**Warning: this essay is primarily intended for readers who have already seen Halloween Ends. As such, this will be heavy on spoilers for Halloween Ends as well as several other Halloween films besides**

            In the summer of 1998, when I was thirteen years old, I saw my first Halloween film in theaters. Halloween H20: Twenty Years Later was hailed by its own marketing as a glorious return to form on the back of Jamie Lee Curtis’s resurrection of Laurie Strode alone, to say nothing of retconning the arguably-crappy sequels before it in a well-intended attempt to simplify the franchise and bring it back to its roots. While I’ll gladly argue that the two-part showdown between Curtis’s Laurie Strode and the infamous boogeyman Michael Myers (or The Shape, as he is known among fans with that deep a knowledge of such things) stands tall on its own merits, the rest of the film suffered greatly from cheap and obvious nostalgia cash-ins combined with the era’s Scream-inspired cynicism. I was learning quickly then that such unplanned and box office dependent franchises (as opposed to, say, Star Wars) were almost always going to fall victim to studio interference, poor continuity building, and a deep-seated will to appeal to zeitgeists and superficial audience expectations. Substantial ideas for stories, thoughtful dwelling on character motivations, and explorations of themes were not elements to hold out much hope for in these kinds of media releases. I mentally cut my losses while watching the movie and enjoyed it for what I could, all the way up to (spoiler alert) the decapitation of Michael at the end of the film. This exclamation-point of a violent ending was at once awesome in its seeming victory for Jamie Lee/Laurie and at the same time deflating as I immediately realized that, in order for the franchise to continue (as such things must), the next installment would have to explain that it wasn’t actually Michael beneath the mask in that scene. And, unfortunately, I was absolutely right.

            I call H20’s attempt to simplify the franchise well-intentioned because, at its heart, the idea was on the right track in terms of general course-correction. One of the biggest reasons the 1978 original Halloween – directed by John Carpenter from a script by himself and producer Debra Hill – worked as well as it did was its inherent simplicity: a dangerous mental patient who has sat quiet for the last fifteen years since murdering his teenage sister returns to his hometown to stalk similar teenage girls/babysitters on Halloween night. It’s about as straight-forward a premise as you can get, a premise the writing team of Carpenter & Hill used to great effect. The face-value simplicity of Haddonfield’s small town environment coupled with the modern consumeristic celebration of the title holiday touched on dark themes and the subtle, uncomfortable truths lurking just beneath the surface of Good Ol’ Fashioned Americana. But read a single interview with either writer or watch any documentary about the film’s production, and it quickly becomes apparent that the writing of the film began from an even simpler place than the finished product makes evident. Carpenter, Hill, and movie mogul Moustapha Akkad all had their own ideas for a low-budget, thrown-together-from-scratch horror flick that could make all parties involved some quick cash and accelerate their collective careers. Working together to that shared end created a strange alchemy of concepts that led to Halloween as a final product.

All of it adds up to the fact that many of the themes and concepts We-The-Audience have since attributed to the original film were less intentional nods from the filmmakers and more accidents of creative providence. Michael kills his older sister Judith when he is six-years-old in 1963 because the math simply worked out that way based on how old the writers wanted him to be in the present (twenty-one years old in 1978) versus how old they wanted him to be when he committed the act. The timing also served as a cute trick-reference by having Michael’s first murder take place the same year that Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho released, itself a major template and source of homage for Halloween on top of the starring turn from Jamie Lee Curtis’s mother, Janet Leigh. But much has been written since ‘78 about the fact that Michael suddenly turned from a normal young boy into a stone cold, silent murderer less than a month before the Kennedy assassination, an event largely credited with the end of America’s postwar age of innocence. One can add to that 1978 is a year positioned roughly between America getting over its post-Vietnam woes and beginning to enter the Reagan era of forever reaching for a bygone suburban-American perfection that never truly existed in the first place. Michael’s homecoming romp of murder through a small town American vista – largely unnoticed beneath the costumes and trick-or-treat traditions of the holiday – can be read on several levels as a treatise on the darkness that not only exists on America’s streets and within its homes, but that most ordinary Americans deliberately ignore. No evidence really exists that Carpenter or Hill deliberately positioned Michael’s sororicide in Halloween of ’63 or his comeback on Halloween of ‘78 to facilitate such lofty thematic purposes, but these are far from the only examples of such coincidences and alignments of characters, environments, and American historical context within the film that make the sum of its parts worth far more than what the filmmakers initially intended.

