Warning: The following contains spoilers for Halloween Ends
Halloween ends Director David Gordon Green explains the film’s one big change from another H40 trilogy movies. Green brought Michael Myers and Halloween back from the dead (again) with his franchise reboot in 2018. Then in 2021 the writer-director launched the bloody second installment of a new trilogy featuring Halloween kills.
And now Green has – presumably – the so-called H40 trilogy with the just released Halloween ends. As expected, the film provides a final showdown between the ruthless Myers and his nemesis Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). Unexpectedly, the film also focuses heavily on a new character, Rohan Campbell’s Corey Cunningham. Halloween ends he indeed wastes no time dropping Corey in the deep end, taking him through a hellish trauma in the cold, and later showing how his bullying at the hands of other Haddonfield residents pushes him right into Myers’ arms.
It may come as no surprise that the decision to focus so heavily on an entirely new character that pushed Laurie Strode into the background for much of the film has been divided. Halloween ends audience. But director Green assures there was a solid reason behind the decision to focus on Corey and his strange murder internship under Michael Myers. View Green’s comments on EW in the space below:
I wanted to get a new perspective on Michael Myers and Laurie Strode and the family, and I wanted to bring in a new central character to be a pivotal exploration of those characters and the city. We’d seen a stalker’s story and we’d seen a lot of the ways the trauma affected Laurie Strode, but I really wanted to see how that affected the city. … Bringing in a new character from Corey Cunningham, and discovering his own immediate trauma in our cold open air first, and then how that affects him, and then how an encounter with our already established evil could become some sort of contagious thing. It is an examination of the contagiousness of these negative entities in our lives. If left unchecked, they will spread. If we can wrap ourselves around them and be our own hero, then we might have a chance to fight.”
What Halloween’s Change Means For The Future Of The Franchise
Green clearly had specific themes in mind that he wanted to explore Halloween ends, and believed that Corey’s character allowed him to dive into it more effectively. But Corey’s arrival also means something different when it comes to the long-term future of the Halloween franchise: the chance to hand over the mantle of The Shape to a new character. Indeed, in many ways Halloween ends centers on the creation of a killer who charts Corey’s descent from decent person to full-blown homicidal maniac, through a combination of bad luck, psychological torment, and the malevolent influence of Myers. This confirms the idea that the evil Myers carries within can be passed on to another character and continue even if Myers himself is thoroughly destroyed.
It’s significant, of course, that Myers’ evil has a chance to outlive his physical form, like Halloween ends climax with Strode and her granddaughter Allyson defeating the killer, and Myers’ body is chopped into mulch by a car-crushing machine. Also important, though, is the fact that the new vessel of Myers’ evil, Corey, also seems to be dying at Myers’ own hands. But the history of the Halloween franchise is full of unlikely resurrections, and it’s not out of the question that Corey could be brought back after his neck is broken to put on Myers’ mask and kill and kill again. The title Halloween ends can promise that this was the last chapter, but as John Carpenter himself recently warned, the franchise will not really end until it is no longer profitable. It is therefore quite possible that the “last” Halloween movie is really just a set up for a new beginning, starring a new killer with an alliterative name.
Source: EW
