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I wrote in my review of the 2018 reboot of “Halloween” that the team behind the film didn’t “really understand what made the first film a masterpiece.” Not to be that guy, but if the cluttered “ Halloween Kills ” didn’t prove me right then the baffling “Halloween Ends” certainly does. What’s so bizarre about this truly strange sequel is that it's easy to admire its wide swings at doing something different with a trilogy closer, but Green and his team can’t figure out how to wed their undeniable ambition to something that’s coherent. Much like the criticism of the notoriously divisive “Halloween 3: Season of the Witch”—and some of the structure is intentionally a nod to that diversion from the Michael Myers formula—“Halloween Ends” is barely a “Halloween” movie. Rather than directly end what was set up in the previous film, it introduces a new antagonist, and spends way too much time on a half-baked young love story, but it has to come back to Laurie Strode ( Jamie Lee Curtis ), even if the final showdown has been drained of any sense of urgency by the convoluted route these films took to get there. It also doesn’t help that we all know that the title of this film is a lie. There will be another “Halloween” movie somewhere in the future, which will make this even more of an odd tangent in the history of a horror legend. Although “Halloween Pauses” probably doesn’t sound as exciting.

Rather than pick up after the chaos of the last film that left Judy Greer ’s Karen Nelson dead—a stupid choice that still annoys me—“Halloween Ends” opens in 2019 with a new character named Corey Cunningham (the downright bad Rohan Campbell , poorly directed to a dull performance). He’s babysitting for a kid in Haddonfield who’s a little scared by all the murder around town. When the kid decides to play a prank on Corey, it results in an accident that leaves the little scamp dead, turning Corey into a pariah. Three years later, Laurie is working on her memoir—allowing for way too much voiceover about the nature of evil and all that—and living with her granddaughter Allyson ( Andi Matichak ).

After being bullied by a series of marching band tough guys—which might be a movie first—Corey starts to crack, discovering Michael Myers in a sewer, where the two basically become BFFs, unleashing violence all over Haddonfield. The admittedly ambitious idea seems to be that evil is not just in notorious monsters like Michael Myers but could be unleashed in an average babysitter whose life is ruined by an accident. Corey ends up basically infected by the Myers’ evil, but Allyson can’t see his true depravity, falling more in love with the brooding maniac because, well, it’s a movie. To say the love story between Corey and Allyson is underwritten and unbelievable would be an understatement. It’s just poorly executed in every way.

A shocking amount of “Halloween Ends” is poorly executed with clunkier editing, framing, and writing than the other two films, as if the team were hired to make this one as a contractual requirement and were trying to get through it as quickly as possible. What’s more likely true is that Green and his team had a truly ambitious film idea about the nature of evil and how violent loners can be created by fearful societies ... but they also had to make a “Halloween” movie. It’s the two concepts pushing and pulling against each other that tear this movie apart. What starts promising gets dumb, and Green can’t even manage the art of a quality kill, dispatching some victims here with remarkably forgettable monotony—only a DJ gets a death worth remembering. And we know it's all leading to Laurie vs. Michael, something that had such promise in 2018 but doesn’t have any power left. 

If this is truly the end, it’s a whimper, not a bang.

In theaters and on Peacock today.

Brian Tallerico

Brian Tallerico is the Managing Editor of RogerEbert.com, and also covers television, film, Blu-ray, and video games. He is also a writer for Vulture, The Playlist, The New York Times, and GQ, and the President of the Chicago Film Critics Association.

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Film Credits

Halloween Ends (2022)

Rated R for bloody horror violence and gore, language throughout and some sexual references.

111 minutes

Jamie Lee Curtis as Laurie Strode

Andi Matichak as Allyson Nelson

Will Patton as Frank Hawkins

Kyle Richards as Lindsey Wallace

James Jude Courtney as The Shape

Rohan Campbell as Corey Cunningham

Omar J. Dorsey as Sheriff Barker

• David Gordon Green

Writer (based on characters created by)

• John Carpenter
• Paul Brad Logan
• Chris Bernier
• Danny McBride

Cinematographer

• Michael Simmonds
• Timothy Alverson

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2021’s Halloween Kills was the Infinity War of the contemporary Halloween franchise — an ambitious movie that expanded the scope of its predecessor, but ultimately felt like an incomplete story. But instead of bringing things home with an Endgame equivalent, Halloween Ends plays out more like Game of Thrones season 8: a rushed entry that skips over important character development, kind of just forgets about plot points from the last two movies, and ends up betraying what made this reboot worth watching in the first place. David Gordon Green’s trilogy-capper does feel like a definitive ending to the Halloween series led by Jamie Lee Curtis, but fans might be begging for someone to take another stab at it rather than ending Michael Myers’ reign of terror on such a sour note.

Did you remember that Michael was a kid who stabbed his sister, killed a few babysitters, left one survivor who spent decades preparing for his return, then found himself trapped in her burning house, but somehow survived, and escaped to murder the survivor’s daughter? Green and co-writer Danny McBride, working this time with Paul Brad Logan and Chris Bernier, assume you don’t, as Halloween Ends kicks off with a whole flashback sequence recapping the entire story so far. The trust issues only get worse from there, as the horror movie constantly reminds viewers not just of moments in Halloween history, but of things that literally happened minutes before, and of character relationships that should be obvious by now.

Everything that isn’t bluntly pointed out is swept under the rug. Michael’s slaying of Karen (Judy Greer)? Don’t worry about it. The whole town enacting mob justice against Michael Myers at the end of Halloween Kills , then losing miserably? What matters is everyone’s still scared and paranoid. Instead of resolution, Halloween Ends picks up four years after the events of Kills , with everyone having forgotten about Michael, and the Strodes mostly on the sidelines. Green and his cohorts reframe the action on an unrelated character, Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell). And as for the Shape, he’s been in hiding, until Corey stokes his thirst for blood.

Despite this entire trilogy supposedly riding on the shoulders of Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode and her trauma, Halloween Ends never dives deeper into the trauma’s significance. It has multiple characters, including Laurie’s granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), to guilt Laurie into thinking that somehow Michael’s return was her fault for obsessing over him —despite both the audience, and multiple character witnesses like Allyson herself, knowing otherwise. The tonal shift borders on victim-shaming, and a complete betrayal to what was supposed to be the core of this movie.

Thankfully, Jamie Lee Curtis still shines as Laurie, who we meet here at a different point in her life. Four years after her brutal encounter, Ends finds Laurie writing a memoir, baking pies for Allyson, and flirting with Will Patton’s Deputy Hawkins. After two emotionally heavy performances in the previous two films, it is actually delightful to see Curtis get to flex her comedic muscles for a while, delivering some genuinely funny moments that should add fuel to the fire of her recent comments about wanting to do another Freaky Friday.

Though Halloween Ends seems in a big rush to reach the finish line, it dawdles toward the action one might expect from a Halloween movie. That’s because most of the 111-minute run time is spent on Corey, who becomes a social pariah after a deadly incident one Halloween night and gets strangely obsessed with Michael Myers.

If nothing else, the turn is ambitious. Halloween Kills expanded the scope to the entire town, and Halloween Ends makes some bold choices through Corey’s storyline, as the film explores whether evil is something created by one’s environment or something already within us, unshakable, and just waiting to be unleashed. Halloween Ends continues the thread from Kills of asking whether Michael Myers is a 70-something-year-old mentally ill man or evil incarnate, a supernatural being that heals himself through the act of killing and can almost pass on his essence to others.

Unfortunately, Green doesn’t seem interested in answering the big questions. Nor can he find new ways to enliven Michael Myers, focusing on Corey for most of the run time, and using a vastly different and more angsty tone that belongs in a Kevin Williamson Scream script rather than a Halloween one. He discards the modernized John Carpenter visuals and camera work that became essential to his first Halloween sequel for a less creative or energetic film where the camera barely moves.

There is, of course, an actual confrontation between Laurie and Michael, one that arrives too little too late after an hour of following Corey. There are some cool and gruesome kills, but most of them happen off screen or are purposefully undermined by staging. Where Halloween Kills was a brutal slasher that seemed to place us in the shoes of the Shape, David Gordon Green tries everything he can to subvert the primal origins of the premise. There’s almost a sense of shame hanging over the entire movie.

The Halloween saga started by John Carpenter and Debra Hill in 1978 ends in this film, but the end can’t vindicate the existence of this continuation of the story. Even if 2018’s Halloween set out to explore trauma through horror, there’s nothing in Ends that pays off the probing. The trilogy wasn’t ultimately about how evil takes hold of us and creates havoc through paranoia. This was an ambitious trilogy that tried to take the Halloween franchise to new places, but it ultimately falls short, introducing so many ideas that it quickly abandons, while forgetting about the one thing it was always supposed to be about: Laurie Strode.

Halloween Ends opens in wide theatrical release and simultaneously streams on Peacock on Oct. 14.

Halloween Ends Review

The ends of an era..

Halloween Ends debuts in theaters and on Peacock on Oct. 14. Below is a spoiler-free review. When you're done here, be sure to check out our spoiler-filled Halloween Ends ending explained .

The original Halloween practically invented the trope of the killer rising from his apparent death for one last surprise attack. In that same way, Halloween Ends as a whole feels like one heck of a narrative curveball right before the curtain closes on the franchise as we’ve known it up to this point (well, this time anyway). In opting to jettison all but the original film as canon, director David Gordon Green made an early choice to focus down his Halloween trilogy on the essentials of what made John Carpenter’s classic work, especially on how Michael Myers’ violence represented evil as an elemental force. Halloween Ends furthers Green’s exploration of whether evil and its effects can truly be overcome in ways that are intriguing in their larger implications, but sometimes at odds with its more grounded goal of bringing Laurie Strode’s story to a satisfying close.

If the first two Green Halloween movies explored how trauma affects a family and a community, Ends focuses on how trauma can mutate and form destructive cycles - something the opening credits image of a reincarnating pumpkin announces early on. Halloween Ends’ interrogation of that idea rests largely on the shoulders of new character Cory Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), whose strong introduction sets the stage for a study in how Michael Myers’ legacy has affected Haddonfield’s hopes for the future. A young man with great college prospects, Cory shares a lot in common with Laurie Strode at that age, and Green uses details like him choosing chocolate milk over beer while he’s babysitting to raise interesting questions about his moral compass. A shocking end to Cory’s babysitting gig pushes him further into Laurie’s footsteps, with the whole decaying town treating him as an outcast - he’s even targeted by a roaming gang of dastardly band geeks. Of course, you don’t introduce a roaming gang of dastardly band geeks in a slasher movie without a very bloody end in sight for them, and their increasingly creative demises later on serve as the backbone for one of Halloween Ends’ standout sequences of classical slasher mayhem.