            It is that accidental substance, that naturally-occurring value of story that Halloween both sprang from and itself delivered that makes the cookie-cutter approaches to every subsequent installment for the following four decades so depressing. Halloween’s unanticipated success created an obvious potential for more profits to be made, a potential that was immediately recognized – and seized upon – by a wide swath of Hollywood producers. This led to a vast overflow of imitators and hollow, schlocky slasher flicks trying way too hard to ride Halloween’s coattails (Friday the 13^th comes to mind as the most obvious example), delivering all of the surface window dressing of Halloween with none of the substance. This windfall of profiteering imitators revitalized the slasher sub-genre of horror, which then circled back and caused the Halloween franchise to fall victim to its own glamor, churning out lackluster sequel after lackluster sequel that increasingly had more to do with Halloween’s imitators than the original film itself. After the first sequel, it didn’t take long for Jamie Lee Curtis to declare she was done with the franchise, a decision that stuck for seventeen years. H20 was largely considered the one shining light of a decent sequel largely due to Curtis’s presence alone, and even then it was derided as a mere shadow of the original (a sentiment I have to agree with, despite my personal fondness for the film). Discussions among fans about what went wrong and continued to go wrong with the franchise (discussions I was present for as I grew up within and alongside the nascent internet) usually cited a lack of respect for the substance, subtle mystery, and amorphous themes that made the original film work so well and in such a straight-forward fashion. The general consensus was that the money-makers churned out whatever superficial blood-and-gore garbage they thought audiences wanted instead of taking the time to hire filmmakers with legitimate vision for story and heartfelt respect for the Carpenter & Hill original material.

            And then, at last…

Along came David Gordon Green and Danny McBride, portraying exactly the aforementioned legitimate and invested filmmakers, fans themselves who understood the value of the original material down to its core. Together, they implemented 2018’s Halloween, a follow-up that completely ignored every film in the franchise save the original (though eagle-eyed fans have spotted more than a few easter egg references to the since wiped-out sequels), with plans in place for two follow ups if the first was successful. Say what you will about the 40-Years-Later trilogy and each installment’s inherent flaws (and they do exist; not one of those films is perfect by any means), but these guys got it. They got the most important points of Michael and Laurie and, even more importantly, the entire town of Haddonfield (we’ll come back to this in detail later). They understood these elements so well that not only Jamie Lee Curtis, but John Carpenter himself – long divorced from the franchise due primarily to the money-making practices discussed previously – returned to the fold to lend their welcome hands to sequel quality control. Even as a pretty die hard Halloween fan in my teen years, I never quite got to the point of bowing at the altar of John Carpenter as the all-time infallible God of Horror Cinema that most of my fellow Halloween fans seemed to. That said, even I had to concede that Green and McBride clearly understood some key elements to the original enterprise if they convinced Carpenter to come back to the project following nearly four decades of largely self-imposed exile.

            Which leads me to Halloween Ends, the last chapter of the Green & McBride trilogy that holds far, far more merit as a film and a Halloween installment than most of the current reviews would have you believe. And I make that statement not from an entitled fanboy I’m-right-and-everyone-else-is-wrong standpoint. I say it because, thus far, most of the negative reviews I have read make clear that the reviewers simply aren’t getting it.

