The finale of Halloween Ends finds Laurie Strode leading a literal procession of Haddonfield residents to the scrapyard, where they all crowd-surf the body of Michael Myers to an industrial shredder (remember, Michael is Christine) and watch the formless embodiment of evil implode in a gory, CGI-laden spectacle that once again crosses the soul of Halloween upon which Green had promised to build. See? Halloween ends. Michael Myers is just blood and guts after all!
This sequence, in its somber, heavy-handed, and vaguely Christlike glory, is Green doubling down on the worst part of Halloween Kills—that Haddonfield can rise up, form a torch-carrying Frankenstein mob, and take down the boogeyman with their activism. Their ’21 catchphrase “Evil Dies Tonight”—so cynically a refraction of, someone’s got to say it, real-life stuff like “I Can’t Breathe”—is the most soulless sort of neoliberal commentary one could conceivably shoehorn into a goddamned 20-million-dollar slasher film.
The epilogue of Ends finds Laurie, back in Allyson’s good graces, finishing her memoir about “the shape of evil” or whatever, and considering a new future for herself in which she can maybe go on a romantic date in Japan to gawk at cherry blossoms with her deus-ex-beau Deputy Hawkins.
Worst of all, this film dares to send us out on the world’s most contrived needle drop: Blue Öyster Cult’s “Don’t Fear the Reaper.”
It’s all answers, no questions. It’s not art, but content.
Color me surprised, then, to learn from a recent interview with Green for Entertainment Weekly that this easy ending was shoved in late, after test audiences didn’t like what surely must have been a better one:
“I screen movies a lot, from the very first assembly,” says Green. “I want to watch the audience as much as I’m watching the movie. I’m ping-ponging back and forth, trying to see when they’re engaged and when they're not.”
He continues, “We were trying to do a little bit more of a modest, intimate ending. Kills was big and expansive and super noisy and aggressive, almost like an action movie at points, and I wanted this to return to the simple dramatic roots. But then there were times when I thought it just didn’t play big enough and I wanted some scope to it. We wanted something more grand, and [that became] the procession sequence. So the actual ending of the movie we came up with this summer, like two months ago, after we screened it a few times.”
And as for Corey specifically (remember him?), he’s the formulaic product of mixed metaphors and toothless, strained attempts at social analysis—an all-too-common archetype in our post-Get Out horror movie landscape, where every monster flick now must make a borderline-explicit political statement to keep up. He’s, I glean, the earthly Michael Myers foil who’s supposed to get us thinking about white male rage; to keep us wondering about the effects of violent media on the downtrodden. And he’s also another masturbatory meditation on the fad that is trauma. The old writers’ adage of “show, don’t tell” erodes with a lazily penned, performed, and directed character like this. The movie tells us that he is all these things at once, and yet he is still of no dimension—no soul.
With his manufactured soullessness that grants him no life of his own outside the pages he’s half-heartedly splattered on, Corey Cunningham does not exhibit the type of banality that works to great effect on a figure like the threadbare, provocative Michael Myers of yore. Perhaps he should have shut up and slowed down.
The Whole Damn Thing
Halloween Ends, with its big, moronic swings, is in many ways the product of the choices made in the gratuitous Halloween Kills—but it’s also the bottom of the slide for a lot of Green, McBride, et al.’s decisions in their 2018 Halloween. While this new trilogy is frontloaded, Halloween ’18 is certainly not perfect. Its envisioning of Laurie Strode, especially in retrospect, is spotty.
Jamie Lee Curtis, a big Hollywood star who’s the child of two big Hollywood stars, has all the moviemaking power you’d expect. In the late ’90s, by agreeing to reprise the role of Laurie in H20, she saved the franchise at that point from going straight to video. Her return to the 2018 film (paired with Carpenter’s sign-on) served as a major boon to a possible new franchise. By virtue of her involvement in a profit-participation deal with Blumhouse, it was clear then that we’d be seeing a lot of Curtis on the big screen in the new Halloween. How that shakes out ultimately in the ’18 chapter is 50% successful and 50% unbelievable. It’s natural to imagine Laurie, 40 years on from the original story, as a paranoid and even rugged survivalist—it’s not quite as natural to imagine her as a formidable sparring partner to Michael Myers.