Cory’s inner turmoil and reaction to Michael’s latest activity in Haddonfield provide Ends’ most interesting, if befuddling, character arc and an unexpected lens through which to examine The Shape’s legacy. To this point, Green’s trilogy has used Laurie and the entire population of Haddonfield as a counterpoint to that evil, but in each of those cases, we, the audience, had a lot of prior history with those parties. Bringing all that thematic weight to bear on a single new character this late in the game is a risk that doesn’t entirely pay off. Rohan Campbell gets off to a sympathetic start as Cory, with a boy-next-door charm so pure that the collective cold shoulder his character receives feels almost unrealistic in comparison, but Ends loses its commitment to fleshing out the character near the middle, and so changes in his personality feel less and less motivated. Cory and Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) develop a bond through a mutual sense of unbelonging that’s meant to contextualize his place in the larger morality play, but the more time goes on, the more their connection feels designed to set up the confrontation between Laurie and Michael that Green knows we’re expecting. Matichak gets the short end of the stick here, having to serve as a foil to both Cory and Laurie leaves Allyson without much room of her own in the story.

After spending much of Halloween Kills laid up in a hospital bed, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has a more active role in Ends, which picks up with her coping with everything that’s led to this point in admirable fashion. Now a surrogate mother to the orphaned Allyson, the Laurie who’s flirting at the grocery store with Frank Hawkins (Will Patton) and fumbling around trying not to burn a pie almost feels like a counterpart from a parallel dimension who never encountered Michael Myers. Curtis is just as focused on selling Laurie’s quieter emotional triumphs as she is her latter day ass-kicker persona, and leaves us with a performance that blends both in a testament to how much she reveres the final girl role that put her on the map. But of course, this is the last(?) Halloween movie and so Laurie’s also called on to tangle with that oldest, creepiest dance partner of hers one more time. Green has his eye squarely on audience expectations throughout the climax of Ends, with plenty of nods to imagery from Carpenter’s original film, but the law of diminishing returns prevents Laurie and Michael’s ultimate confrontation from having quite the same punch as their last reunion in 2018’s Halloween. The rematch feels incongruous with what Ends had been building towards, and the immediate fallout of it escalates at such a jaw-droppingly quick rate that you hardly have time to consider what the outcome really means for the survivors.

What’s your favorite timeline in the Halloween franchise?

After a long line of competing visions of the mythology, this new Halloween trilogy has mostly benefited from having one director’s vision to hold it together. Even though Ends starts to distract with its self-serious discussions about “evil,” it does feel very much of a piece with David Gordon Green’s previous efforts and having seen plenty of Halloween sequels that are begging to coalesce around something, it’s hard to argue that having more cooks in the kitchen has ever served the Halloween movies well. Green’s approach to filming Michael’s violence remains as brutal and stylish as ever. Ends may be the best looking of Green’s three Halloween movies, with evocative glimpses at both Haddonfield’s underbelly and upper class that serve as equally haunting backdrops for bloody and tense sequences. The film’s opening scene takes place in what must be the biggest house in Haddonfield, and its opulent design gives Green room to both build dread and misdirect attention to wicked results. Ends is a largely serious affair, but it’s during these signature kill scenes that Green allows himself to wink at us with a number of enjoyably staged tableaus of terror. There’s only so much a drumstick can be twirled before it ends up in someone’s eye, right?

The Many Pale Faces of Halloween's Michael Myers

Halloween Ends concludes the Myers/Strode rematch trilogy with an ambitious, if somewhat confused, final chapter. Despite dialed-in performances from Jamie Lee Curtis and franchise newcomer Rohan Campbell, David Gordon Green’s larger exploration of evil and trauma expands on the conversation he started in Halloween 2018 and Halloween Kills at a rate that Ends doesn’t quite have time to keep up with. There are some memorable kills and reverence for the franchise at large, but it stumbles as it brings it to a close.

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After yawning through 2021’s disappointing “Halloween Kills,” we all wanted the horror reboot series to die a bloody death.

Thank God we left our chef’s knife in the drawer, though. Because when the credits roll at “Halloween Ends,” the actual final chapter that hits theaters and Peacock Friday, you’ll consider taking Wite-Out to the title and changing it to “Halloween Keeps Going, Please.” 

Director David Gordon Green was deservedly lauded in 2018 for his superb first ‘ween film , which restored the Michael Myers vs. Laurie Strode death match to its 1970s gritty glory after a string of bombs in the 1990s and aughts. Here, he wraps up his contributions in an extremely satisfying way. 

HALLOWEEN ENDS

Running time: 111 minutes. Rated R (bloody horror violence and gore, language throughout and some sexual references.) In theaters and on Peacock Oct. 14.

Most surprising are, well, the many surprises. John Carpenter’s 1978 “Halloween,” after all, established the well-worn slasher flick pattern that we now know as well as “Happy Birthday.”

“Ends” starts, as many such films do, at a lovely suburban house in Haddonfield, Ill., with Corey (Rohan Campbell) babysitting a bratty kid on Halloween night. Something horrible happens, but it’s not at all what we come in expecting. It’s much worse.

Some months later, Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis) decides to stop running from her boogeyman and moves out of her (now incinerated) bunker in the woods into a spooky blood-red, two-story home in town. I would’ve picked Punta Cana. But Laurie chooses the sort of property that looks like it can’t sell on Trulia because of the pesky quintuple murder that happened in the living room.

She lives with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) and is working on a memoir. When she goes out, the jackass neighbors mock her and call the aging survivor of a serial rampage a “freak show.” (“Halloween” has never been particularly kind to my home state of Illinois.)

Allyson, who works as a nurse, starts up a controversial romance with Corey, whose life has taken a turn for the worse. The two bond over their emotional scars like pain is a piece of pasta in “Lady and the Tramp.” 

All the while, Michael lurks.

Usually by the time most nostalgic series reach their conclusions, the end isn’t so much a competent movie as a shameless fanstravaganza filled with predictable moments for die-hards to clap. Not “Halloween Ends.” Green zeroes in on Corey, someone we’ve never met before, and his complex journey and transformation grab us with gusto.

Campbell, a 25-year-old Canadian actor who’s made no American films till now, is a major talent to watch. As Corey, he morphs from handsome and honor-roll to damaged, unhinged and borderline-possessed with little more than solid acting to rely on. (Carpenter’s classic “Halloween” theme music helps, too.) Yet, even as Corey becomes corrupted and Gollum-like, the audience doesn’t stop believing our guy can be redeemed. Right to the end. Then, duhr, we remember we’re at a horror movie — not “Silver Linings Playbook.” 

And Curtis is strong as ever. Her Laurie has become as battle-hardened as a general on the front lines. There are glimpses of softness beneath her armor, but mostly she exists to be a warrior and protector. Fighting Myers is her raison d’être. Laurie and Michael, as far as opponents go, are up there with Godzilla and King Kong.

What I love about Green’s style is he has both a sense of the grand — he gives Michael’s mask the cinematic weight of Moses’ Ten Commandments slabs — and the goofy. One death in particular, gory though it may be, is a scream. And the transitions, well-edited by Timothy Alverson, give the movie the ceaseless momentum of a highway chase.

Green seems dead-set on closing the book on his “Halloween” trilogy. The final scenes are, pardon the expression, overkill, but they sure are finite. In the past, Michael has plummeted to the ground or been stabbed, shot, burnt and more. But whenever he falls off that horror-se, the optimistic madman gets right back up. 

This time, that’ll take some doing.

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Halloween Ends Reviews Are Here, See What Critics Are Saying About The Trilogy’s Final Film

Michael Myers is back...

Horror movie fans always delight in the month of October, checking out what new frights the genre has to offer on the big screen while still pulling out the old classics. Halloween is, without a doubt, one of the best horror movie franchises , making this fall particularly exciting given the impending release of Halloween Ends . Jamie Lee Curtis is back as Laurie Strode for a final battle with Michael Myers to close out the trilogy, and the reviews are in to let us know whether or not we can expect satisfactory closure on the Halloween franchise . 

Amongst the things we know about Halloween Ends is that it takes place four years after the events of Halloween Kills , in 2022’s post-pandemic Haddonfield, Illinois. Laurie is forced to confront her past yet again, after Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) is accused of killing a boy he was baby-sitting. Along with Jamie Lee Curtis, Andi Matichak also returns as Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson Nelson. Are critics excited about the trilogy’s conclusion ? Let’s see what they have to say, starting with CinemaBlend’s review of Halloween Ends . Mike Reyes rates the movie 4 stars out of 5, saying it's a "bold and satisfying" conclusion that will have fans talking:  

Going into Halloween Ends, I was expecting Jamie Lee Curtis’ ass kicking skills to be at full throttle throughout. If I had gotten the movie I’d expected walking into this screening, I don’t think I would have liked it as much as I did. Rather than making the endgame for Laurie Strode all about killing Michael Myers, this final chapter combines that old chestnut with a more powerful drive: to overcome the darkness that has sat with her ever since that fateful Halloween in 1978.

Aaron Neuwirth of We Live Entertainment agrees that fans will be satisfied, giving it a User Rating of a 7. He posits that for a good chunk of the first half, you might forget you’re watching a Halloween film, but the second half brings the brutality audiences want to see in a number of different ways:

No, this is not an art film disguised as Halloween; it simply marches to a different beat that focuses on the sorrow and downtrodden individuals who get extra jumpy toward the end of October. Still, this movie is not without a sense of fun. There’s plenty of humor and moments bound to allow plenty of viewers to react accordingly. Even a major showdown between Michael and Laurie hits in ways that recall the past and provide some new, satisfying beats. In fact, all of the violent horror on display is depicted in brutal and varied ways, which is what one generally wants on some level with this kind of thing. It only helps to see a certain level of control on display.

Matt Oakes of Silver Screen Riot gives the movie a grade of C+, calling it a mixed bag that isn’t likely to win over any new fans but might be enough of a satisfying conclusion for longtime followers of the franchise. The critic says,

Halloween Ends lives up to its name in unexpected ways, taking a largely unexpected route to the conclusion of the franchise before ultimately caving and offering up exactly what fans expect and want. The kills are strong and there’s some flashy new ideas here though the writing leaves much to be desired.

Peter Gray of The AU Review also calls Halloween Ends “unexpected,” but gives it the middling rating of 2.5 out of 5 stars. This review says Jamie Lee Curtis is better-utilized in this offering than its predecessor, and you have to respect director David Gordon Green for making “a ballsy, uncharacteristic move” to end this trilogy. According to the critic: 

Whilst Ends, at times, doesn’t always feel like a film that belongs in the Halloween canon, it does feel like it has something of a tighter grip on certain motivational actions behind its bloodshed. Kills, for all its faults, enjoyed itself immensely from a gore point of view, amping itself up and displaying no mercy as it offed as many people as possible, and whether or not they were connected to Laurie didn’t seem to matter. Ends has a more specific mentality in its killings.