            If there’s one thing wrong with the whole picture that one can lay at the feet of the filmmakers and production, its borderline false advertising. The majority of the film’s plot and trajectory is driven by the brand new character of Corey Cunningham, played by Rohan Campbell, who accidentally kills a young boy in his charge one Halloween night and, after a few years of town ridicule in the shadow of The Shape’s actions in the previous two films, winds up drawn into both Laurie Strode and Michael’s circles. Much of the film revolves around Corey both learning the ways of evil directly from Michael – whom he finds lurking within the Haddonfield sewers beneath an overpass – and dating Allyson (played by Andi Matichak), Laurie’s granddaughter and survivor of Michael’s last rampage; this dichotomy of character and the choices that lead Corey down a very Michael-like path are not only explored in detail for Corey’s sake, but are heavily reflected in just about every other Haddonfield resident that takes up character scenery in the film. It’s an extremely interesting direction to take the story (especially as it winds down to the finale the title implies) and it can be argued that the nature of the preceding film, Halloween Kills, almost telegraphed the fact that we would spend this movie ruminating over the deeper, more personal effects such cycles of violence and trauma have on Haddonfield residents beyond Laurie Strode & Friends. And in every single trailer, TV spot, and online advertisement, none of this was even hinted at. The one time you see Corey (maskless, at least) in any of those ads, one would assume he’s a soon-to-be-easily-forgotten victim of Michael returning from his recuperation in the Haddonfield sewers. Not only were audiences given no marketed indication of the character’s presence or importance in the film, but every ad revolved around Michael vs. Laurie Round III.

            Personally, I don’t think for a second that the marketing team meant any ill will with this; if anything, they likely wanted to avoid giving away the story too soon, on top of wanting to center the ad campaign around what audiences were most likely to get excited about. This is understandable, and such business decisions around creative properties are always tricky, but it clearly backfired in luring audiences to feel the movie was primarily going to be another Michael Myers bloodbath leading up to an epic final showdown with his most prominent onscreen nemesis. It’s a small wonder then that viewers went in with high horror expectations and were quickly let down when they realized they were getting a thoughtful and very slowly building exploration of one character’s descent into evil and how it drives the conclusion of a long running story he literally just entered.

            So that’s the major fairness point I have to give the film’s detractors; on that particular end, I completely understand how people’s expectations and hopes were dashed. That said, I fully expect this film to go the way of another John Carpenter classic, The Thing, a film likewise derided and completely under-appreciated when it released, but destined to be reexamined and more fully valued with repeat viewings and the passage of time (to say nothing of, in Halloween Ends’s case, being viewed as the concluding chapter of a four-part horror epic). Some films live like the original Halloween: a near blank slate of open themes that can have yet greater significance very easily read into them, like the creepiness and rage we all read into Michael’s pale, expressionless mask. At the other end of the spectrum live films like Halloween Ends: films that dive so deep into themes, concepts and character substance that the audience is not nearly ready to properly receive and absorb them, like the disturbing truths we all claim to want to see behind Michael’s mask and yet can’t quite catch a glimpse of. It also says something about the times we live in, where our deliberate ignorance of the true evils among us coupled with our adverse reactions to those we wrongly perceive as evil lead directly to the traumas and horrible tragedies we claim to want to avoid, bringing us full circle to one of the key themes of the original film (think serial killers living amongst us in the seventies and on to mass shooters today). The circular nature of these issues is exactly what Halloween Ends attacks, particularly in its display of an entire town full of people that consistently find their own unique and terrible ways to deal with and address the horrors of their community the wrong way.

            Taken as a quadrilogy (is that the right term?), this is where the complete set of films really feeds off of one another and lends greater meaning to the individual installments. Read this way, the original film seems even more simplistic and even quaint on the surface: made and taking place in a far simpler time compared to our present and offering zero explanation for Michael’s urge to kill and how or why he picks his targets. Viewers make obvious inferences about the similarities between Michael’s base targets and his first victim, his promiscuous teenage sister, but even then we’re left with the question of why he killed Judith Myers in the first place, especially at such a tender age. I went into this film expecting some sort of investigation (if not direct explanation) of Michael’s motives via Laurie or Allyson or both combing through records and searching around Haddonfield for more details of Michael’s life prior to Judith’s murder. I partially expected this due to the excellent flashbacks to 1978 in Halloween Kills, given their commentary around Michael as a young boy and all the time spent in the Myers house. But it also just made the most sense to me, because how better to round out the franchise story and bring a true ending to the whole thing than really giving audiences something more detailed to chew on regarding Michael’s origins? I neither expected nor really wanted detailed, concrete explanations for Michael’s motives or what made him “snap” or whether or not he truly is supernatural, but the nature of the preceding two films led me to believe that we would get much more evidence and detail from which to draw more substantial conclusions.

