No Surrender Cinema: Halloween Ends
Freddy had his Final Nightmare, the story of Jason Voorhees had its Final Chapter, and now Michael Myers is looking mortality straight in the face. After 40+ years of putting the town of Haddonfield through hell and destroying the life of Laurie Strode, there is supposed to be no coming back from this one. Let’s see if the promise is kept as we use this October edition of No Surrender Cinema to celebrate the spooky season with the latest (and supposedly last) entry into the Halloween franchise, Halloween Ends.
SPOILER WARNING: This review contains spoilers for Halloween Ends. Don’t read any further if you haven’t seen the film yet!
Our film begins not with any of the characters that we’ve come to know, but with the introduction of some new faces. Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) is a skittish, meek young man who is spending Halloween Night 2019 acting as a babysitter for an obnoxious little kid. When the child’s parents head out to a Halloween party, Corey and Jeremy pass the time by watching John Carpenter’s The Thing. Rather than sit around and get scared, Jeremy decides to do the scaring, and lures Corey up into the attic and locking him in. Panicked, Corey kicks the door open, but the force of the door swinging outward knocks Jeremy backwards over the bannister and plummeting down three stories to his death.
Although the incident was a tragic accident, the town turns on Corey, making him the scapegoat for all of the horrors it has endured. With Michael Myers having gone from Boogeyman to Invisible Man and not making his presence felt in the four years that have passed by since the events of Halloween Kills, Corey is the Most Hated Man In Town. It’s something that has clearly gotten to him, but his timid nature has made him a sad sack that allows himself to be bullied by members of the high school marching band and talked down to by his loud, overbearing mother. Laurie winds up coming to his defense during an encounter with the former and sets up an introduction between Corey and her granddaughter Allyson. The two agree to a date for a Halloween party and everything is swell until Corey is berated publicly by the mother of the kid whose death he caused. Corey takes some of his repressed anger out on Allyson and storms off, but the night goes from bad to worse when the Marching Band Mafia toss him off an overpass and he’s dragged into the sewers by a shadowy figure.
Some time later, Corey awakens, surrounded by rats, but if you’re looking for Master Splinter and the Ninja Turtles, you’re in the wrong zip code, bub. The shadowy figure is none other than Michael Myers himself, having disappeared underground after the pounding he took during the finale of Halloween Kills. Corey is snatched by the throat when he tries to flee, and in that moment we get a quick peek into Corey’s mind that shows us his fractured mental state and the thoughts that are manifesting. Throw in another dead body where the blood is on Corey’s hands (another accidental kill that is much more hastily thrown in the film than the one that sets things off) and Houston, we’ve got a problem.
Corey’s descent into madness is also the spark that enhances his confidence, even though he looms around town looking like a haggard Harry Potter. None of this deters Allyson, who falls harder for him. The two connect on a level that others can’t understand, since both are outcasts in their own right, but while Allyson is lauded for being a survivor, Corey will always be the Psycho Babysitter. One of the best aspects of the film is that it has Laurie, who has plenty of experience with psychopaths, quickly picks up on the fact that Corey’s newfound strength is a mask for the dark side he’s begun to embrace. Since the entire town has turned against him, he looks to Myers as a kindred spirit and appoints himself his apprentice of sorts. Corey doesn’t fear Michael and gleefully lures on person into the sewer hideout for Michael to make mincemeat out of, smiling when The Shape takes the man by the throat and starts stabbing away. This act seems to restore some of Michael’s previously lost strength, and for the first time since the previous film, we see him stalking the streets of Haddonfield once again.
By the time Halloween Ends rolls into its third act, Corey has completely snapped, a fact that only Laurie Strode seems to realize. Laurie’s Spider-Sense has been going off around the young man, and he rightfully points out that she’s the one who hooked him up with Allyson in the first place. Corey decries Laurie as being a hypocrite, because her quest to kill the psycho that came after her in 1978 has damaged her beyond repair. Laurie’s warning to stay away from Allyson pushes Corey over the edge, so much so that he turns on his murderous mentor and rips his identity away from him, donning the Michael Myers mask and embarking on a reign of terror where none of his previous antagonists are safe. If Haddonfield wants to paint Corey as the villain, then he’s going to be the biggest villain he can be, even when the real Michael Myers is still at large.
I liked the inclusion of Corey here in Halloween Ends, even if the film does come off as a little preachy at times when it focuses on the mental health of the core characters. A lot of allusions were drawn between Michael’s effect on the town of Haddonfield and the despair that people felt in real life while going through the pandemic of the past few years. It was an interesting choice, invoking thoughts of real life despair and sadness to try and build sympathy for the survivors of a fictional killer. What I liked more, though, is that Halloween Ends often seems to be getting by on a tried and true horror trope like the sweet girl falling for the killer, but then throws a middle finger up at us and makes a sharp left turn. It’s a divisive method of storytelling for sure, and I agree that it can make for inconsistent storytelling, but at the heart of the story it’s really just there as a stepping stone to the meat and potatoes…the main event…the final encounter between Michael Myers and Laurie Strode.
In my introduction to this column, I mentioned several instances where popular horror characters took their “final bow”, only to be return soon after. Freddy came back to battle Jason and get rebooted, Jason returned from the grave in one of the most popular entries in 80’s horror (and my personal favorite film of the Friday The 13th series), and Michael himself went through several Halloween series reboots before Blumhouse erased everything save for the first film from canon and put their “requel” of the franchise into motion. The fact is, none of these characters ever stay dead for long; not on film, and certainly not in popular culture. Halloween Kills may not have fared well with audiences last year, myself being one of its detractors, but as long as these films make money, they’ll continue to get made, regardless of fan goodwill. This is also important to remember since even though Halloween Ends is supposedly the end of the story, it’s really only the end of the one that Blumhouse wanted to tell while their studio had the rights; with this third and final entry, the rights revert back to Malek Akkad, whose family has been involved with the production of Halloween films dating back to the originals.
Halloween Ends closes the book on Michael Myers for now, and does it in a way where you’re curious about where things go from here. The kill scenes are rather pedestrian, and one even got a chuckle out of me when it probably shouldn’t have. All in all, I was entertained much more by this film than the previous one, and the Corey character being set up as a co-conspirator to Myers put a nice twist on what I expected the story to be. It ain’t Shakespeare, but it didn’t need to be; it’s just the right type of movie for a night with the lights off and a bag of popcorn at your disposal.
(Bonus points for Corey’s dad watching Hard Target, even though it made him oblivious to the fact that his junkyard was turning into a murder scene.)
Halloween Ends is currently streaming on Peacock and showing in theaters.