But in 2018, in the thick of the Trump era, it wasn’t surprising to see Blumhouse turn Halloween into a rah-rah, “slay, queen” feminist narrative. Green and his DP, Michael Simmonds’, choice to pay homage to Halloween ’78 by putting Laurie in The Shape’s place for a few classic Dean Cundey moments (Laurie appearing ominously in the distance outside Allyson’s classroom; her body mysteriously disappearing after a fall through a window; her emerging from negative space to surprise Michael) reads as extremely corny, though, and marks the first big tonal misstep of the trilogy.
The other glaring weakness of Halloween ’18 comes in the form of Dr. Ranbir Sartain (Haluk Bilginer), Michael’s new shrink at Smith’s Grove Sanitarium. (As Laurie annoyingly puts it, saying the quiet part loud, “You’re the new Loomis.”) Though Bilginer’s performance is strong, the character’s twist at the mid-point of the film lays the groundwork for what would become the Corey Cunningham problem in Ends: Sartain, obsessed as so many of us are with Myers’ motivations, reveals that he’s actually orchestrated the murderer’s escape to study his behavior outside of captivity. Sartain goes so far as to assault and leave for dead Patton’s Deputy Hawkins when the cop tries to kill Michael, donning the mask in a bit of proto-Corey bullshit and placing an unconscious Michael in Hawkins’ car. Within minutes, though, Sartain’s plan is derailed when Michael awakens, gains the upper hand, and squashes the doctor’s head like a watermelon—another pulpy kill that’s more in Jason’s wheelhouse. This subplot dies with this short-changed character, as it’s never explored again.
There are moments in Halloween ’18 where it’s abundantly clear that the story’s been cooked up by minds more suited to comedy. Green and McBride, in particular, are skilled craftsmen of that genre, with their collaborations on the note-perfect The Righteous Gemstones and underappreciated Vice Principals for HBO as proof (McBride, as an actor, is one of those presences who elevates nearly every comedy he’s in). Where Halloween ’18 dabbles in cheekiness (Judy Greer’s Karen, daughter to Laurie, hates Halloween so much that she wears a Christmas sweater on the 31st; two cops on the lookout for Myers shoot the shit on banh mi sandwiches for a minute and a half), near-action-comedy Halloween Kills delivers twofold in characters like Big John and Little John (Scott MacArthur and the hilarious Michael McDonald, respectively), a charming couple who have moved into the renovated former Myers house. When The Shape descends upon a screaming McDonald, I can’t help but imagine I’m watching the button of an old MADtv sketch, or one of his famous Austin Powers cameos.
Kills does too feature that aforementioned Haddonfield mob, led by present-day ’78 survivor Tommy Doyle (a clownish Anthony Michael Hall), who wields a baseball bat and shouts platitudes in such a way that any good comedian would find ripe for ridicule. More offenses: Another escaped mental patient (Ross Bacon) erroneously thought by the mob to be Myers jumps to his death in an overwrought moment of tragedy, only to smack the pavement with a zany splat, and original Halloween ’78 cast member and octogenarian Charles Cyphers is trotted out again as former sheriff Leigh Brackett to deliver cheaply his signature line, “Everyone’s entitled to one good scare!”
Halloween Kills also sets the tone for the sidelining of main characters that would become tradition by the trilogy’s final act, as Laurie Strode spends most of the second installment’s runtime asleep or in surgery at the hospital. This could be read as another winking allusion to Halloween II ’81, where Laurie does much the same. These syrupy callbacks and “Easter eggs,” as they’re known in the fanboy economy, contribute largely to the milquetoast, nostalgia-obsessed filmmaking that today gets us vapid products like Halloween Ends. In his own takedown of Netflix’s flagship baby food delivery system Stranger Things (itself a vacuous pastiche of John Carpenter at his peak), the excellent Freddie deBoer writes:
This is a widespread plague in our present culture, this obsession with catering to the “hardcore fans.” The best art you’ve ever enjoyed was made with a studied indifference to its audience. One of the things I hate most about modern TV and movies is recognizing the moments where the creators said “oh, people are definitely gonna gif this part!” It’s bad form for shows to constantly put out their lips to be kissed.