William Bibbiani of The Wrap says so much of Halloween Ends focuses on Corey's character that it feels more like a backdoor pilot than a continuation of the original film. He says:

Instead of providing any fresh perspectives on Myers and his impact on the long-suffering town of Haddonfield — or its most famous residents, the Strode family — Halloween Ends merely offers an extended, one might say extremely padded, coda to the tale that Green has been telling. The film eventually provides some memorable gore but the ultimate conclusion is unconvincing and perfunctory. Halloween Anecdotally Concludes would have been much more accurate, although the studio’s marketing department would no doubt have hated it.

Tom Jorgensen of IGN wonders if David Gordon Green's exploration of the long-ranging effects of evil gets in the way of bringing Laurie's story to a satisfying end. This critics rates the film an "Okay" 6 out of 10, saying:

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Halloween Ends concludes the Myers/Strode rematch trilogy with an ambitious, if somewhat confused, final chapter. Despite dialed-in performances from Jamie Lee Curtis and franchise newcomer Rohan Campbell, David Gordon Green’s larger exploration of evil and trauma expands on the conversation he started in Halloween 2018 and Halloween Kills at a rate that Ends doesn’t quite have time to keep up with. There are some memorable kills and reverence for the franchise at large, but it stumbles as it brings it to a close.

If you can’t wait any longer to see Halloween Ends , no worries! The movie will be released both in theaters and to those with a Peacock subscription on Friday, October 14. 

Be sure to also check out what other upcoming horror movies are headed our way, and if you want more Michael Myers, check out all of the Halloween movies in order , and see how you can watch them. 

Heidi Venable is a Content Producer for CinemaBlend, a mom of two and a hard-core '90s kid. She started freelancing for CinemaBlend in 2020 and officially came on board in 2021. Her job entails writing news stories and TV reactions from some of her favorite prime-time shows like Grey's Anatomy and The Bachelor. She graduated from Louisiana Tech University with a degree in Journalism and worked in the newspaper industry for almost two decades in multiple roles including Sports Editor, Page Designer and Online Editor. Unprovoked, will quote Friends in any situation. Thrives on New Orleans Saints football, The West Wing and taco trucks.

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Well, Halloween Ends Is a Pleasant Surprise

There are maybe two jump scares in Halloween Ends — neither of them good — and three decent kills, and yet somehow, David Gordon Green’s third and presumably final entry in the Halloween series winds up being the pleasantest of surprises. After the carnival-belly inanity of the previous movie, Halloween Kills , which swirled together au courant hot takes about trauma and media opportunism and mob justice in an unattended blender of fan service and gore, this new film takes a step back and remembers to tell a story, with characters and everything. In so doing, it plays to director Green’s strengths and largely steers clear of the pitfalls that dog many a horror sequel. There’s no desperation to escalate, no tiresome fetishization of the gruesome.

Indeed, the craziest thing in Halloween Ends might be its opening scene, which takes place on Halloween night 2019 and features a teenage babysitter, Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), taking care of a young boy who’s a little too fond of pranks. Sure enough, one prank goes horribly wrong, and Corey is unfairly branded a child murderer. (Relax — it’s not a spoiler if it’s the first thing that happens in the movie.) Although he ultimately gets off, Corey’s life is ruined. He’s an outcast in the town of Haddonfield, Illinois, a place that knows a thing or two about child murders.

The only person who seems to show Corey any kind of grace is longtime franchise survivor Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), who after the events of the previous film appears to be trying to shed much of her gun-toting, survivalist persona. She’s also working on a memoir, which means we get to see her at a computer, Carrie Bradshaw–style, offering voice-over insights about Michael Myers. (“As he was locked away in his prison, I disappeared into mine.”) Her new attempts at a soft-focus life notwithstanding, Laurie secretly wants to mix it up. One day, she saves Corey from a group of local teen bullies who are attacking him and helps slash their tires. Then she takes the bloodied young man to a nearby hospital, mainly in order to introduce him to her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), who works there.

Look, I never said that this movie made any sense . What Halloween Ends demonstrates is that it’s not impossible or ill-advised to crossbreed the slasher genre’s fondness for fantastical and broadly foreseeable schlock with a sense of acute unpredictability, to mix some sadness in with the silliness. We might know where the story is going generally, but individual scenes retain the element of surprise, as the story takes unexpected emotional detours.

Watching the slow-building romance of Corey and Allyson against the backdrop of this dead-end small town, it feels at times like director Green has finally brought to the series some of the charm of his earlier independent films. Here are two young people who’ve been ostracized by almost everyone around them, united by one another’s pain and loneliness; it’s the first time in many a Halloween picture that the characters have felt like actual people. Even though we can tell that nothing good can come of Corey’s increasing need to stand up for himself, we feel for him regardless. The film takes its time showing how guilt and fear can curdle into resentment and cruelty. In so doing, it wins us over to the characters’ side. Haddonfield, as these movies have repeatedly made clear, is a mostly terrible place. It’s hard not to empathize at least a little with Corey and Allyson’s burn it down energy.

Which is when Michael Myers finally shows up — not like an intruder or an otherworldly demon, but a spirit of evil lurking beneath Haddonfield. Literally: He’s apparently living in an abandoned concrete drainage pipe, half-dead among the cobwebs. One encounter with Corey, however, and suddenly Michael has a newfound lease on life, as if the negative energy of this place and these people has begun to feed him. It’s all very Ghostbusters II . It’s also, in its own way, surprising and tragic.

At least for the first half. Eventually, the movie does begin to indulge in gore and other typical genre kicks, which can feel like a bit of a letdown, in part because Green, despite having co-written and directed all of the entries in this most recent crop of Halloween sequels, isn’t really a horror guy. He doesn’t seem to have the precision and rhythm required to truly shock us. Luckily, with Halloween Ends , he’s found a way to make one of these movies his own, sans scares but with tons of atmosphere and a sense of queasy, gathering dread.

More than any other film in the series, Halloween Ends reminded me of 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch , that bizarrely creepy, slow-burn one-off that was once widely loathed but has now (rightly) been reclaimed as a beloved cult item. The new movie is maybe not quite as goofy, but it has a similarly irreverent spirit, a refusal to fit into the demands of the broader slasher genre and a cavalier attitude toward this specific slasher’s so-called lore. After the dutiful but effective Halloween and the bloviatingly tedious Halloween Kills , at long last, Halloween Ends does manage to reinvent this series — right before (presumably) killing it dead forever.

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Halloween Kills

Surviving victims of Michael Myers form a vigilante mob and vow to end his reign of terror. Surviving victims of Michael Myers form a vigilante mob and vow to end his reign of terror. Surviving victims of Michael Myers form a vigilante mob and vow to end his reign of terror.

• David Gordon Green
• John Carpenter
• Scott Teems
• Jamie Lee Curtis
• Andi Matichak
• 2K User reviews
• 346 Critic reviews
• 42 Metascore
• 3 wins & 10 nominations

• Laurie Strode

• The Shape (1978)

• Officer Hawkins

• Young Hawkins

• Pete McCabe

• Cameron Elam

• Lonnie Elam

• Tommy Doyle

• Leigh Brackett

• Little John

• All cast & crew
• Production, box office & more at IMDbPro

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Did you know

• Trivia Jamie Lee Curtis , Charles Cyphers , Kyle Richards , Nancy Stephens , and Nick Castle were all in the original Halloween (1978) and all returned for this sequel. The characters of Tommy Doyle and Lonnie Elam from the original also returned, but were recast with Anthony Michael Hall and Robert Longstreet , because Brian Andrews has retired from acting since 2015, and Brent Le Page never acted again after the original Halloween.
• Goofs The firefighters perform a full smoke dive to the burning building at the start of the film, in spite of it already being up in flames and without knowledge of any survivors trapped inside. Normally, fire brigades don't endanger their people needlessly in such situations and focus only on preventing the fire from spreading to the surrounding area.

Laurie Strode : I'm coming for you, Michael.

• Alternate versions After the release of the film, director David Gordon Green announced an extended cut which would feature additional scenes and an alternate ending. In that cut (simply titled Extended Cut), Laurie would call Karen's phone near the end of the film. She is instead replied with Michael's heavy breathing, indicating Karen is dead. Laurie then leaves the hospital with a knife, determined to find him. This indicates the sequel Halloween Ends (2022) would take place immediately after Kills in 2018, instead of four years later in 2022 which would later be confirmed. The Extended Cut runs for 109 minutes.
• Connections Edited from Halloween (1978)
• Soundtracks She Doesn't Want You Anymore Written by John Carpenter Courtesy of Daniel Davies & Cody Carpenter

User reviews 2K

• benjaminskylerhill
• Oct 15, 2021
• How long is Halloween Kills? Powered by Alexa
• Will there ever be a Halloween crossover film?
• Based on the Silver Shamrock mask appearing in this film, will Tom Atkins make an appearance as well?
• What year does this Halloween movie take place in?
• October 15, 2021 (United States)
• United States
• Official Facebook
• Halloween Kills. La noche aún no termina
• Wilmington, North Carolina, USA
• Universal Pictures
• Blumhouse Productions
• See more company credits at IMDbPro
• $20,000,000 (estimated)
• $92,002,155
• $49,404,980
• Oct 17, 2021
• $133,423,964

Technical specs

• Runtime 1 hour 45 minutes
• Dolby Digital
• Dolby Atmos

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Jamie lee curtis in david gordon green’s ‘halloween kills’: film review | venice 2021.

Michael Myers is once again back in Haddonfield to spread carnage by the light of jack-o’-lanterns in this second part of a trilogy tied directly to John Carpenter’s original.

By David Rooney

David Rooney

Chief Film Critic

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“Evil dies tonight,” shout the inflamed townsfolk of Haddonfield, Illinois, more times than you can count in Halloween Kills . Or maybe it’s “A franchise dies tonight?” I might have misheard. Either way, this latest installment is like a latex ghoul mask so stretched and shapeless it no longer fits.

Three years ago, David Gordon Green successfully breathed new life into the mythology of Michael Myers by building a story about the legacy of trauma and pitting three generations of women from the same family against the psycho-slasher introduced by John Carpenter in the influential 1978 horror classic. Green and his co-writers made the smart choice to ignore the multiple disposable sequels and return to the beloved original, picking up the story of “final girl” survivor Laurie Strode 40 years after that fateful night.

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Venue : Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition) Release date : Friday, Oct. 15 Cast : Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Will Patton, Thomas Mann, Anthony Michael Hall, Dylan Arnold, Robert Longstreet, Kyle Richards Director : David Gordon Green Screenwriters : Scott Teems, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green

But in this second part of a trilogy spun out of the rebooted property — all set on the same night and slated to conclude with next year’s Halloween Ends — Green has made exactly the kind of witless, worthless sequel that bled the franchise dry in the 1980s and ’90s. It premieres in Venice in conjunction with a Golden Lion career achievement award being presented to Jamie Lee Curtis , who deserves to be celebrated for any number of more memorable films.

