Back in 2018, David Gordon Green did the unthinkable: He made a popular and critically acclaimed sequel to John Carpenter’s 1978 horror classic Halloween, ignoring a litany of previous sequels and remakes in the process. Four years and one trilogy later, it’s safe to say Green’s franchise-savior reputation has been tarnished; follow-ups Halloween Kills and the new Halloween Ends have seen diminishing returns in terms of box office and Metacritic scores. The promise that Ends will indeed close the curtain on beloved Final Girl Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and the masked figure sometimes called The Shape—more commonly known as Michael Myers—has been greeted by many with derisive relief: Halloween Ends? Please do! But maybe some time off from Michael Myers will give horror fans the opportunity to revisit all three movies, and realize that Green has made some of the best and most distinctive slasher sequels of the post-Scream era.
It’s easy to understand why Green’s first Halloween sequel hit it big. Having Laurie reappear as a doomsday prepper who teams up with her daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) to outfox Michael Myers makes for a massive crowd-pleaser—a victorious high that must turn temporary for the story to continue. Kills and Ends untie that bow and work it into something knottier and stranger. At the same time, they recall past retconned sequels, whether in Easter eggs (such as Kills’ cameos of props from the otherwise-unrelated Halloween III: Season of the Witch), or actual plot points, like Michael’s hobo-style hideout in Ends, which recalls Halloween 5’s similar set-up. Most dramatically, Halloween Kills mimics plot and setting elements from Halloween II, even as it discards that film’s famous revelation that Michael and Laurie are long-lost siblings.
This willingness to simultaneously recall and rebuke past series touchstones has been read by some as a toxic mixture that tries to have it both ways: disdain for the retconned sequels awkwardly paired with groveling fan service for anyone who might miss them. Yet there’s nothing in the text of Green’s movies that particularly suggests a dislike for the other Halloween movies (many of which are bad!) so much as a desire to make their baggage implicit, rather than explicit. His use of this baggage lends past, decanonized Halloweens a folkloric quality–part of an unspoken history of Haddonfield, the fictional Illinois town where most Halloween movies are set. To refocus the films on Haddonfield, the trilogy actually goes further than simply erasing Michael and Laurie’s shared parentage: It implies that Michael isn’t especially interested in stalking and killing Laurie in particular. He sticks around because Haddonfield is his home. Despite his supernatural resilience, Michael Myers is just a man; the real Shape may be Haddonfield itself.
That becomes clearer in the first sequel, Halloween Kills, when a lot of fans decided the series had gone off the rails. For much of that second movie, Laurie is sidelined in favor of vignettes where various likable citizens of Haddonfield are interrupted and brutally massacred by the town boogeyman. These character sketches—of a sardonic gay couple having their own Halloween party; a middle-aged Black couple amusing themselves with a drone; some folks out at a bar briefly clashing and then reconciling—are drawn with Green’s love for the quirks of human behavior. This unifying element is consistent across his eclectic body of work: His indie productions like Prince Avalanche and Joe feature haunting performances from non-actors, while for a broad comedy like The Sitter, he’ll cast Sam Rockwell as the main villain, just to make it easier to vibe with his weird brand of menace. Spending three movies in Haddonfield gives him ample opportunity to poke around in its humanity, rather than leaving it as a vague, all-American hunting ground for a psycho, and in Kills the town’s residents are delightfully individualistic. That is, until they’re confronted with the return of the Shape, whereupon they become terrified, angry, and often dangerous.
The Haddonfield of Halloween Ends, which is mostly set four years after the events of the first two films, finds even Green-er country in its newly desiccated scenery. Plenty of folks still live in the long-suffering town, but Green zeroes in on its nooks and crannies, which are cluttered with debris and machine parts, closely resembling the post-industrial landscapes he’s photographed in smaller projects like George Washington, Undertow, and Joe. It’s only natural that Corey (Rohan Campbell), the movie’s resident outcast, would work at a car mechanic’s junkyard, and that Allyson, having survived the first two movies, would be drawn to his romantic disillusionment over his scarred, judgmental hometown. Like Laurie—and nearly everyone else in Haddonfield—Corey is haunted by his past, though the gruesome accident that changed his life is only tangentially related to Michael Myers. His romance with Allyson plays as a kind of townie gothic, with touches of mid-century Americana (a diner, a motorcycle, the radio tower of a ubiquitous local DJ) fueling two lovers on the run who nonetheless can’t outrun the birthplace that’s shaped them as much as it has Michael.
Giving so much of the film over to Corey and Allyson is a bold gambit, as is letting Laurie relinquish some of her badass determination to kill Michael as she attempts to play doting grandmother. This makes Laurie a true citizen of Haddonfield, shaped by the evil the town has witnessed, and trying different tactics to cope with it. Is Laurie a traumatized survivor, an empowered badass, a barely-recovering addict, or a memoirist reflecting on the past that shaped her? In Green’s trilogy, she’s all of those, just as slasher villains can turn from pitiful victims to monsters to de facto protagonists of their long-running series.
To that end, Ends also performs an eerie and effective riff on the next-generation positioning of both legacy sequels and old-fashioned ’80s slasher series, which semi-regularly threatened to pass the knife from iconic masked killer to fresh-faced upstart. Historically, this tactic never sticks (see Michael Myers’ niece in Halloween 4, or the copycat Jason Voorhees in Friday the 13th: A New Chapter) and Corey is appropriately dorky compared to the hardened menace of Old Man Myers (who does appear, albeit less frequently than in the last two movies). Again Green uses slasher standbys to evoke both their ritualistic pull and the unpredictable psychic imprint of violence.
Not everything about the new movies works perfectly. As we saw with the Star Wars sequel trilogy, there’s something uncomfortably distended about two legacy sequels taking place in close proximity before jumping years ahead for the finale. Moreover, Green’s subtext can be heavy-handed and sometimes contradictory—especially if it’s taken as a one-to-one metaphorical commentary on the January 6th riots, or vigilante justice, or, yes, sigh, generational trauma.
But these references are part of the trilogy’s texture, not its reason for being. Green’s Halloween movies repeat themselves and other movies, while also managing to move further afield from the original movie, recalling the way that the past can start to look distorted with repeated revisitations, or how a folktale changes shape with new tellings. The Haddonfield we see in Halloween Ends—trash-strewn underpasses, a hollowed-out mini-mansion, a frenzied night at a local bar that looks more feverish than when we saw it in Kills—doesn’t much resemble the town from two movies or 44 years ago, yet it maintains some familiarity, much like Michael’s worn-to-abstraction white mask. The closure provided by Halloween Ends may not be what fans were looking for, but it plays fair. It shows what happens to Laurie and to Michael, and doesn’t leave much room for another sequel. With the weird serenity of its final shot, the movie acknowledges a truth equally applicable to good and to evil: Some things don’t need to be living or breathing to survive.