Halloween Ends

The moment the opening credits rolled and those jagged, electric-blue letters hit the screen, I knew exactly what kind of trouble we were in. For the uninitiated, blue text in this franchise is a direct visual dog whistle to 1982’s Halloween III: Season of the Witch—the black sheep sequel that famously ditched Michael Myers entirely. By choosing that font, David Gordon Green wasn’t just being retro; he was firing a warning shot. He was telling us that the grand finale of his multi-million dollar trilogy was about to take a hard left turn into "weird," and I’ve spent the last two years oscillating between admiring his guts and scratching my head at the execution.

The Boy Who Cried Shape

Instead of the 111-minute wrestling match between Laurie Strode and Michael Myers we were promised by the marketing, we got the tragic, grimy origin story of Corey Cunningham. Rohan Campbell steps into the spotlight as a social pariah who accidentally kills a child he’s babysitting (a grim inversion of the original 1978 premise), and the film spends an enormous amount of time watching him "catch" evil like a common cold.

I’ll be honest: spending the final chapter of a 40-year rivalry focusing on a brand-new character is a move so ballsy it borders on cinematic trolling. But there’s something fascinating about how Haddonfield is portrayed here. In the era of social media dogpiling and heightened community trauma, the town itself has become the monster. They’ve bullied Corey into becoming the very thing they fear. It’s a messy, cynical look at how "The Shape" isn't just a man in a mask, but a darkness that can be transmitted. I watched this while wearing a pair of itchy wool socks that were far more distracting than any of Corey’s teenage angst, yet I couldn't look away from his weird, sewer-dwelling mentorship with a decaying Michael Myers.

A Legacy on the Kitchen Counter

When we finally do get to Jamie Lee Curtis, she’s in a jarringly different place than the "survivalist grandma" we met in the 2018 reboot. She’s writing a memoir, making pies, and trying to flirt with Will Patton’s Deputy Frank Hawkins. It feels like a different movie entirely, a domestic drama that just happens to have a serial killer living in the municipal drainage system. Andi Matichak returns as Allyson, who unfortunately gets saddled with a "bad boy" romance subplot that feels like it belongs in a YA novel rather than a slasher finale.

However, when the violence finally erupts, it is mean, creative, and startlingly gore-heavy. The radio station kill is an all-timer for the franchise—a scene that reminds you Green actually knows how to stage a nasty death when he isn’t busy being a philosopher. James Jude Courtney plays a weakened, pathetic version of Michael, which I found surprisingly effective. Seeing the boogeyman as a fragile, huffing old man makes him more grounded, though I know many fans felt it robbed the character of his mythic power.

The Pandemic and the Peacock Problem

Looking back at Halloween Ends, you can see the fingerprints of our current "hybrid" era all over it. Universal Pictures released this day-and-date on the Peacock streaming service, a move that likely shaved millions off its box office but cemented its status as a "watch it at home and argue on Twitter" event. It pulled in over $104 million regardless, proving that the Halloween Collection is essentially bulletproof.

There’s a lot of "legacy sequel" fatigue in the air these days, but this film avoids the "greatest hits" trap by being actively hostile to what the audience expected. It doesn't want to be a comfort watch. It wants to be a strange, somatic exploration of how violence ruins a zip code. The climax—a brutal, kitchen-utensil-heavy showdown—is the only time the movie plays the notes we paid to hear. It’s a cathartic, bone-crunching sequence that Jamie Lee Curtis sells with every fiber of her being, reminding us why she’s the undisputed Queen of Horror.

Even if the "Corey era" feels like a bizarre detour, the final twenty minutes provide a sense of finality that the genre rarely allows. They literally put the past through a metal shredder. In a franchise that has been rebooted and retconned more times than a superhero’s origin story, there’s something genuinely respectable about that.

Halloween Ends is a deeply weird, often frustrating experiment that I’ve come to appreciate more with distance. It isn't the "ultimate showdown" the trailers lied to us about, but it's a fascinatingly grim character study of a town that has forgotten how to be kind. It’s flawed, overstuffed, and takes too long to get to the point, but I’d rather have a weird swing like this than a safe, boring retread. If this truly is the end for Laurie Strode, she went out fighting—not just Michael, but the expectations of a billion-dollar franchise.

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