*Warning! This article contains MAJOR spoilers for Halloween Kills! If you haven’t seen the movie yet and don’t want anything spoilers, then you might want to click off the article right now! You have been warned!*
Halloween Ends arrived in theaters and on Peacock last weekend. Much like the last Halloween movie, Kills, it has gained a rather mixed response from fans and critics alike. It also doesn’t seem to be doing quite as good at the box office as early projections claimed it would. That is not exactly how you want a franchise movie to be received, especially one that has been stated repeatedly to be the final movie of the franchise. However, saying a new Halloween movie has gotten a polarizing or negative reception is actually nothing out of the ordinary.
Every since the original Halloween came out in 1978, it has been followed up with 12 other entries. Of those 12 entries, the only one that received generally positive reviews is Halloween 2018. Every other one has fell victim to either a muddled or negative reactions at the time each one came out. Although a handful of them such as Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers and Halloween H20: 20 Years Later had developed strong cut followings since their releases, I’m not sure Halloween Ends will be as gracious many years down the road.
The main reason I don’t see Ends being more well-liked in the future mostly has to do with the number of interesting choices made in what is suppose to be the overall conclusion of the Halloween series. The main one of course being that the movie seems to put most of it’s focus on a brand new character never before seen in the Halloween franchise named Corey Cullingham, played by the admittedly quite handsome Rohan Campbell (who I hope to God is not on social media).
Despite most of the marketing focusing on Ends being about Laurie Strodie and Michael Myers’s final showdown in the series, that’s not actually the main focus of the movie. As a matter of fact, that basically feels like a footnote to the whole thing. If it wasn’t for the fact that the trailers and posters put so much emphasis on that one aspect and the overall climax, I would be hard pressed to discover that this is in fact a Halloween movie that took place in the same timeline as 2018 and Kills. Instead, it focuses on a young man named Corey Cullingham and his tragic life spend in Haddonfield.
On a Halloween night in 2019, Corey Cullingham was a 21-year old babysitter and was put in charge to look after a young boy named Jeremy. During his time with him, Jeremy pulls a prank on him by making him think Michael Myers has arrived and locking him in the attic. Just when the parents got home, Corey kicks the door of the attic so hard that it knocks Jeremy over a staircase (in a comedically over-the-top sequence) and plummets to his death. Corey is accused of intentionally killing Jeremy and spends some time in the slammer until he became clear of manslaughter.
Despite three years passing by and being cleared, many folks in Haddonfield still believes him to be a killer. After coming home from work at his stepfather’s salvage yard, he gets picked on and bullied by a group of high school seniors, sustaining a severe injury to his hand. Laurie witnesses this and helps take Corey to the emergency room to treat that hand injury. It’s at the hospital that he meets Laurie’s granddaughter, Allyson, who now works as a nurse. The two begin to fall in love with one another and start dating. As the two start to go out together in public, the public doesn’t take so kindly to Corey’s appearance.
At a Halloween party at a bar, he runs into the mother of the dead child who chews him out and telling him he knows that he killed the boy on purpose. After going home from the party, he once again gets bullied by those same high schoolers, who beat him up and throw him down a bridge. This leads to Corey waking up after being unconscious and headed down the sewers where he runs into Michael Myers himself. After Michael has his arms around Corey’s head and about to kill him as he has done to many of his prey, he takes a good look into Corey’s eyes and sees he got killer in his eyes just as he does. Once he is let go from Michael, Corey is confronted by a homeless man who he stabs to death and flees, which gains him that killer instinct he may have had when he killed the boy three years ago.
After constant more public appearances not being approved by the public such as Allyson’s ex-boyfriend/cop at a restaurant, the couple decide they want to leave Haddonfield together and go somewhere more peaceful. Laurie, who had been skeptical of Corey since he started dating her grandfather, wants to break the two up but neither one of them approves, which leads to potentially alienating Allyson.
This lead to Halloween night in 2022 where Corey decided to spend the last night at Haddonfield by killing anyone that dares get in his way such as his parents and Laurie herself. After going back in the sewer to steal Michael’s mask and with some help from the same clumsy high schoolers, he’s able to murder his stepfather, mother, and a few others who wronged him. Just as he goes to kill Laurie herself, she makes a call to report a suicide which at first seems like it’s for herself but it ends up being for Corey herself.
