Film Review - Halloween Ends
Images courtesy of Universal Pictures.
David Gordon Green has finally finished his Halloween trilogy, a three-piece tribute to John Carpenter’s original 1978 classic that defined the slasher genre. First the slick 2018 reboot-sequel that brought an elderly Michael into the modern day, mostly a fun slasher movie in it’s own right, working as an update of the original film, a tale of the legacy that grief can carry over through generations, and a slight meta-comment on the state of slashers at the time. Then two further sequels were shot back-to-back. Delayed by the pandemic but still hyped up like the horror equivalent to the third and fourth Avengers films. Halloween Kills, whilst being a fairly good commentary on overbearing mob mentality, still ended up a messy disappointment, with unbearably stupid characters (even by slasher standards) and underdeveloped drama that relied too heavily on nostalgia for the ‘78 film.
Halloween Ends concludes this trilogy on a high note, with much more confident direction than the previous film, and the bold cinematography of a 70’s slasher but with that same modern sheen, smooth camera movement, and stark, moody lighting. Whilst being much more focused on story and characters, it never loses sight of its purpose as a slasher film, and delivers not only creative kills, but also gives them a more concrete narrative purpose instead of being a random civilian bloodbath. This final chapter takes the story into somewhat darker territory, with the consequences of the events of Halloween turning Haddonfield into a suspicious town, looking for any excuse to turn on each other, and to find a new scapegoat to fill the hole they dug while hunting Michael Myers.
~~~SPOILERS AHEAD~~~
Instead of immediately following the ambiguous cliffhanger ending of the previous film, Halloween Ends opens with a seemingly innocuous prelude exactly one year later, in Halloween 2019, introducing us to a new character, Corey Cunningham, as he accidentally kills the young boy he was babysitting. After the most creative opening title sequence of the entire franchise, we move forward three years into 2022, where fear and paranoia have consumed the town of Haddonfield since Michael’s return and his following unexplained disappearance. As Laurie is writing her memoir about the events she bookends the film with bored-sounding expository narration.
Corey’s accident still haunts him, he’s become an outcast since the people of Haddonfield view him as a child murderer. But after a chance encounter with Laurie Strode, Corey finds a new friend in Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson, kicking off a young romance that takes up a significant portion of the first half of the film. Corey becoming a new central protagonist in the tail-end of a trilogy is a very interesting choice, and likely to be the most divisive part of this film for some fans as he’s very much a new dynamic shift from the previous films, being the first protagonist not directly related to Laurie Strode, nor the previous Haddonfield killings. We spend so much time following Corey and his turbulent relationship with Allyson, but it’s a very welcome change to the underdeveloped mob of cardboard cutouts that swarmed Haddonfield in the previous film.
As the violence and mistrust towards Corey reaches a tipping point, as he goes on a downward spiral of further violence, spearheaded by the inevitable return of Michael Myers. He finds Michael in an abandoned sewer, but instead of immediately murdering Corey, Michael lets him go, seeing himself in young Corey’s eyes. Corey begins to team up with Michael, almost as an apprentice to the masked serial killer, eventually donning his own mask. There’s a slight comedic tinge to Corey becoming Michael Jr., and a gleeful brutality in the graphic dispatching of those who wronged him, two most notable kills involve the use of a blowtorch on a face, and a victim’s severed tongue skipping over a vinyl record. Yet those fleeting moments of fun are soon washed away in the sad realisation of what Corey has become, or rather what Haddonfield may have turned him into.
The long-awaited final fight between Michael and Laurie is a cathartic, bloody battle, in true slasher fashion. Yet, it turns into an almost tender putting-down of a rabid animal once Laurie finally kills her Boogeyman. What follows is a very odd scene of parading Michael’s corpse through town, and as Laurie pushes his body into a car crusher, mulching him into a gory mess, it becomes a eulogy for the franchise as a whole, that Michael cannot come back from this, no cliffhangers, no sequel hooks, a surprising sense of finality to this entire 44 year old franchise.
Follow Nick on Twitter and Letterboxd.
Halloween Ends is screening in cinemas from Thursday October 13th. For tickets and more info, click here.