What’s most disappointing is that after reimagining Curtis’ Laurie as a fierce warrior grandmother, hardened by PTSD into a tough customer at considerable cost to her personal relationships, here she’s basically sidelined in post-surgery recovery. She gets to spout some wobbly Halloween lore, about Michael transcending mortality to become a superhuman disseminator of fear. But mostly she’s just killing time waiting for the inevitable showdown in the closing chapter.

In a screenplay co-written with Scott Teems and Danny McBride, Green’s storytelling skills are in trouble from the start. It’s a full 20 minutes before we find Laurie where we left her at the end of 2018’s Halloween , clutching a nasty abdominal knife wound in the back of a pickup truck with her daughter Karen ( Judy Greer ) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). As firefighters speed in the other direction, toward the blaze of the house where Laurie has trapped Michael in the basement, she screams, “Let it burn!” She seems to know already that Michael won’t be kind to those first responders.

Before all that, we wade through clunky detours and messy recaps of Michael’s history, from his murder at age 6 of his teenage sister, through his 1978 Halloween night rampage in Carpenter’s film to his escape from a psychiatric hospital 40 years later — along with another patient who’s roughly half his height and yet somehow later manages to be mistaken for Michael by an angry mob.

The writers have combed the original story by Carpenter and Debra Hill for any surviving minor character they can subject to more punishment. That includes Tommy Doyle ( Anthony Michael Hall ), whom Laurie was babysitting in ’78; and Lindsey Wallace (Kyle Richards, reprising the role), whose babysitter, Annie, was one of Michael’s victims. Annie’s dad, former sheriff Brackett (Charles Cyphers), is still around, now working security at Haddonfield Hospital.

Also still kicking is Marion Chambers (Nancy Stephens), a colleague of Michael’s former psychiatrist, Dr. Loomis, now sadly departed but resurrected in an inadvertently amusing flashback by someone doing a bad Donald Pleasence impersonation: “Pure eve-ill!” That 1978 interlude sheds light on Will Patton’s Officer Hawkins, played in his rookie-cop years by Thomas Mann in scenes that reveal how he failed his fellow officer and didn’t stop Michael when he had the chance. But Patton’s main function here is to give Laurie someone to talk to in the ICU.

That leaves a whole lot of barely developed characters to hunt down Michael or help pump up his body count. Or both. At the nominal center is the posse captained by Hall’s blustery bore, Tommy, leading the “Evil dies tonight!” charge. He’s accompanied by feisty Allyson, packing heat like Grandma taught her; her boyfriend, Cameron (Dylan Arnold); and Cam’s father, Lonnie (Robert Longstreet), who narrowly escaped a brush with Michael back in ’78.

Green amps up the violence and gore at the expense of actual scares or even a modicum of suspense. This is a curiously numbing bloodbath, as the masked Michael (James Jude Courtney) supplements his knife skills with everything from a pickax to a fluorescent light tube. Within the context of Carpenter’s laser-focused plotting, Michael’s kills were often subversively playful, suggesting a warped sense of humor beneath his psychosis. Here, he’s just a mayhem machine, going through the motions.

Laurie speaks in awed tones at one point of “Michael’s masterpiece,” stirring up the mob and disseminating chaos. But there’s no sense of him having much of a plan beyond eliminating anyone dumb enough to get in his way. Or a gay couple — called Big John (Scott MacArthur) and Little John (Michael McDonald), in a touch I assume was intended to add some levity — sufficiently heedless to think they can slap a coat of paint on a haunted house and live there unharmed. None of this is either frightening or fun, unless you get a kick out of watching Judy Greer wield a pitchfork.

Perhaps the saddest way in which Green bulldozes the lean-and-mean essence of the Carpenter mold is how far he strays from the latter’s insidious use of music. For those of us who saw the phenomenally successful 1978 indie back before its terrifying power had been diluted by endless riffs and rip-offs, the needling synth notes of Carpenter’s score could plant themselves in our heads whenever we entered a dark empty house. (OK, I’m speaking for myself.)

I felt a genuine jolt of excitement as the first gut-churning electronic rumble is heard here over the Universal logo. But as in everything else, restraint has been abandoned. Carpenter’s son Cody and Daniel Davies share composing credit with the master, going big and bombastic, and layering in vocal elements. But instead of getting under your skin, the music hammers you over the head. Call it Halloween Overkills .

Full credits

Venue: Venice Film Festival (Out of Competition) Distributor: Universal Production companies: Universal Pictures, Miramax, Blumhouse, Malek Akkad, in association with Rough House Pictures Cast: Jamie Lee Curtis, Judy Greer, Andi Matichak, Will Patton, Thomas Mann, Anthony Michael Hall, Dylan Arnold, Robert Longstreet, Kyle Richards, Nancy Stephens, Charles Cyphers, James Jude Courtney, Nick Castle, Omar J. Dorsey, Michael McDonald, Scott MacArthur, Diva Tyler, Tom Jones Jr., Carmela McNeal, Michael Smallwood Director: David Gordon Green Screenwriters: Scott Teems, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green Based on characters created by John Carpenter, Debra Hill Producers: Malek Akkad, Jason Blum, Bill Block Executive producers: John Carpenter, Jamie Lee Curtis, Jeanette Volturno, Couper Samuelson, Danny McBride, David Gordon Green, Ryan Freimann, Bob Osher, Andrew Golov Director of photography: Michael Simmonds Production designer: Richard A. Wright Costume designer: Emily Gunshor Editor: Tim Alverson Music: John Carpenter, Cody Carpenter, Daniel Davies Special effects makeup designer: Christopher Nelson Casting: Terri Taylor, Sarah Domeier Lindo

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Halloween Ends is the best of the new Halloween trilogy

By richard urquiza | oct 14, 2022.

After successfully rebooting the franchise with 2018’s Halloween  and then completely botching the sequel with 2021’s  Halloween Kills , David Gordon Green returns with what is perhaps the best entry of the trilogy, Halloween Ends . I know what you’re thinking: any movie can be better than Halloween Kills , how much better are we talking?

In my opinion, the key choice that makes the difference for this movie is the daring decision to introduce the character of Cory (Rohan Campbell). The opening scene shows a 21-year-old Cory arriving at a babysitting gig. Charged with watching an enthusiastic child, the typical spooky occurrences have us thinking that Michael Myers is on the way. However, it turns out the killer had already made his entrance. An innocent prank results in the child’s gruesome demise, and Cory’s life takes a horrible turn.

This is surprising. If you saw the trailer above, or the commercials or even just posters, you know they frame Halloween Ends as an epic battle between Laurie Strode and Michael Myers. You would never have thought that both of their roles, as main character and main villain, would actually be siphoned off by Cory. This might cause an uproar among fans, but personally, I thought it pays off pretty well. It felt refreshing and new.

The trouble with it, and what I suspect may be a major complaint for some audience members, is that Myers himself is not nearly as much of a presence in this film as in past entities of the Halloween series. However, I think by putting more focus on Cory, the film is actually serving the main theme Myers has always represented: the inner evil, the idea that anyone is capable of being a beast.

The movie also does a lot with Laurie. Her involvement with the life of her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) as well as with Cory gives Jamie Lee Curtis plentiful opportunities to show off her abilities as an actor. Her conversations with Cory are particularly gripping, because Cory is basically the main character. Scenes with him always move the plot forward. Laurie’s scenes… eh, not always. I don’t really care much about Laurie’s relationship with Officer Hawkins, and I can only laugh off the scenes of various townsfolk making big leaps in logic and blaming Laurie for the various crimes of Michael Myers.

Cory is the guy who carries the movie. We are introduced to him as a sympathetic man forced into unfortunate circumstances and watch him evolve into a monster. I found his descent into evil far more entertaining than I would have another Myers rampage. I even found the romance between Cory and Allyson not only bearable but actually compelling. At first I thought I’d hate it, because it so blatantly indulged in the love-at-first-sight trope so many movies lean on. But a couple scenes in I sort of started to love it, because I was getting the idea that Allyson was a psychopath herself. Why else would she suddenly become obsessed with a guy she’d only known for a couple days? Also, the fact that a majority of Cory’s victims are people that annoyed her made me think she was pointing Cory in their direction. Well, killing the cop might have been Cory’s idea, but how did he just decide to go for the chatty nurse or douche doctor? Coincidence? I think not.

Allyson definitely has a screw loose, and I liked that. I wish they had lended more into that aspect of her character, as by the end it didn’t really amount to much. And speaking of the end of Halloween Ends …

Spoilers for Halloween Ends  

If this was any other film, Cory would have been the main character through to the end. However, because this is “the final Halloween movie,” the film had to become about Laurie Strode eventually.

To set the scene: Cory, now a full-fledged killer obsessed with Allyson, goes to Laurie’s house to kill her. However, Laurie turns the tables on him, and in the end Cory commits suicide but makes it look like Laurie killed him, thus severing her relationship with Allyson, who arrives just in time to see what Cory wanted her to see. It’s established before that Allyson blames Laurie for some of the things Michael had done to their family over the years. (Again, not really sure how that’s Laurie’s fault, but I digress.)

Personally, I think I would have preferred a story that didn’t end with Cory committing suicide, because his arc begs something more; he needed a more meaningful death. But because his death leads to a change in Laurie’s relationship with her granddaughter, I was down with it.

However, after that Michael appears and has one final (very satisfying) showdown with Laurie. Allyson ends up saving Laurie, which was a total let down. It undermines the obsession Allyson was showing through the movie. I would have preferred a mixed bag ending rather than a happy one, even though I understand why they gave this to Laurie, who kills the monster who has haunted her for the majority of her life, even if her relationship with her granddaughter is ruined. The way things end, Cory and Allyson’s movie-long romance is rendered pointless.

CG kills make me ill

While I enjoyed the subversion of expectations in the script, the deaths left a lot to be desired. I’m no huge fan of slashers, but I know that part of the fun of them is the uniqueness of the killings. With some exceptions, such as the first death in the film or the killings at the scrapyard, most of the deaths are standard stabbings. To be fair, you could argue Halloween Ends  is trying to be realistic. I think that works given Cory’s status as a novice murderer.

However, if you want to go down that route, I do think the murder scenes could have been crafted better. I’m sorry, but digital blood and CGI knives break my immersion. I want to feel that blade break skin and flesh. Give those scenes the slow pace and attention they deserve. Credit where it’s due: the special effects improve significantly for the climax. Laurie’s meticulous takedown of Michael is great; properly gory and wince-worthy. Just a shame that effort didn’t go into the whole of it.

Halloween Ends  is not what people will expect; it sure as hell isn’t what the ads promised, and I suspect some hardcore fans will walk out of the movie disappointed. However, I found Halloween Ends both surprising and refreshing, and much more nuanced than the goofy orgy of blood that was Halloween Kills . There were some boring scenes and hokey writing here and there, but hey, nothing that bad.

And indeed, Halloween did end. Midnight has finally rung, the morning rises on November 1st, and the film kept its promise. No more disappearances of the killer’s body, no more dead fist clutching before a cut to black, and no more post-credit scenes. Halloween has truly ended. For me, that’s the biggest achievement of Halloween Ends . It ended the story, and in a movie industry dedicated to stories that never end, that’s an accomplishment.