            Well, I was wrong…but also kind of right.

            Here’s why Corey Cunningham’s story in Halloween Ends works so perfectly for the conclusion of this saga: it basically does explain how and why Michael is. No, it doesn’t cement whether Michael is supernatural or just that batshit crazy. No, it doesn’t tell you the exact moment Michael turned evil/psycho. No, it doesn’t spell out why Michael killed Judith and subsequently pursued primarily other teenage babysitters. But it does show how someone like him comes to be, which is all the explanation we really need for a plethora of reasons (reasons which would require a whole other essay to delve into). Suffice it say, we needed some explanation of Michael’s madness in order for this film to actually serve its role as the franchise’s conclusion (or this iteration of it, anyway), but Michael also works best as the villain and driving force of these films the less we actually know about him with any certainty. Corey’s story served to give us a form of character interaction with Michael we had never seen before (would you call Corey an apprentice to Michael? A partner?) while also showing us how such a monster as Michael is created via parallels. Corey accidentally killed someone as opposed to Michael’s deliberate murder of his sister, but the initial death of someone who shouldn’t have died in the eyes of the community leads to a dark mythology taking shape (if you’ll excuse the pun) around both boys, complete with mythological trappings. The Halloween franchise has always played around with grounded, modern versions of classical horror/fairy tale scenarios and settings: the Myers House is a modern day haunted house; Laurie’s compound in the 2018 film becomes Grandma’s House In The Woods with Michael’s Big Bad Wolf banging on the door; even Michael’s trappings in the Haddonfield sewer at the beginning of this film turns him into the proverbial Troll Under The Bridge. And the mythology doesn’t let up, giving Corey a haunted house of his own in the abandoned mansion where he accidentally made his first kill, all the way up to him sleeping atop the blood-stain left by the little boy who died. The tragic mythology winds up becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy for Corey just as it likely did for Michael, if in no other way than by the observations of his doctor Sam Loomis, played to such understated and melancholy effect by the late Donald Pleasance in the ’78 film.

Characters around Corey – and even Corey himself – spend much of the film questioning whether this particular brand of evil was always in him or if it infected him and took root with the treatment he received from the culture around him. This is further argued on a couple of different levels: the initial friendship between Corey and Laurie that is later antagonized when Laurie identifies Myers-brand evil sprouting up in the kid now dating her granddaughter; the uncertain analysis of Corey by the father of the boy who died under Corey’s care; the attempts of some citizens of Haddonfield to move on with their lives in the face of their tragedies versus the accusations and hostility of other Haddonfield citizens who take every opportunity to vent their pain and rage on whomever they can blame for it. And it doesn’t stop at Corey, either: Laurie herself spends much of the movie accused by those who cross her path as being nearly as bad as Myers himself insofar as she “tempted and provoked” him into returning to Haddonfield to murder again. Through this lens, it becomes apparent that all of these films – up to and including the original, if only in a very subtle sense – are wrestling with the concept of responsibility, culminating in Halloween Ends concluding the saga by finally asking the big question outright: who is truly to blame for evil? Is it the perpetrator that chooses to kill? Was it always in the perpetrator’s nature to kill and cause tragedy, or was it something put in them by outside forces? If the latter is the case, do we then sympathize with the perpetrator and subsequently blame the community for, in effect, creating them?

            The good news is, Halloween Ends does deliver its own answers to this line of questioning, provided viewers can quit bitching about the lack of violence and jump scares long enough to dig in and catch them. And the answers basically amount to this: evil sprouting from any community is essentially the entire community’s fault, but assigning that blame only matters when you catch it in time to prevent it because once evil is pure, active and present, it must be killed. By that point, it doesn’t matter anymore who’s fault it is.

