When you’re following the path of the original Halloween films — as David Gordon Green has done for his only-the-first-film-counts sequel trilogy, co-created with Danny McBride — then movie three must break the formula. After 2018’s Halloween brought back Michael Myers for another Haddonfield massacre in a John Carpenter’s original-homaging film, and 2021 follow-up Halloween Kills took a Halloween II-style detour to the local hospital, it’s Halloween III: Season Of The Witch writ large that comes to mind when watching closing chapter Halloween Ends. Ends has Myers alright, but like Witch (which it consciously apes in its blue title card), Ends feels markedly different from what came before it, moving away from Laurie Strode’s original Boogeyman.
It’s a bold move — but not as exciting as you might think. Season Of The Witch is now a cult classic; nobody will be taking up ends’ narrative left-turn in that vein. In fact, rather than ending a trilogy it feels more like an epilogue to everything that has come before. While Halloween and Halloween Kills all happened over one night — Myers wiped out half of Haddonfield while Jamie Lee Curtis’ grizzled grown-up Laurie fought to end her nightmare once and for all — Ends jumps forward four years later. We haven’t seen Michael Myers since then either; but we have seen the impact he made on Haddonfield, which is still nursing its collective grief and rage.
That time-jump does give us Curtis’ Laurie in an invigorating new light — one of the few residents of Haddonfield seemingly determined to seize the day now. It’s nice to see our former final girl shown other sides after decades consumed by PTSD; it seems she wants to taste every bit of life she can before she actually dies. But make no mistake about who this movie is truly about: Rohan Campbell’s Corey Cunningham, a new character that lives in the town and whose fear of Michael Myers ends up leading to a shocking tragedy, which we see in an effectively tense opening sequence. He becomes a pariah around town, his guilt and fear and rage turning inwards — until Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak, somewhat under-served in this series) recognizes the nature of his pain. For most of its running time, Ends is an Allyson/Corey Halloween character drama; they start dating just as you know it’s all about to be derailed by masked figures.
Green does remix certain things well here. Ends not only cherry-picks from wider Halloween lore (everything from Witch to Resurrection), but his intentions here flirt with the kind of psychological/sociopolitical horror that Ari Aster’s Hereditary or Nia DaCosta’s Candyman are playing with. Unlike those films though, Green cannot synthesize the serious with the popcorn stuff. It is interesting but makes for a bad movie. And so yeah time spent with Corey isn’t great I’m afraid.
At the very least, there’s some inspiration to the filmmaking. Green has always been good at nuts-and-bolts horror sequences (though there’s considerably less of that here), and Ends’ abrasive sound mix is a different kind of audience discomfort. There is pleasure in seeing Green really go for something — to explore fear and trauma as a virus that exists beyond any one person — even if he ultimately gets lost amid his Big Ideas.
The movie eventually does deliver on the long-promised Laurie versus Michael showdown — and Halloween Ends, to its credit, definitely ends. But it does so via an unusual route that isn’t likely to satisfy audiences expecting slasher thrills and spills. Gore-wise, aside from some inspired splatter — a great severed-tongue gag, wince-inducing death-by-blowtorch — Green’s trilogy goes out with more of a sizzle than a bang, not so much running out of ideas as energy. When the credits roll, you may feel more tricked than treated.
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