Halloween Ends: The Problem Behind The Problem

Note: This will be full of spoilers. If you plan on seeing Halloween Ends and don't want it spoiled, come back after you've seen it. 

Not shockingly, Halloween Ends has been divisive. I predicted as much when I wrote my First Reaction. Part of the reason I didn't wade into a proper review was that I felt like I needed to sit with it, think about it some more and see what came of it. I was also hoping to try to catch it again before writing anything more in depth. I've recently come to see the thought process behind reviews based on a single viewing being treated as worthy critique as flawed. Describing my reaction to a film is one thing, but that's not really critique is it? It can, to some degree, describe whether a film succeeds in the goals it sets for itself. Did it manage to inspire an emotional reaction in me? It takes more time to be able to look at what about a film is working or isn't, how the story is constructed, do the rest of the technical pieces of the filmmaking process work to support the goals and the story? 

Halloween Ends isn't a film the majority of the world believes is worthy of that consideration, and even a good portion of horror fans and fans of the franchise would say, "This is just a silly slasher movie, there's no need to go that deep," or the equivalent. The nexus of trash and art though is always interesting though. Those instances of entertainment made for mass consumption or in genres considered trash also touching that much more ineffable space that is "art" are interesting and I try to approach films as if they might just do that. It's always possible and rarely likely. 

The Halloween franchise has been around for over forty years, and if the box office success of Halloween Ends is any indication, people aren't tired of it. Something about it works. The list of imitators that have come and gone in that time is in the thousands. As is often the case, this franchise began with a genuinely great film. There are now twelve other film chasing that legacy or trying to engage with what's made it such a cultural behemoth. Some of them are better than others, but it's no way controversial to say none of them live up to the quality of the original. 

From the minute the credits rolled on Halloween Ends it was clear die hard Michael Myers fans were going to be unhappy. Walter Chaw has a particularly good piece on why that is. There's a chance I would have been disappointed in the early years of my love affair with horror. It took a while for me to realize the reason John Carpenter's Halloween differed from the scores of other slasher films clogging video store shelves was the quality of the technical filmmaking, the characters of Laurie Strode, Annie Brackett (the relationship between those two characters) and Dr. Loomis, as well as Michael Myers. There wasn't anything magic about Michael Myers as a character on a screen. Carpenter did catch lightning in a bottle, but it wasn't just in the visage of this man and the mask. Yes, Michael was frightening in the original film, but it's not Michael that makes the film scary and touch whatever soft subconscious spots it does that it's only continued to gain in esteem and reputation. Michael is one part of the equation. The "magic" was in the film, as a whole. There was a time I was a Michael Myers fan, but I'm now less a Michael Myers fan than I am a  Halloween fan. 

Over the last few years, I've come to want franchises and sequels to have people creating them to approach them with the question of "What is the most interesting way to tackle this material? What's the most interesting story to tell with this mythology, characters and audience?" Those dogmatically faithful to formula have proven to be likely failures. The algorithmic approach to filmmaking existed before algorithms did, it's gets boring and ends up being emotionally flat. Halloween Ends does take these characters and material in a new, more interesting direction than basically all of the other entries since the original, it puts new light on the other films in this trilogy and John Carpenter's 1978 original. Rob Zombie's Halloween 2 may be the only other that attempted anything as new or different. Halloween Ends may not succeed in everything it's trying to do, but it's certainly trying to do something more interesting than every other sequel or reboot or re-stytling in the history of the franchise. 

There have been two central criticisms of Halloween Ends. The first is that as a Laurie Strode film, focusing so much on a new character does her a disservice. This isn't a wholly unfair criticism, especially since she was sidelined in the previous entry and it's going to be Jamie Lee Curtis last appearance in the franchise. Jamie Lee Curtis has been clear she's done with Laurie Strode, and this is as definitive an ending as we've seen in a Halloween film. That this film doesn't put her more at the center is an understandable criticism. 