One might argue that Green’s Halloween series is, with all its “risks,” made with that studied indifference of which deBoer speaks. But it’s clear by the at-times meticulously careless Halloween Ends that this filmmaker is his own real-world version of Corey Cunningham, putting on the proverbial mask to merely perform a detached coolness whilst tripping over his own comic attempts to pay tribute to those who did it better.
From a jump-scaring Laurie and an insane Sartain in Halloween ’18, all the way through to the copycat Corey outdoing Michael’s own body count in Ends, Green is assigning form to what was once formless.
Ultimately, Green does the same to his setting, especially in Ends. It’s this stilted and hyperbolic 2022 subversion of Haddonfield that seals the deal for me, making Halloween ’18 and Halloween Kills look comparatively like The Godfather and The Godfather Part II.
While it’s logical to suppose that Haddonfield, after experiencing a lot of murders on one night in the 2018 timeline, might have a certain chip on its shoulder by 2022, it’s just not believably landing for me. In Ends, we are introduced to an unrealistically mean town. Every new character is shallowly in service to the plot, meaning they’re all absurdly shitty to some permutation of either Laurie, Allyson, and/or Corey—the only exceptions are good cop Hawkins, whose lack of significant screen time renders him nearly forgettable, and Corey’s stepfather, who gets accidentally blown away with a shotgun during New Michael’s showdown with his bullies. Really, though, everyone’s a bully in Ends, from the voice on the radio to the doctor who dresses Allyson down in front of Corey.
Imagine, if you will, that one of Halloween Ends’ softer characters is actually Michael Myers, a recluse who takes that walloping from Corey like a sad old dog.
As a tip of the hat to the original narrative, presuming that that actually was Green and his team’s objective with this trilogy, Ends spectacularly fails. The harshness of present-day Haddonfield might work in another film that committed to the bit instead of setting itself up for an impossibly pleasant, major-chord resolution of a final act. The magical reinstatement of Haddonfield’s quaint midwestern soul following the death (and makeshift funeral) of Michael Myers is a trite bookending—we don’t need to see it so spelled out in such a neatly wrapped parable on trauma. I know it’s 2022, but we don’t have to make Halloween Good and Nice. (If we’re going that route, why not just put a fat “Trigger Warning” out in front of the thing?)
Alas, Ends’ grim backdrop is, once again, in full service to that 2D conclusion topped by a saccharine Laurie Strode #selfcare voiceover on the first of November: something, something, cherry blossoms. Maybe in a Blu-Ray extended cut we’ll get a deleted scene of Laurie making her Pinterest account.
See you at the next “ending.”
Post-Mortem: Season of the Bitch
If you’ve made it this far, we should be friends.
You may remember how I opened this frankly ridiculous piece with a barb at our present subscription to “hot takes.” Though I’m guilty of sometimes participating in the parlance in everyday social settings (I am, regretfully, an online millennial), it’s a term I still resent. “Hot take” feels too rash and distilled, like a TikTok: a quick two syllables and we’re on to the next thing. Not only that, but the term itself implies that it’s “spicy” to go against popular opinion. ¡Ay, caramba! Imagine taking a moment to think about something independently!
The serving of hot takes also encourages internet content consumers to get real weird, making such exhausting claims as this:
This is perhaps the preeminent hot take in our immediate Halloween Ends discourse, and I hate it.
With all due respect to the luminary HADDONFIELD BLOOD TEARS, to give this prognosis is to fall for the trap set by Ends from its title credits. To open his third installment, Green uses the same typeface—Franklin Gothic Heavy Italic in a very ’80s electric blue—that Halloween III fans will recognize from that gem of a film, which is an actual cult classic in the old-fashioned way. The brashness of this aesthetic choice is incredibly inorganic, and speaks further to the new third chapter’s soulless undoing of a modern sequel franchise with once great potential.
In Halloween II, we see Michael Myers go down in flames—it’s all over. John Carpenter and Debra Hill, definitively done with the Myers character after turning in a second script that didn’t inspire them, would return to a third film as producers on the condition that it did not resurrect The Shape. The final screenplay for Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) was written by its director, Tommy Lee Wallace, a childhood friend and frequent collaborator of Carpenter’s who’d served as production designer and co-editor of Halloween ’78.