Will this truly be the last Hollow’s Eve to be haunted by Michael Myers? Personally, I don’t think so. Maybe 10 years, maybe just five years down the line, that white-painted William Shatner mask will return to stalk adolescents yet again in some new timeline, and it’ll probably suck. However, for now, Halloween Ends on a high note. As one of the major spooktacular releases for this October, I say it is definitely worth a watch.

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‘Halloween Ends’ Review: Michael Myers Saga Concludes, For Now, With a Whimper

Director David Gordon Green offers little more than a padded coda to the tale of Haddonfield, with a sudden focus on a brand-new character

The title “Halloween Ends” is a bit off, and that’s not just because nobody in their right mind seriously thinks this lucrative franchise will completely stop here.

Even if you take filmmaker David Gordon Green at his word, this new “Halloween” movie doesn’t put much of a button on the series. It says very little that wasn’t already said in “Halloween Kills,” a divisive sequel which attempted, with some success, to reframe the whole series as a treatise on multigenerational trauma, culminating with the metaphysical rebirth of Michael Myers as an immortal idea, a despicable living legend.

Instead of providing any fresh perspectives on Myers and his impact on the long-suffering town of Haddonfield — or its most famous residents, the Strode family — “Halloween Ends” merely offers an extended, one might say extremely padded, coda to the tale that Green has been telling. The film eventually provides some memorable gore but the ultimate conclusion is unconvincing and perfunctory. “Halloween Anecdotally Concludes” would have been much more accurate, although the studio’s marketing department would no doubt have hated it.

After a brief and shocking prelude, “Halloween Ends” picks up several years after the events of “Halloween” and “Halloween Kills.” Myers has disappeared without a trace, but it seems like every Halloween since that fateful night has been marred by tragic, mysterious deaths which may or may not have been the boogeyman’s handiwork. Maybe he’s out there killing people, or maybe Haddonfield is now just a place where horrible things happen all the time, as though his evil has infected it.

Surprisingly, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) has taken Myers’ disappearance in stride. She’s living in suburbia again, with her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak, “Foxhole”), and writing an autobiography to purge her inner demons. They’re still mourning the loss of their family members, but it appears that life, for once, is pretty good for the Strode family. It’s an observation that infuriates their deeply scarred neighbors, who constantly remind Laurie that her tragedy has ruined their lives.

Yes, Haddonfielders have long memories. They also refuse to let a young man named Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell, “The Hardy Boys”) forget a shocking tragedy in his own past. He’s guilt-ridden, repressed and fragile, and Laurie and Allyson immediately recognize him as a kindred spirit in need of love and support. If he can stop beating himself up – and if the townsfolk can stop beating him up, too – Corey might even realize that Allyson is not only totally into him but also charmingly forward about it.

The problem is that Corey might not be on a path to healing. He might be on a much darker journey, which could lead him into the literal and figurative catacombs of Haddonfield, where he’d find his own, very unusual place in the legacy of the town. What if Corey isn’t another Laurie Strode? What if he’s another Michael Myers?

At least, that’s the idea that “Halloween Ends” is toying with. It’s a bold decision to take a series that had previously focused on the Strode family and suddenly refocus much of it on a brand-new character, in what was supposed to be (allegedly) its final chapter. But the novelty wears off quickly. The script can’t seem to make up its mind about Corey. Either he was always evil, or he was driven to it by an oppressive community; both plot points get floated, and neither is supported very well by Campbell’s scattershot performance. It’s not intriguingly ambiguous — it’s just frustratingly non-committal, and it takes up most of the movie.

So much time and energy is dedicated to Corey’s plot that “Halloween Ends” no longer plays like a continuation of the original story. Instead, it’s like we’re watching a backdoor pilot episode for some kind of “Tales of Haddonfield” anthology horror series, where scary things happen on October 31 but are only tangentially related to the characters and ideas from the original films. Not a bad pitch for a show, but not a very satisfying film.

Green’s movie might have been stronger if it had committed to an anthology concept, instead of constantly reminding us that there are other, richer, pre-existing characters we could be focusing on more before eventually tacking the conclusion to their story onto the end of a “Corey Cunningham” standalone. Then again, the “Halloween” series has a bit of a sketchy history of transforming its third installments into unrelated anthology tales. If it’s an intentional throwback to “Halloween III: Season of the Witch,” it’s less effective than its ridiculous but consistently entertaining 1982 predecessor.

Corey’s storyline ultimately yields some memorably gruesome set pieces, but Green’s screenplay — for which he shares credit with three other writers — struggles to make it fit into the rest of the puzzle. What does it even say about Allyson that she can fall in love with someone who, possibly, has a lot in common with the mass murderer who killed her mom? The world may never know, because the script for “Halloween Ends” doesn’t want to ask that or many other valid, potentially fascinating questions.

Instead, Corey’s story awkwardly segues into a tacked-on climax that’s probably supposed to give this all some sense of closure. But the events of the film are too arbitrary for that to be dramatically satisfying. What’s worse, it doesn’t even seem like the filmmakers are completely convinced it works either, since they spend most of the movie arguing that Haddonfield is a place where evil self-perpetuates, thanks to a populace that refuses to let anything die, before then giving the townsfolk a ham-fisted last-minute conclusion which, based on everyone’s behavior throughout the last two movies, is either completely unearned or unlikely to mean much to them in the long run.

“Halloween Ends” is far from the worst film in the series, but that says more about the series than it does about “Halloween Ends.” It’s hard to give a film credit for going in an unexpected direction when the direction is this aimless. As a slasher movie, it’s too backloaded to be broadly entertaining, and the handful of gruesome kills are counterbalanced by other, more humdrum slayings. Even cinematographer Michael Simmonds, whose oily shadows and eerie compositions made Green’s other “Halloween” movies total stunners, seems oddly subdued for most of “Halloween Ends.”

Perhaps “Halloween Ends” doesn’t work because — going back to that title — “Halloween” isn’t supposed to end. John Carpenter left the original with an almost complete lack of closure, which played less like a sequel tease and more like a threat. Michael Myers is still out there somewhere, literally or figuratively, and he’s going to get you. If he’s not, then this whole enterprise comes across as rather pointless. If evil can truly end — and especially if it ends this anticlimactically — it must not have been that powerful to begin with.

“Halloween Ends” opens in US theaters and streams exclusively on Peacock Oct. 14.

Halloween Ends: release date, reviews and everything we know about the horror movie

Michael Myers and Laurie Strode face off for the final time.

Trick or treat Halloween fans, the legendary horror franchise is ready to deliver what is being billed as the final chapter in the Michael Myers and Laurie Strode saga, Halloween Ends . 

The capper in a trilogy of movies (2018’s Halloween and 2021’s Halloween Kills ) that were made as direct sequels to 1978’s Halloween. Fans are eager to see the masked maniac and one of the original "final girls" go head to head one last time.

Here is everything that you need to know about Halloween Ends , from when it’s coming out to who’s in it and how you can catch up with the iconic franchise.

When is the Halloween Ends release date?

Halloween Ends releases in the US, UK and most of the world on October 14. US audiences have the choice to see the movie either in movie theaters or on the Peacock streaming service when it premieres. Find out exactly how to watch Halloween Ends .

This is the same strategy that Halloween Kills followed (as well as other Universal movies like Marry Me ). Even with the dual release strategy, Halloween Kills made nearly $50 million in its opening weekend and more than $131 million globally throughout its run.

Is there a Halloween Ends trailer?

Universal Pictures has released the trailer for Halloween Ends . While only a little more than a minute, it has just about everything long-time fans of the series could want as it promises that the saga between Michael and Laurie is coming to an end and teases an intense fight between the two, played over by the franchise's iconic score. Watch the Halloween Ends trailer directly below. 

What is the Halloween Ends plot?

We’ve alluded to it multiple times already, but the bare bones of Halloween Ends is that Michael Myers and Laurie Strode, one way or the other, are going to end their long-time rivalry, presumably with only one left standing.

But, the official synopsis for the movie sets the stage for this final showdown with a bit more detail:

Four years after the events of Halloween Kills , Laurie is living with her granddaughter Allyson and is finishing writing her memoir. Michael Myers hasn’t been seen since. Laurie, after allowing the specter of Michael to determine and drive her reality for decades, has decided to liberate herself from fear and rage and embrace life. But when a young man, Corey Cunningham, is accused of killing a boy he was babysitting, it ignites a cascade of violence and terror that will force Laurie to finally confront the evil she can’t control, once and for all.

Halloween Ends reviews — what the critics are saying?

How does Halloween Ends compare to some of the best entries in the franchise? Unfortunately the general consensus is not well.

What to Watch's Halloween Ends review calls it an "abysmal whimper" to end the recent trilogy, and we're not alone. As of October 14, the movie has a score of 43%, which classifies it as "Rotten," on Rotten Tomatoes . It's not any better over at Metacritic , where Halloween Ends scores a 45.

Though, if we're looking for a positive, it is scoring better than its predecessor, Halloween Kills , which earned a final 39% on Rotten Tomatoes and 42 on Metacritic.

How long is Halloween Ends?

Halloween Ends has a run time of one hour and 51 minutes.

What is Halloween Ends rated?

Halloween Ends is rated R in the US and 18 in the UK for "bloody horror violence and gore, language throughout and some sexual references."

Who is in the Halloween Ends cast?

Jamie Lee Curtis returned to the role that first made her famous for the first time in 16 years with 2018’s Halloween and now gets ready to play Laurie Strode for the last time with Halloween Ends , more than 40 years after she starred in the original. While Laurie Strode is probably Curtis’ most iconic role, she’s also starred in memorable movies like A Fish Called Wanda , True Lies , Freaky Friday and, most recently, Everything Everywhere All at Once .

The other side of the deadly rivalry, Michael Myers (aka the Shape), is played by James Jude Courtney, who has been portraying Myers in this latest trilogy of Halloween movies.

Additional Halloween Ends cast members include Andi Matichak ( Orange is the New Black , Blue Bloods ) as Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson, Will Patton ( Yellowstone , Remember the Titans ) as Officer Hawkins, Kyle Richards (1978’s Halloween , ER ) as Lindsey Wallace and Rohan Campbell ( Virgin River , The Hardy Boys ) as Corey Cunningham.

Who is the Halloween Ends director?

David Gordon Green has overseen this new trilogy of Halloween movies, directing all three, including Halloween Ends . Green also wrote the script for all three recent Halloween movies, along with Danny McBride ( The Righteous Gemstones ); Chris Bernier and Paul Brad Logan are also credited writers on Halloween Ends .

Before taking on the Halloween movies, Green was more known for comedy and drama, having directed Pineapple Express , Eastbound & Down , Stronger , Vice Principals and The Righteous Gemstones . He is expected to continue with the horror genre, though, as he is lined up to direct a new version of The Exorcist and a Hellraiser TV series.