My biggest gripe is connected to the way the time is balanced between the three major character. It doesn't give enough time to the relationship between Laurie and Allyson. I saw a lot of promise in their scenes together in Halloween (2018), and I'd liked to have seen the possibilities it suggested come to fruition. Jamie Lee Curtis and Andi Matichak are very good together, and I would like to have seen them get more time to explore the way their relationship has changed since Halloween Kills. Halloween Ends sketches the relationship, but there isn't enough to make Allyson's insult of Laurie in the second half of the film as impactful as it should have been. It's not just about Laurie in this trilogy, it's also about the fall out in Haddonfield and for Laurie's family, which now consists of Allyson. The film would have had more emotional depth by giving that relationship more attention. 

I also wouldn't mind seeing an entire film of Jamie Lee Curtis and Will Patton playing out the romance we get bits and pieces of in Halloween Kills and Halloween Ends. That's not even to say it has to be a film in this universe with them playing Laurie and Frank. They are both delightful in those moments, and I've never seen either of them be as invitingly tender in their careers. What Will Patton is doing in those moments embodies the kind of male characters I'd like to see a lot more of on film, and Jamie Lee Curtis is note perfect. Like the scenes between Laurie and Allyson in Halloween 2018, these scenes have an emotional reality that could have given Halloween Ends more emotional punch, if they'd explored them. I'd love to see a film with these two playing older adults, trying to work out whatever is getting in the way of making an attempt to have this relationship in their lives. I don't melt for romance in film very easily, because it too often veers into fairy tale territory, but these two are conveying so much with so little, I was completely taken. 

That's not the what we got. As much as I would have liked those to be part of this movie, I also want to engage with what we did get. It's never seemed completely fair to hold filmmakers to a film they didn't make or to only discuss or critique a film for what it should have been. We have to look at what it is and try to approach it with as much openness to the filmmakers vision and their own goals for a film. "Does it meet the goals it seems to have?" is a valid critical measure. "Is this vision something that's just not for me?" is a valid question too, and especially as criticism and discussion has moved online, these things have seemed to get muddled, to say the least. This film, particularly, deserves more consideration because of the way it approaches the way the environments we exist in shape how we see and react to the world, and how much we question the way the people in those environments engage with the reality in front of them. 

The technical filmmaking in Halloween Ends is good. It's not going to change cinema forever, but it's good. It's competent. Some of the cinematography is excellent. Some of the sound design is quite good, as is the set design. The soundtrack and score are both very good. This soundtrack could be great for almost any Halloween party. 

The second central criticism, not based in aimless nitpicking, has been the lack of Michael Myers. There's a connection between "This doesn't feel like a Halloween film," and "There's not enough Michael Myers" or "How did they trade Michael out for Corey?" 

Twice recently, I saw references to the concept of "the note behind the note." It's a screenwriting reference, but it applies to a lot more than screenwriting. Hat tip to James Van Fleet (@HorrorFilms101) and John Zaorziny (@johnzaorziny) for reminding me of it. James, particularly was talking about the reaction to Halloween Ends, and saying that a good portion of it is due to the fact that the deeper reason people are unsatisfied or having problems with it is hard to articulate, so they latch onto more shallow but visible problems. 

The problem behind the problem being expressed in the reaction to Halloween Ends is the result of the question any filmmaker has to have an answer to before they even start writing a film with Michael Myers in it. Is there something supernatural about him? Is Michael Myers the embodiment of pure evil, as Dr. Loomis began describing  in the original film or is he a human being, albeit deeply disturbed and extremely dangerous? Is he a man named Michael Myers or is he The Shape, this supernatural embodiment of evil? Any attempt to kill Michael Myers that's meant to have finality, which it's clear was part of the intent of Halloween Ends, is going to have to deal with whether or not Myers is something more/other than a man. 

If the ending of the 1978 film is part of the continuity of the story, it is a bit of a stretch, but a human being could survive it. Human beings do sometimes survive being shot multiple times. A human being could survive the fall from the balcony. 