After baiting Corey with her false suicide attempt, it’s then that Corey slices his own throat because if he can’t be with Allyson, then no one can in an effort to frame Laurie for killing him, just like he got framed for killing the boy. After being still half alive, Michael Myers comes out of nowhere and finished the job for Corey by killing him and taking back his mask that he stole. This leads to one last confrontation between Laurie and Michael themselves, with Allyson eventually getting in on the action, making the climax have to do with the two main leads that the movie promoted itself with instead of the one character who was actually the main focus all along.
So, yeah! Apparently someone involved with the production of this new Halloween movie decided that the only way they could justify a trilogy’s worth of movies in this timeline with the final installment is by creating a new origin story of a character who thought he was destined to be the next Michael Myers until he wasn’t. While prior Halloween movies have hinted at an idea like this, this is the first one to have that be the main point. The problem with that isn’t necessarily just that this is the last one in the trilogy and focusing on a new character disconnected from the main Laurie and Michael story makes this timeline feel uneven (although that doesn’t really help) but that I don’t think the film 100% commits itself to that idea as a whole.
First off, there really isn’t enough information giving in the movie as to what kind of person Corey was before the tragic incident with the kid who he was babysitting. While I know he didn’t mean to kill that kid, was he really that much of a good person to begin with? Maybe he got along with kids and his parents but there isn’t much else aside from that. The movie keeps beating down on Corey after the accidental death he committed in an effort to make us feel sympathetic. However, I don’t really think there is anything making him truly worthy of sympathy. Yes, it sucks to see him be viewed in the public eye as he is but we need to actually like something about him aside from the fact that everyone hates him because he killed someone by accident.
This also makes the relationship between Corey and Allyson even more awkward as it is hard to tell how we are suppose to feel about the two being together. For what I understand, Allyson is completely unaware of all the killings Corey had done in the movie aside from the kid he babysat or that he is basically Michael Myer’s apprentice. But the way Corey is always acting so strange and defensive around her when he is in public makes you wonder why Allyson isn’t bothering to question dating a potential killer and run away with him. Again, this does seem to hint at an idea of a member of the Strode family turning into her own Michael Myers but the film never commits to it. It makes you wonder why Allyson want to so badly go away with this boy who could just (literally) stab her in the back at any given moment.
The worst of this all is how this storyline ends. I almost want to believe that the original idea here for Corey was how one tragic incident could lead to a innocent young man turn into pure evil and chaos just like Michael Myers. How Michael has impacted Haddonfield so hard that not only does everyone fear him but want to become him. How there will be more insane folks like Corey that will haunt this corrupted town for many years to come. However, just about all of that is flushed down the toilet after Corey is unceremoniously killed off by himself and Michael Myers. Once it gets to the actual climax of the movie and the one character we spent the most time on is killed off just like that, it makes the whole thing feel like a lot of build up to not really all that much.
Despite Allyson acknowledging that Laurie was right about Corey, the Strode family seems to be the only ones to acknowledge him. Everyone else just seems to focus on Michael Myers, the antagonist who only shows up for about ten minutes in the actual movie, and not on Corey, even with all the violent crimes he committed the same Halloween night. It makes you wonder why the filmmakers bothered to go through the amount of trouble they did to create a villain origin story only to cop out at the last second by killing the villain off. That just basically goes back to the problem for doing this in your final film.
When you are making a concluding chapter, then it’s best to tell a story that is able to wrap up the plot threads of all the previous movies instead of inserting in new ones and have that be the main point of the narrative. You can add in new elements if you like but it should not derail from the main story that has been focused on in the preceding two films. It’s like trying to plug a puzzle piece from an entirely different puzzle than the puzzle you are currently trying to solve. There are things that just don’t fit.
When thinking about Halloween Ends, I can’t straight up say I hate it or even think it’s bad. I’m more conflicted and frustrated than anything else. I’m honestly had a point with films where I find the ones that set itself up to be the most safe, disposable, uninteresting piece of media imaginable to be more offensive than the ones that swing for the fences and doesn’t quite succeed at it. However, I’m just not sure this was the right film to swing the fences with. If it was a beginning or middle chapter, I could see it working more as it would lead to more room for character growth and exploration of the choices made. As a final chapter, where everything has to be resolved by the end, it makes it come across as rather iffy in execution.
I would say the Halloween franchise should have worries for the future but there has been much worse that has come from this series that it was able to overcome and I don’t see this one being any different. Guess we’ll have to wait and see ourselves!
Even so, the legacy of Laurie Strode and Michael Myers will always live on. Even if Corey Cunningham doesn’t.
Adam's Blog 