How to watch the Halloween movies

There have been 13 Halloween movies since 1978, from the John Carpenter-directed original to the upcoming Halloween Ends . The timeline and how they all connect can be a bit confusing, but if you just want to know how to watch or rewatch any of the Halloween movies right now, we’ve got you covered:

• Halloween (1978) : available on The Roku Channel (US), Netflix (UK)
• Halloween II (1981) : available via digital on-demand (US), Netflix (UK)
• Halloween III: Season of the Witch (1982) : available via digital on-demand (US), Netflix (UK)
• Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers (1988) : available on AMC Plus & Shudder (US), Netflix (UK)
• Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers (1989) : available on AMC Plus & Shudder (US), Netflix (UK)
• Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers (1995) : available via digital on-demand (US), Paramount Plus (UK)
• Halloween H20: 20 Years Later (1998) : available on Paramount Plus (US), Virgin TV Go (UK)
• Halloween: Resurrection (2002) : available on Paramount Plus (US), Netflix (UK)
• Halloween (2007) : available on Netflix (US), Virgin TV Go (UK)
• Halloween II (2009) : available on Tubi (US), digital on-demand (UK)
• Halloween (2018) : available via digital on-demand (US), Virgin TV Go (UK)
• Halloween Kills (2021) : available on HBO Max (US), Sky Go, Now TV and Virgin TV Go (UK)

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Michael Balderston is a DC-based entertainment and assistant managing editor for What to Watch, who has previously written about the TV and movies with TV Technology, Awards Circuit and regional publications. Spending most of his time watching new movies at the theater or classics on TCM, some of Michael's favorite movies include Casablanca , Moulin Rouge! , Silence of the Lambs , Children of Men , One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest and Star Wars . On the TV side he enjoys Only Murders in the Building, Yellowstone, The Boys, Game of Thrones and is always up for a Seinfeld rerun. Follow on Letterboxd .

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• Entertainment /
• The new Halloween is a slasher movie with an actual message

Director David Gordon Green delivers a very 2018 entry for the 40-year-old franchise

By Bryan Bishop

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Welcome to Cheat Sheet, our brief breakdown-style reviews of festival films, VR previews, and other special event releases. This review comes from the 2018 Toronto International Film Festival. It has been revised for the film’s wide theatrical release.

Warning: mild spoilers for the Halloween franchise below.

Horror movie franchises aren’t necessarily known for their thoughtfulness. Films that spawn decades of sequels initially become part of the zeitgeist for a reason, no doubt, and broad trends in the genre often reflect the cultural anxieties of the moment. But by the time a film franchise hits installment five or six, there usually isn’t much left to explore, beyond new ways to kill off characters.

That’s never been truer than in the long-running Halloween franchise. John Carpenter’s stylish 1978 original was the prototypical slasher film, with Michael Myers in his signature white mask terrorizing teenagers as an unknowable, unstoppable force of nature. It featured many of the genre tropes that would become commonplace in the decade that followed: Myers targeted teenagers who were having sex or drinking while underage, activities that were off the menu for Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), the “final girl” who eventually stopped him. If slasher films are morality plays born out of America’s latent Puritanical values, Halloween is the film that codified it all.

But in the sequels that followed, anything fresh or exciting was quickly left by the wayside in the pursuit of just knocking out new installments. And attempts to give the series a different look and feel, as Rob Zombie did with his 2007 reboot and sequel, were misguided at best. Creatively, the Halloween well ran dry long ago — which is precisely why David Gordon Green’s new entry, simply titled Halloween , is such an interesting experiment. It’s a franchise-wide retcon, a direct sequel to Carpenter’s original that eliminates all other films from the franchise continuity. That move allows Green and his co-writers, Danny McBride and Jeff Fradley, to build a film that actually has a narrative reason for existing. They don’t squander the opportunity. They use it to explore the long-lasting consequences violence and trauma have on victims, and in the process, they entirely rethink what Michael Myers stands for.

The 2018 Halloween isn’t an entirely successful film, and it won’t provide an easy template for a new generation of revitalized slasher flicks. But it does serve as a fitting coda to a story that began 40 years ago.

What’s the genre?

It’s a slasher film / meta-comedy hybrid. Halloween is rife with gore and violence, but it also has so many laughs that it starts to feel like a genre comedy at times, not unlike Green’s The Pineapple Express . The filmmakers are also acutely aware of the audience they’re playing to, and the film goes out of its way to wink and nod at the other films in the franchise. It’s often subtle and clever; at other times, it’s just distracting. This is simultaneously the funniest Halloween film that’s ever been made and one of the most disturbingly brutal, which makes for a tricky mix at times.

What’s it about?

A meta-slasher / comedy hybrid

The movie wipes away everything but Carpenter’s first film. As it opens, viewers learn that not long after the first film, Michael Myers was captured by the police and has been under psychiatric care ever since. Facing Myers scarred Laurie Strode irrevocably, and though she went on to have a daughter, Karen (Judy Greer), she has lived her life since as a self-made survivalist, preparing for the day when she might need to face Michael again.

That occasion comes when Michael escapes while being transferred to a new facility. From there, he heads straight to his hometown of Haddonfield, Illinois, picking up where he left off, with murder and mayhem on a new Halloween night. Only this time, Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson may also be in danger, and Laurie has to work with Michael’s new doctor, Sartain (Haluk Bilginer) to bring Michael’s reign of terror to an end.

What’s it really about?

It’s about the long-lasting effects of violence and how trauma impacts not just its victims, but the lives of everyone close to them. Laurie went full Sarah Connor after facing Michael and spent her daughter’s entire childhood training her in weaponry and self-defense on the off chance that Michael might one day return. But the cost of that approach has been massive. She’s blown through two marriages and become estranged from Karen. Now, Laurie lives as a hermit in a house in the woods that she’s turned into a mini-fortress, equipped with a panic room and massive amounts of weaponry.

The one person who hasn’t written Laurie off is her granddaughter, but Allyson is constantly caught between Laurie and Karen, with her mother unable to forgive Laurie for essentially hijacking her childhood. Michael has been imprisoned for 40 years, but Laurie has never stopped living with him — and that’s forced everyone close to her to live with him, too. This isn’t just a passing concern in the film, either. The core idea is deeply embedded in Halloween , carrying through from the opening to the final frame. To execute the idea, the movie leaves behind many of the mysteries around Michael Myers that Carpenter established in 1978.

Michael Myers is no longer the morality boogeyman

Michael doesn’t just focus on pot-smoking teenagers this time around; he’s an equal opportunity killer, happy to bludgeon housewives and children as well as the requisite babysitters. That turns the character from a morality boogeyman into a metaphor for the vicious, unexpected cruelty that ordinary life can bring. It makes Michael Myers as a character even more of a cipher — the character’s nickname, “The Shape,” has never seemed more appropriate — but it serves the movie thematically: the kind of random violence and loss he represents in this Halloween is something that can touch anyone at any time, just as real-world violence and tragedy knows no bounds.

Is it good?

There are many things to like in Halloween . Beginning with the opening titles — a faithful homage to the original title sequence — the filmmakers make it clear that they intend to hew closely to the aesthetics Carpenter established. From the score (Carpenter returned to write the music, alongside his son Cody and composer Daniel A. Davies) to the cinematography (director of photography Michael Simmonds shot the film in the same anamorphic aspect ratio original DP Dean Cundey used) to the ever-present use of Steadicam, the film feels tied to the original. It’s striving to be a true sequel, not only with story and characters, but in look and feel.

And while it’s necessary for the movie to bring new elements into the mix, lest it become yet another rehash, it’s the execution of those new elements that lead to some of the film’s troubles. The murders are graphic, cruel, and violent in this film, no doubt intended to underscore the random brutality Michael represents this time around. But there’s a dissonance there, given how audiences are used to taking in these movies and the character of Michael Myers.

Is this a nostalgic slasher throwback, a horror-comedy, or a mature look at trauma?

Like many slasher franchises, the Halloween films turned into a roller coaster ride over the years, with audiences cheering the boogeyman on as he snuffed out cookie-cutter characters in film after film. Going into this movie, it’s easy to assume that’s still going to be the case — just with the added nostalgia of original movie callbacks and the presence of Jamie Lee Curtis. Instead, there’s a viciousness in Michael that’s genuinely upsetting. When he kills two journalists early in the film, for example, it’s as if every expectation that the audience has about what this movie should be gets thrown out the window. As a filmmaking tactic, it’s extremely effective, putting the audience back on their heels and announcing that this movie isn’t going to play by the safe, familiar rulebook. But that clashes with the constant tongue-in-cheek nods the movie makes to other films in the series.

It’s also out of sync with the ever-present comedy in the film, which includes some genuinely funny, laugh-out-loud moments. A young kid named Julien (Jibrail Nantambu), who one of Allyson’s friends is babysitting, steals every scene he’s in with constant one-liners. And a sequence in which Michael stalks a high school nerd (Drew Scheid) is hilarious as well as scary. But all of the film’s facets feel like they’re fighting each other rather than working together. There’s a constant tension: is this a nostalgic slasher throwback, a horror-comedy, or a mature look at trauma? The answer can change from scene to scene — sometimes from line to line — and the resulting movie feels like a mashup of several different, more focused films rather than its own fully formed idea.

This Halloween is certainly better than almost every other sequel in the franchise, though that’s no great achievement in and of itself. It ultimately feels like a decent movie that could have been a very good movie, if only Green had been able to modulate his tone more effectively.

What should it be rated?

It should be (and is) rated R. R for days. R without even a fleeting moment of consideration that it should be anything but an R. Seriously: really, really R.

How can I actually watch it?

Halloween opens in theaters on October 19th. Trick or treat.

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2018, Holiday/Horror, 1h 46m

What to know

Critics Consensus

Halloween largely wipes the slate clean after decades of disappointing sequels, ignoring increasingly elaborate mythology in favor of basic - yet still effective - ingredients. Read critic reviews

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Halloween videos, halloween   photos.

It's been 40 years since Laurie Strode survived a vicious attack from crazed killer Michael Myers on Halloween night. Locked up in an institution, Myers manages to escape when his bus transfer goes horribly wrong. Laurie now faces a terrifying showdown when the masked madman returns to Haddonfield, Ill. -- but this time, she's ready for him.