            This interestingly and significantly tracks with the trajectory of these Halloween films overall: just as the original film was far more timely and prescient in its ideas than the creators necessarily meant it to be, 2018’s Halloween – itself hailed as a strong analysis of traumatized women fighting back against their male predators – was halfway into its own development when the #metoo movement began catching on in social media. Likewise Halloween Kills had a final script and was about to begin filming its own story dealing with mob violence and the panicked, chaotic reactions of a microcosm of American society when the January 6 riots occurred on Capitol Hill. And now, Halloween Ends organically capitalizes on the entire throughline of the franchise to cut to the heart of the matter: the struggle of Americans to determine who deserves blame for our tragedies when we should be dealing with evil on its own terms as it arises, and in the meantime put our energy into preventing the creation of such evils by simply striving to treat one another with decency. One of the most interesting aspects of watching Halloween Ends is our relationship with the characters in the film as an audience; We-The-Audience can see the evil that is growing in Corey, who was (and, for the first half of the film, still is) otherwise a good kid. We watch as the citizens of Haddonfield accost and bully and provoke Corey throughout the film, and we shake our heads as we watch the inevitable unfold, whispering to the viewers next to us that so-and-so is making it worse and so-and-so is asking for it and we are so amused by the surprise of said citizens when Corey inevitably goes full-Shape on them before Laurie finally takes him down. And speaking of Laurie, even she is not innocent in this. In one of the best character scenes of the film, Laurie takes her best opportunity to help Corey correct his own course and poisons it with her own personal concerns by declaring Allyson – Corey’s one anchor to goodness at this point in the story – as off-limits. In this, the film pulls no punches: the tragedy of Corey Cunningham really is everyone’s fault, up to and including the franchise’s hero.

            But everyone’s fault includes the killer. Again, the film ultimately culminates in making clear that once the evil in question is present and taking lives, who cares who’s fault it is? Who cares what provoked it or where it came from? Who cares whether said evil is supernatural or psychological? The last lines of the original film say it all: when Laurie, still shaking from Michael’s last attack, tells Dr. Loomis “It was the boogeyman,” Loomis responds “As a matter of fact, it was.” Loomis is a psychiatrist, a man of medicine and science, the last kind of person in this world given to believing in demons and spirits and superstition. But he recognized evil in Michael right from the start, did what he could to prevent its growth, and when he realized it was too far gone, made moves to contain it and ultimately kill it. Insofar as we were able to see in the original film, Loomis never attempted to determine or even care whether Michael’s evil and seeming immortality was due to supernatural entities or just him being so psychotic that he ceased to feel pain. Loomis didn’t care because he knew evil that pure was beyond mankind’s understanding, whether supernatural or otherwise. Personally, I feel the climax of Halloween Kills makes clear that Michael is likely supernatural, and Halloween Ends only reinforces this point in my mind with Michael’s seeming psychic link to Corey when they first meet and the manner in which both Michael and Corey seem to draw strength and subtle rejuvenation from their kills. On the other hand, the film also reinforces the point that dwelling on this question amounts to wasting time on the wrong concern.

            Halloween Ends has its cake and eats it, too, in this sense. We are both given glimpses of the true root causes of evil as well as a detailing of what Loomis understood when he defended Laurie in 1978; it is something she herself comes to understand by the time she finally slays Michael on her kitchen counter here in 2022. Evil is everyone’s responsibility, from the perpetrator to the community that encouraged said perpetrator’s growth. But perpetrators do make a decision to be and remain perpetrators, at which point it is no longer the community’s responsibility to empathize or understand; to paraphrase Officer Hawkins in 2018’s Halloween, once a killer crosses the final line, the community has only one order of business. It’s a business that Laurie has to come to terms with herself before she can finally be rid of the evil she has lived with most of her life.

            Of course, such themes and concepts will be sneered at in the current media climate. The masses say they just want to be entertained, there’s enough politics and cultural problems to deal with in the news every day, and can we please just have movies that give us a good time at the theater and leave it at that? We came here to see Michael Myers cut some people up in scary fashion and to watch him have one last big battle against Jamie Lee Curtis before she gets too old to do it anymore, not to bore ourselves with some think piece on American social trauma.

