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. Traditionalists will find it. HalloweenYou will not enjoy the experience of watching the Shape make mincemeat of people he encounters. 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 is Deadwhere it was hidden in the Easter eggs and murders. However, here the pace is also uneven. This is a difference from Kills began right where 2018’s Halloween concluded, Halloween endsOne year later, he begins another time jump. The mythology becomes confusing from there. Still, there’s something to be said for how viewers are kept on our toes until the very end. It’s been 40 years since the original franchise was founded and there have been many sequels. Halloween ends isn’t boring is nothing to sniff at.
Halloween endsStarts with another babysitter.
It’s Halloween 2019, and Michael Myers was never found after the events of the first two movies. Everyone in Haddonfield has a nervous breakdown. Corey Campbell, the babysitter, is understandably nervous when he is locked up in a room with his bratty charges. He then pushes his little brother a little. You can alsoThe child presses hard on the escape door and flies to his death.
Laurie protected her charges from Michael by setting up Corey as a diametrically opposite to Laurie. This was up until now. 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 confusing message from this franchise?) Mob justice can sometimes be quite good!
A new time jump thrusts Corey into the present, where his life — to be frank — sucks. He works in a garage/dumpster. 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 could be the 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 takes Corey to Allyson’s Hospital to get him checked 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 endsIt is often second or third chance.
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 hand, there is Allyson and Corey. They seem to be heading down a darker and more destructive road. You can see their motorcycle riding!
However, there are some wild swings with tonal shifting. 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. Kyle Richards is Lindsey. He was the original actor. HalloweenNow she is a Real Housewife! OK, sure.) But Curtis believes it and sells it. We love Curtis for that! Her chaotically healing trauma queen is an icon for all crones.
Honestly, it’s Green’s filmmaking 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 WashingtonAs well as broad stoner comedy Pineapple Express. There are also the cable shows that McBride concocts together with admirably batshit. Eastbound and Down, Vice Principals, The Righteous Gemstones. Green brings the same level of craftsmanship and a slightly off-kilter sense to all his projects, regardless of how obscure or large the IP. Green’s work is at best a testament to his ability to think outside the box. HalloweenTrilogy cannot be accused not to take 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 HalloweenIn 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.
It was then that the HalloweenFranchise was such a frightening experience that we were able to hang our own meanings on clothes on a hanger. Laurie Strode’s resilience and Curtis’s pontificating about her plight were not yet a thing of morning TV-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 is a joy in the chaos of finding the meaning for ourselves.
Although this iteration of franchise takes itself too seriously, I feel a little protective of it and its 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 reminds us of the ending to Texas Chainsaw MassacreWhen Sally’s screams turn to hysterical laughterAs she leaves Leatherface, in the dust. This also serves to illustrate epigenetic trauma which is a major theme of the trilogy. And who better than Jamie Lee Curtis — daughter of Psycho’s Janet LeighTony Curtis, who was afflicted with Addiction — to speak out about the intergenerational traumas of Hollywood? Who could 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 continues to be a powerful Final Girls. Allyson ends the cycle of living and death in Haddonfield. And Michael Myers is dead and buried, as advertised, and he’s not coming back.
At least, until John Carpenter’s next opportunity to be approached by a young filmmaker with a great idea. And hey, I’ll probably go see that Halloween too. You will too.
Halloween endsOngoing in theaters and streams Peacock Oct. 14.