Rating: R (Brief Drug Use|Bloody Images|Horror Violence|Language|Nudity)

Genre: Holiday, Horror, Mystery & thriller

Original Language: English

Director: David Gordon Green

Producer: Malek Akkad , Jason Blum , Bill Block

Writer: Jeff Fradley , Danny McBride , David Gordon Green

Release Date (Theaters): Oct 19, 2018  wide

Release Date (Streaming): Dec 28, 2018

Box Office (Gross USA): $159.5M

Runtime: 1h 46m

Distributor: Universal Pictures

Production Co: Malek Akkad, Rough House Pictures

Sound Mix: Dolby Atmos

Aspect Ratio: Digital 2.39:1

View the collection: Halloween

Cast & Crew

Jamie Lee Curtis

Laurie Strode

Andi Matichak

Will Patton

Officer Hawkins

Virginia Gardner

Nick Castle

Haluk Bilginer

Dr. Sartain

James Jude Courtney

Miles Robbins

Dylan Arnold

Cameron Elam

Drew Scheid

Omar J. Dorsey

Sheriff Barker

Dana Haines

Jibrail Nantambu

David Gordon Green

Jeff Fradley

Screenwriter

Danny McBride

Malek Akkad

John Carpenter

Executive Producer

Ryan Freimann

Michael Simmonds

Cinematographer

Timothy Alverson

Film Editing

Original Music

Cody Carpenter

Daniel A. Davies

Richard A. Wright

Production Design

Art Director

Emily Gunshor

Costume Design

News & Interviews for Halloween

“Rotten Tomatoes Is Wrong” About… The Halloween Franchise

Halloween H20 Vs. Halloween (2018)

What Happened to Cinema’s Virginal Final Girl?

Critic Reviews for Halloween

Audience reviews for halloween.

The best sequel/reboot of the Halloween series. John Carpenter returns as executive producer and sound director leaving the directing to David Gordon Green of "Pineapple Express" and "Joe." The movie does a great job of connecting to and playing homage to the original (there are many easter eggs to find) while injecting an original story around the distraught Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis). Unfortunately, an unbelievable plot twist late distracts from the stronger main plot line. If you can forgive that one sin, you'll enjoy the Halloween reboot tremendously.

Great job tying in with the previous movies. JLC is a beast!

As an attempt to reinvigorate the Halloween franchise, the film mostly works. I have a few problems with it, mostly involving the 40-year gap and ignoring the previous films. I hold know ill will towards ignoring Resurrection, and it'd be pretty weird if they acknowledged the Thorn trilogy and all that. But the problem with ignoring everything is that Michael Myers goes from a force with 100s of kills to 5. We as the audience understand Michael Myers as a force of nature, but the characters in the movie shouldn't, but they still treat him that way. Laurie's trauma I understand and actually kind of like. At first I felt the same way about it that I did about everyone else's reaction to Michael, but really she was at ground zero to Michael's rampage, and just looking to real life people have gotten messed up from far less so it's actually believable she'd become this reclusive person prepping for his return. The film is at it's best when it's Laurie's story. I'd kind of compare it to the Aliens films. In the first one, it was people totally unprepared. In the second one, we got to see what happens when soldiers face off against the Aliens. Here, Laurie has completely Home Alone'd her house to prepare for Michael, so the final confrontation is satisfying because she knows what to do and she's prepared for it. However, the other characters are still required to do lots of stupid stuff. There's some dumb comedy and weird character bits, and I actually didn't mind it for the most part because it gave a level of realism to their world. What I did mind was when people would do the dumbest things they could. Not just things like "oh, they don't know they're in a slasher movie," dumb, things no person should do in any situation regardless of a killer being on the loose dumb. There's also some annoying subplots that go absolute nowhere, like a cheating boyfriend. Most slasher movies would take the chance to kill him, but here he just...I don't even know, he never even shows up again after being a dick. Look, the film has problems when I look back at it is what I'm saying. But while I was watching it, I can't deny it was a satisfying Halloween film. Far and away the best of the sequels, and definitely a better return than H20. There's a great approach to Michael as a creepy force in the distance that I really liked. There's one scene in particular where I thought to myself "wait, did I just see him walking by in the background there?" and I really wasn't sure I had until the characters started finding bodies. Stuff like that is great and gives it a creepy atmosphere. It's got good atmosphere, but for me it was never outright scary. I was never really terrified or genuinely creeped out, more just thought "ooh, that was well done". Still, it's a good return, and it shows Michael well, and Jamie Lee Curtis absolutely owns the show.

It's enamored with the original but without any of the clever voyeurism that made that movie so effective. Still, Curtis is outstanding and I like how the mythology is reduced to the bare essentials.

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'Halloween Ends' director David Gordon Green talks spoilers and the stunt Jamie Lee Curtis insisted on doing herself

• Warning: Major spoilers below if you haven't seen "Halloween Ends."
• David Gordon Green told Insider why it took so long for Michael Myers to show up in the movie.
• He revealed the scene that was originally a DVD extra and said Jamie Lee Curtis insisted on doing her own stunts.

With "Halloween Ends," director David Gordon Green puts a cap on his relaunch trilogy of the iconic horror franchise. And he held nothing back.

With 2018's "Halloween" followed by "Halloween Kills" three years later, Green took us on a blood-soaked ride as he ignored the nine sequels that came out after John Carpenter's groundbreaking 1978 movie and has Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode character patiently waiting 40 years for the return of psychotic killer Michael Myers.

But for "Halloween Ends," Green gets even more daring — introducing a new evil character and giving us less Michael Myers.

The movie catches up with Strode as she's finally come to terms with the loss of her daughter at the hands of Myers, who has not been seen since the events in "Kills."

However, there may be a new evil entering Haddonfield.

We are introduced to Corey (Rohan Campbell) who has been ostracized by the town following the death of a boy he was babysitting. After being bullied through the first half of the movie, and growing fond of Strode's granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), Corey encounters Myers and becomes the villain's killing protégé.

It leads to a gory ending that finds Strode and Myers having their final showdown.

The movie, currently in theaters and on Peacock, has been bashed by the critics. Variety called it the franchise's "most joylessly metaphorical and convoluted entry" (it has a 40% Rotten Tomatoes score ).

But the way Green sees it, it's no fun doing a franchise like "Halloween" unless you take big swings.

"It's tricky because you want to invite the fans to the party, but you also want to give something that's 100% of your creative energy," Green told Insider over a Zoom chat about his mindset in making the third movie. "You've got to swing for a few, you don't always hit them, but why not take the risk at this point."

Here, we chat with Green about the movie's biggest spoilers, his reason behind why we don't see Michael Myers until well into the movie, the gory scene that was originally planned as a DVD extra, and Curtis' insistence to have Myers smash her face through a prop-glass cabinet.

Green felt opening the movie with a kid's death would grab audiences 'by the throat'

You go and do something in the first 15 minutes of the movie that's very rare in mainstream horror movies: killing a child. Did you get any pushback from Blumhouse or Universal in making that choice?

Once we knew we were going to do a babysitter intro, and we've seen a lot of them, a lot of great ones, I think we needed to do something that grabbed people by the throat a little bit. Or a lot.

And what was really fortunate for me in this creative standpoint, the reason I continue to make movies with Blumhouse, is you get in a room and start pitching ideas and you sculpt them to be even better. It's not like they are these authoritarian corporate figures who are telling you what to do with your movie.

The second we have a rough draft we bring our DP, our production designer, our set designer, our sound mixer, and our producers into a room and we read it out loud and we hear how it goes and then we decide if it's shocking enough.

For this scene in particular did it evolve from, say, the kid breaking a leg to him falling four stories to his death?

No, he always died. There was no softer version. 

Were there different causes of the death? 

No. There were certain intentions that were different. Was Corey more mean? Was the kid really bad and, Corey in defending himself, leads to the kid dying? There were those kinds of questions we were asking. But we always knew it had to end with some ambiguity that the town could point to and say to Corey, "You're a monster." 

Green defends his choice to not have Michael Myers show up until 30 minutes into the movie

Outside of a brief recap at the beginning, Michael Myers doesn't show up until 30-40 minutes into the movie. Was there a discussion on if he should show up earlier?

There was a discussion and even through the editing process. Because you could take certain scenes from earlier and move them around. It just felt right.

Maybe I'll watch it in two years and think that's too long a gap, but it was important to me to develop characters and understand them in their own way and then introduce how Michael relates to that situation. Because he's so exciting when you see him. Myers just gets people shaking. I was worried that was going to distract from the substance of the Corey/Allyson story as it was developing. 

I thought it was a gusty move, but for me, it worked because when Corey goes on his killing spree in the Michael Myers mask, you know what his journey was to get there.

To your point, in the script stage, it was always a question if it would work because we hadn't cast our Corey yet. And if we didn't have a strong Corey cast then nobody wants to hang out in that movie. When we met Rohan and we did rehearsals I was just like, thank God. The guy is layered with vulnerability but he's also tough and physical and can really ride motorcycles. He's handsome without being pretty. He had all these attributes that we were really hoping it would pay off. 

It pays off to the point that, towards the end, I thought what you were doing was introducing us to the new Michael Myers. That Blumhouse would go and make more movies with him as The Shape.

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To be honest, I think from a studio perspective they would have been excited about that. Continue on with him. But we were writing linearly and you get to the point where you know he's got to go. How does he go? We don't know, but he's got to go. He's too evil. And no one sees his death coming. 

Michael Myers might not have special powers, but Green says he's an 'extraordinary human'

So when we meet Michael in this one he's hanging out in the sewers and he's weak. It's almost like Corey rejuvenates Michael and in turn, Michael introduces evil to Corey. Does that mean Michael has special powers? Can he feed off others who are as evil as him?

I like that you're reading into it that way. I've always tried to make sure there's an extraordinary human layer to all of what you just said. To hear from other characters, like at the end of "Halloween Kills," it's Laurie saying, "He's more than a man." That's her philosophy.

In this one, it's Willy the radio DJ saying, "This is all a conspiracy, how can one man survive all that?" We are trying to plant the seeds so that everyone can use their own intuition there. But at the same time, I can make the point: bad boys create bad boys. 

The movie does ask the question, does evil breed evil or does a person's environment create it?

It's like what the father of the child who dies at the beginning of the movie says in the pool-hall scene. It's a line that I added in post to make sure this was clear.

He says, "The kid I knew would never have hurt my son, but the look of the kid I saw at the side of the road, was that always in him or did the town do this to him?" I do want that to be a theme that people take away in terms of the infectiousness of evil. 

But the "Halloween" super fans are going to say Michael giving Corey his evil is a hat tip to the shocking ending in "Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers" when Jamie touches Michael and in the last scene, she kills her foster mother. 

That's a great ending. 

Did anyone bring that up when going over the script? "We're going straight 'Halloween 4' here."

We would spitball that because that's a movie I enjoy. I see where they were going with that movie and I respect a lot of the choices. But we are ignoring that movie in our trilogy.

We were supposed to see more of Corey's mom's death, the killing of Willy the DJ was originally just a DVD extra

What was the most memorable death scene to do in this movie?

The one that stands out is the DJ. That wasn't supposed to be in the movie. We were doing that for a DVD extra. At the script stage, we decided that would be the one we'd get ridiculous with and keep it for the DVD. 

We shot Corey's mother's death very vividly and that was to be in the movie. But when I got in the edit room, I didn't like the pacing. So now we don't see the mother's death, and that will be on an extended version if we make one. But that one is inspired by "Black Christmas." It parallels the Christmas carolers scene in that movie, but we have trick-or-treaters. 