            Fair enough, and this is where I have to concede that the film is not perfect by any means. Through all three films in the modern trilogy, the message-delivery and politics-of-the-time exploration has been handled with pretty heavy-handed moments throughout, and the flaws don’t stop there. For one thing, from a franchise standpoint, Corey probably should’ve been introduced far earlier in order for viewers to build some attachment to him. If nothing else, had he at least been around and been shown to have already known Allyson during the previous two films (which…small town; it’s not like it would’ve been a stretch), their whirlwind, less-than-a-week infatuation with one another would have sold far easier. This was likely a result of the filmmakers being forced to recalibrate their plans for the final installment due to the COVID pandemic, but at the very least, explaining that Allyson and Corey already knew one another to some degree beforehand would’ve smoothed the believability of their relationship over some. The film would have also benefitted a bit more from a deeper exploration of Laurie’s struggle with her own girl-scout-grandma façade. I personally got that her 180 degree turn from the Sarah Connor-figure she was in the previous two films into a gray-haired version of the girl-next-door sweetheart she was prior to Michael’s ’78 killing spree was a deliberate choice on her part in order to be there for her granddaughter and numb the pain of failing to protect her own daughter; I just don’t know that the film did the best job of making that clear to everyone. As much as Halloween films trade in mystery and ambiguity, there are some things that really should be clarified beyond a doubt.

            Personally, my biggest complaint was the lack of Michael himself. Unlike most reviewers I’ve read, once I realized where the story of the film was going, I was fine with the slow and steady build-up of tension around Corey and what that respectively meant for Michael’s limited role in the proceedings. This was never going to be a film about Michael butcher-knifing his way through hordes of terrified Haddonfielders again, misguided marketing be damned. And, honestly: did we really want that? Did we? Because it occurs to me that Halloweens II through Resurrection gave us exactly that: more of the same surface bullshit with a few cheesy and uninspired character twists. The somewhat-steady presences of Donald Pleasance and Jamie Lee Curtis wound up the few saving graces peppered throughout (the only Halloween films I have not yet watched are the Rob Zombie remakes, and I’m told by everyone I ask that I’m not missing much). I don’t know if this was the intention or not, but it occurs to me that Halloween Kills gave us buckets of blood and gore, loads of pretty twisted and agonizing kills, and the highest body count of any Halloween film to date (and by a pretty wide margin) to sate precisely that thirst for slasher-flick carnage so that this film could round out the franchise with a more intimate and atmospheric character tale harkening back to the original. And even with all that, the same people complaining that this movie is too tame and light on Michael’s presence were complaining a year ago that Halloween Kills was too over-the-top with its violence and political focuses. Such people are never happy and were never going to be pleased, but I also think there’s something to be said for knowing your audience and giving in to the desires just a little bit; it can be done without sacrificing the story you want to tell. Michael easily could have been shown racking up an extra kill or two on the side, away from Corey, displaying his slow-and-steady return to strength and placating the blood-hounds in the audience. More to the point, the final fight with Laurie would have benefitted from an extra minute or two. There was a degree to which it had to happen the way it did, both in terms of the franchise and the story this individual film was telling. But given Michael’s large absence through most of the film and audiences knowing this was ultimately building up to THAT fight, the shortness of the battle itself was again a place that the filmmakers could’ve given us just a little extra sugar on the spoon without hurting the overall story.

            But you know what? NONE of the Halloween films are perfect. Not even the original.

Yeah, I said it. Come at me.

            And that’s not necessarily a bad thing. In hindsight, there’s a lot more that could have been done with the original film even just in terms of story and character building, things that wouldn’t have required more money (for the few reading this who don’t know: the original film was made on an extremely shoestring-budget for the time, hence another reason why its massive success was such a big deal). But again, Carpenter & Hill had some cool ideas for characters and themes that they were able to weave together with Akkad’s requests, and that was about as far as they were thinking about it then. So much of what makes that film fantastic is not its classic status or its perceived perfection among horror fans; it’s the fact that it struck particular chords with audiences just by being so simple and open-ended and organic. You don’t get that effect by producing a top-to-bottom perfect piece of work. Like human beings, it needs to be thrown together and experimented with and ripped apart and reassembled to learn lessons, by which point mistakes have been made and there’s a few things that just don’t work that great, but the sum of the parts is pretty awesome. Halloween Ends was just as imperfect, but its imperfections lie in the execution of a story that serves as a near perfect conclusion to a story nearly four and a half decades in the making. I got what I wanted to see in ways I didn’t quite expect, which means the film surprised me. When all is said and done, it’s exactly what you want in a horror film.

            Now let’s what shape the inevitable reboot takes.