Halloween III works because it is a true standalone film. (It also happens to come packing a highly original story, with some legitimately terrifying moments—and, again, it’s shot by Dean Cundey, that fucking boss.) Carpenter and Hill’s idea: To start a new, Twilight Zone-esque anthology series centered around the Halloween holiday. Hill is on record in some old issue of Fangoria calling III a “pod movie” rather than a “knife movie,” with Wallace following her lead by taking influence from the sci-fi classic Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956). Season of the Witch introduces us to Silver Shamrock Novelties, a California company run by Irishman Conal Cochran (Dan O’Herlihy) that’s capitalizing on the Western celebration of trick ‘r’ treating by mass-producing a line of vinyl Halloween masks (a witch, a skull, and a jack-o-lantern). These masks have captivated the nation’s children, and there’s something deeply sinister about them. Even more unsettling is Silver Shamrock’s tie-in TV jingle set to the tune of “London Bridge Is Falling Down” that hypnotically counts down the days ’til Halloween night. Eventually, via an unlikely protagonist (Tom Atkins at his B-movie best as the alcoholic Dr. Dan Challis), we discover that the masks, fitted with microchips, are the instruments of an evil pagan plot to sacrifice children on Samhain. At one point, when subjected to a Silver Shamrock broadcast, a masked child’s face melts into a horrible, writhing pile of bugs and venomous snakes. (Oh, and there are androids.)
Halloween III’s handling of all the Samhain shit that would go on to mar Michael Myers’ return in entries four through six is commendable and economical. It’s a bold first swing at something utterly removed from the expectations set by Halloween and Halloween II. Though most audiences and critics alike did not understand the movie in 1982, resulting in a Halloween property finally falling victim to a Jason film (Friday the 13th Part III) in box office returns, it would in time become revered in horror circles as a goblin-mode contribution to the genre’s heyday.
David Gordon Green knows this, and loves the film himself. In Halloween Kills, he decks out three Haddonfield trick-r-treater characters in Silver Shamrock masks. That’s fine! But in Halloween Ends, he is positively trigger-happy.
To fancy oneself the author of a new mold of Season of the Witch is suspect enough, but to weaponize this important film’s legacy as a cue to get theatergoers thinking we’ve got a “misunderstood masterpiece” on our hands that will all but certainly experience a cultural renaissance is more than a little cynical. While from a marketing standpoint it’s arguably brilliant, if I’m being honest, it’s some IRL Silver Shamrock shit (still soulless, just with lower stakes).
Green’s biggest miss in channeling the original Halloween III is that he’s done it in a Michael Myers film—and not just any old Michael Myers film, but the supposed last one. As a result, The Shape is an afterthought by his own last bow, and all for what? Fan service of the cheekiest order, in a movie that’s nowhere near as fun as its spiritual reference point. I draw a heavy sigh.
For MovieMaker last week, Green revealed:
There was an ending I wrote, that we never filmed, and it takes place at [the] Silver Shamrock factory as it was spitting out witch, skeleton, and jack-o-lanterns masks… and then it started spitting out Michael Myers masks. I had a temptation to go there, but at the end of the day, I thought that’s just fan service for people who know what Silver Shamrock is. It was in every draft of the script ever published [Laughs.] but we never filmed it.
Hot take:
I really wished John Carpenter's anthology idea had worked out. The series was never the same once they brought back Michael Myers, 35 years ago. I mean Halloween 4 was okay, but everything after that was crap, starting with Halloween 5, the worst one! Sure, H20 and H2018 were at least watchable, but there was really no reason to bring back Michael Myers after H2 in 1981! Maybe the whole H20 reunion still could have worked in 1998 (not to mention H20 already ignores 4-6, so them not existing in the first place would've made more sesne). All you just had to do was change the ending to Micheal actually getting his head chopped off and none of the paramedic BS from Resurrection.
Imagine how different the series could've turned out (and possibly better) had they completely dropped the Michael Myers character and only focused on different stories, set around Halloween? It's all because of the hate that H3 got; we got more Myers films and they just got worse and worse, and were seen as nothing more than just quick cashgrabs!
Great read. I’ve always avoided the Halloween sequels (aside from Season of the Witch). Probably the right move!