So we cut that scene and just loved the weirdness of the DJ death. Corey is sloppy and angry, so there's something about watching that. In the edit, we were like, "Are we really going to use this?" It was so wild we had to put it in there. 

Jamie Lee Curtis was heavily involved in crafting Laurie's final battle with Michael Myers (Jim Courtney), she even did '98% of the stunts' in the scene

How did the final battle between Laurie and Michael evolve?

There was a lot of evolution. There was one version that had Allyson infused through the whole fight. But ultimately we pared that all back. I didn't want it to be your average knockdown drag-out brawl without a degree or emotion, without a degree of intimacy between these two characters that have come so far. It needed real moments. Pauses, looks, glances. However you want to look at it, these are two survivors and here we are facing them in a climactic moment. 

We had a scripted idea of where it would go and how it would begin. And then I let the stunt coordinator, Kevin Scott, and his stunt team go on the set and pencil in the geography of how the fight would go down. Then we brought in Jamie and then Jim Courtney to get their takes.

We made it a real conversation even though there are no words spoken in it. 

What kind of input did Jamie bring to the scene?

I would say 98% of the stunts are her doing them. Actually, her double only did two shots. That's Jamie's head getting smashed into the glass. She really went for it.

In fact, her face going through the glass cabinet was her idea. She said, "I want him to grab me by the hair and smash me into the glass." And I was thinking, I still got two more weeks to work with you, I can't have shards of glass in your face. But she did it. That's her face going in the glass. That stunt was her idea. I was reluctant — if not trying to forbid it — but it happened and it looks great. 

What stands out is how slowly Laurie does the slicing of Michael's neck and wrist. 

For the moment when we say night-night to Michael, I thought it was important to be slow and methodical. Let's let it drain. Let's hold hands. Let's look each other in the eye. 

Now, you say looking into their eyes. That moment between them is very similar to Michael looking into Corey's eyes. Are we to believe Laurie now has Michael's evil inside her and must battle it? I mean, she's got Michael's mask sitting on her coffee table now!

It's an amazing insight. It makes me wonder if Corey lived and didn't have a fucked up mom, maybe he could have gotten through that. I think Laurie is smarter than Corey and knows what it takes to put in the work to heal yourself and your community, so I feel she will put every effort into what she needs to do.

But I also salivate over wondering. I mean, the mask is just sitting on the coffee table, somebody's going to fucking pick that up. [ Laughs .]

Hypothetically, if Jason Blum came to you 10 years from now and said, "I got the right script to bring back 'Halloween,'" would you be up for it?

I'm done. But if he said, "I got the script for the new 'Halloween' and it's a Bollywood musical," I'm there.

Watch: 7 tricks horror movies use to scare you

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4 New Horror Books Spiked With Dread and Profound Unease

Our columnist reviews this month’s haunting new releases.

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By Gabino Iglesias

Gabino Iglesias is a writer, editor, literary critic and professor. He is the Bram Stoker and Shirley Jackson award-winning author of “The Devil Takes You Home.”

Simone St. James is known for brilliantly mixing thriller elements with supernatural mayhem, and MURDER ROAD (Berkley, 342 pp., $29) , her most recent novel, offers readers plenty of both.

During the summer of 1995, April and Eddie are on their way to a resort for their honeymoon when a wrong turn sends them down a dark road in the middle of the night. The newlyweds pick up a hitchhiker, and then realize the young woman is bleeding. April and Eddie take the woman to a hospital, but she dies.

The couple soon learn the hitchhiker is just one of many who’ve met their demise on Atticus Line. The road, according to locals, is haunted by a ghost known as the Lost Girl, “a stupid legend,” who has allegedly been killing people for decades. Under pressure because of the unsolved murders, the police unsuccessfully try to pin the killing on the couple, and after they are cleared of any wrongdoing, April and Eddie stick around and try to get to the bottom of things. But the newlyweds have their own dark past, and as it catches up to them, so does the darkness that haunts Atticus Line.

Fast, chilling, entertaining, unexpectedly touching, and with two broken, memorable characters at its core, this might be St. James’s best novel yet.

Argentina’s new wave of horror fiction is quickly finding an international audience, and in the process, has introduced the world to literary giants like Mariana Enríquez and Samanta Schweblin. Now, Marina Yuszczuk joins that list of Argentine horror stars with THIRST (Dutton, 241 pp., $28) .

The book, which is translated by Heather Cleary, is a unique vampire novel full of eroticism and feminist rage. The story takes place in two different periods. First we follow a female vampire escaping persecution, making her way across Europe over the centuries and finally landing in Buenos Aires, where she experiences the city’s early days as well as the yellow fever pandemics of the late 1800s. Eventually, she’s forced to go into hiding in a cemetery. The second part of the book follows a divorced mother who’s dealing with her own mother’s declining health and who receives a strange old photo from an ailing woman that links her to the vampire.

This gripping tale is full of queer representation and lush, lyrical passages, all while exploring death with an air of nihilism. “We’re all standing at death’s door,” Yuszczuk writes. “Someone has to be next in line.” Vampires are making a comeback, and Yuszczuk is spearheading their revival with this bloody novel.

In addition to scaring readers, the tales in THROUGH THE NIGHT LIKE A SNAKE: Latin American Horror Stories (Two Lines Press/Calico, 228 pp., paperback, $16.95) are meant to elicit a profound sense of unease, and they pull it off with flying colors.

The anthology collects 10 stories from some of Latin America’s best purveyors of what the editor Sarah Coolidge calls “narrativa de lo inusual” — narrative of the unusual. In Mariana Enriquez’s “That Summer in the Dark,” translated by Megan McDowell, two young friends become obsessed with serial killers and then must confront the reality of a murderer in their own building. Maximiliano Barrientos’s “The Third Transformation,” translated by Tim Gutteridge, is a superb body horror nightmare full of mystery and also breathing meat flowers with teeth. Julián Isaza’s “Visitor,” translated by Joel Streicker, is the funniest story in the collection, and perhaps the one with the greatest twist. It follows an elderly woman who rescues an alien and develops a symbiotic relationship with it that leads to murder.

These stories — relentlessly unsettling as they are — serve as a fantastic introduction to a growing movement that’s bound to enrich, and help diversify, speculative fiction for years to come.

STITCHES (Viz Media, 112 pp., $18) combines the art of Junji Ito, perhaps the world’s most renowned mangaka, with the brief, punchy short stories of Hirokatsu Kihara, translated by Jocelyne Allen, to craft a delectable collection of illustrated scary stories.

Nine very short tales (more horrific morsels than full stories) make up this book, and they all share some cohesive elements: They open with a blunt opening line like “This happened when M was in elementary school,” followed by a supernatural event and then a surprising twist.

Ito and Kihara fully embrace horror in these tiny tales. In “Face,” a woman sprouts a small face on the back of her neck that must be removed by a priest. “Library” is about the ghost of a young girl who haunts a school library. “The Play” tells of a special staging of “Pinocchio” in which an otherworldly presence insists on participating. “Folk Dance” and “The Kimono” are opposite sides of the same coin: In the former, a photographer fails to capture an image of a dancing specter; in the latter, a friendly, playful ghost shows up in a family picture.

Ito, whose classics like “Uzumaki” and “Tomie” are horror staples, is a master at creating creepy details and expressive faces that help carry Kihara’s succinct terrors. Together, the two masters create their own brand of dark magic.

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The actress Rebel Wilson, known for roles in the “Pitch Perfect” movies, gets vulnerable about her weight loss, sexuality and money  in her new memoir.

“City in Ruins” is the third novel in Don Winslow’s Danny Ryan trilogy and, he says, his last book. He’s retiring in part to invest more time into political activism .

​​Jonathan Haidt, the social psychologist and author of “The Anxious Generation,” is “wildly optimistic” about Gen Z. Here’s why .

Do you want to be a better reader?   Here’s some helpful advice to show you how to get the most out of your literary endeavor .

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Get Set for a Spooky Summer as Halloween Horror Nights Starts Earlier Than Ever

The annual genre event will feature ten scream-worthy haunted houses.

The Big Picture

• Horror fans rejoice! Halloween Horror Nights is back early in 2024 at Universal Orlando with 48 nights of terror and ten haunted houses.
• From classic Universal Monsters to modern hits like Blumhouse films, this year's haunted houses will cater to every horror movie lover's taste.
• Mark your calendars for select nights from August 30- November 3, get your tickets early, and prepare for a spooky good time filled with scares, merchandise, and food.

For horror fans, Halloween is a year-long event and there’s never a bad time to watch our favorite blood-soaked genre films. It’s never too early to celebrate the scare-tastic holiday. In years past, the mecca of Halloween parties was Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror Nights . Now It’s just been announced that the horror-centric theme park is coming back to Universal Orlando sooner than expected to kick off Halloween 2024 in grand spooky fashion.

This year’s Halloween Horror Nights will be terrifying Universal on select nights from August 30- November 3 . Those nights are August 30-September 1, September 4-8, September 11-15, September 18-22, September 25-29, October 2-6, October 9-13, October 16-20, October 23-27, and October 30-November 3. That’s 48 total nights of dread . The park will feature ten movie-like haunted houses with a mix of horror’s most popular brands and characters alongside original nightmares that are bound to keep attendees shivering for weeks. Scare Zones will also be returning, which fill the attraction's haunting streets with hundreds of frightening monsters. There’s never a dull moment at Horror Nights, but at least the various franchise-themed merchandise and scary-good food and drinks will once again give people some much-needed comfort.

You’re in for a Scare From Horror's Past and Present

While horror fans don’t know what haunted houses will feature this year yet, in the past, Universal has done a great job with their haunting variety. Whether it be something classic like the Universal Monsters or something more modern like Blumhouse’s extensive catalog of titles, there is something scream-worthy for every type of horror movie lover. Last year , some of the best houses celebrated The Last of Us , Chucky , and Stranger Things Season 4. 2024 has already been filled with a ton of wonderful horror movies. Universal released Night Swim earlier this year, and they have Abigail , a new take on Dracula’s Daughter , biting its way to theaters later this month. Either one of those would be a fine choice for a haunted house, but this would also be a great time to highlight smaller films like Lisa Frankenstein , Immaculate , and Late Night With the Devil that have become instant cult classics for those who bravely watched them. There’s still a lot of compelling horror to come, like A Quiet Place: Day One , MaXXXine , and Longlegs . So it’ll be interesting to see what new films this year will be highlighted and what icons will be creeping out of the vault.

Single day tickets are on sale now on Universal Orlando’s website and Halloween Horror Nights will be included in a seven-day vacation package. Upgrades, featuring late night RIP Tours and behind-the-scenes tours are also advisable for purchase. Horror Nights will be coming to Universal Hollywood as well . There will be more information in the coming months as we get closer to the spooky season.