As soon as the ending from the 1981 Halloween 2 becomes a part of the continuity of a story, any film following it and including Michael Myers has no choice but to treat him as if he's a supernatural entity. He's shot in both eyes, and then in a hospital room filled with tanks of flammable gases that's blown up. It's not a small explosion either. That Halloween 4 would come along and suggest both Michael and Loomis survived is basically absurd. Michael surviving, as a supernatural embodiment of pure evil? Well, that's what stories about boogeymen do, they reach into the fantastic to grab whatever scares us. That Michael survived fits with what we've been told about the character to that point, and it makes him all the more frightening. Can he be killed, at all? Loomis, a standard issue human being, surviving the same explosion with some scars and a limp? Even in the most charitable of reads, it's a ridiculous reach, but hell, we were all happy to see Donald Pleasance come back, chewing the scenery as Dr. Loomis so we went with it. Again, we've accepted some truly absurd things in this franchise. Each of the films following Halloween 2, including the Thorne trilogy and H20/Resurrection  just further cement the idea of Michael being The Shape, this embodiment of pure evil. Maybe accepting that Michael is just a man and has survived all of the events in Halloween Kills isn't the most ridiculous thing a Halloween film has asked us to accept. 

I bring all this up not to lay out my nerd cred as it relates to the Halloween franchise, but because it's the story fans of the franchise have become accustomed to. Michael Myers is this nearly immortal (or may be immortal) bogeyman, stalking and killing. He's impossibly strong, he's nearly impervious to injury and he will kill anyone or anything that stands between him and the victim he's focused on. He's become a movie monster, not so different from werewolves, vampires, witches in thousands of other stories, except for one crucial thing. We don't know why he is what he is. We know the general rules where werewolves, vampires and other supernatural creatures are concerned. We know how they become what they are, what hurts them etc. There is no end to the number of movies focused on someone going about solving the mystery of what the monster is, where it came from, what its weaknesses are and how to defeat it. Michael has no such mythology of origin. He becomes a conventional movie monster in the later installments, but without any kind of mythology to explain what he is or how he became what he is. 

The first storyline/continuum made a single attempt to lay down any backstory and rules about the exact nature of how the human being that was Michael Meyers came to be this supernatural embodiment of evil, The Shape, was so thoroughly terrible it put the franchise into cold storage for a while. Both Halloween 5 and Halloween 6 are generally considered among the worst of the franchise. One of the primary criticisms of Rob Zombie's Halloween films is specifically that it explains too much. It gives a detailed backstory which would explain why Michael is the unfeeling psychopath he is. Part of the allure of the Halloween series has been the mystique, the not knowing. When H20 came along and jettisoned the Thorne conspiracy storyline of Halloween 5 and Halloween 6, fans and critics alike considered it a smart move. It does, however, retain the sibling storyline and therefore by way of following Halloween 2, Michael has to be somehow supernaturally endowed. 

David Gordon Green and company decided to jettison all of that within their trilogy though. Halloween Ends comes down on the side of Michael being a man, not the supernatural embodiment of evil, but it does try to be somewhat ambiguous, and events in Halloween Kills complicate it. This is the problem behind the problem. Both treating Michael Myers as a man, and not being consistent about it in the whole trilogy. No one who is familiar with this franchise is familiar with Michael Myers being just a disturbed man. We are all ready to, and have indeed accepted for forty years, that he is The Shape, this embodiment of pure evil. 

Disowning everything except the 1978 film also has the benefit of erasing the storyline involving Michael and Laurie being siblings, which for my money, helps keep intact part of what was so frightening about Michael in the original. Whatever it is that's driving the obvious obsession Michael has with Laurie in that film is a random matter of chance. She just happens to be the girl who walked up on the porch of his childhood home, to drop off a key so her real estate agent father could show it later in the day. I always felt the addition of the sibling storyline weakened that aspect of the original film. Rejecting it also ends up giving more support to the themes of Halloween Ends, because Michael isn't obsessed with Laurie forty years later. It's the obsession of a different maniac that puts them together. 

The first film in David Gordon Green trilogy exists as if Michael had been arrested and sent back to Smith's Grove asylum, after the events of the 1978 film. We even see the arrest in a flashback sequence in Halloween Kills. 

It's not irrational to ask if a human being could be shot a number of times, as he was at the end of the original Halloween and still be getting around as well as Michael is in the flashback during Halloween Kills. It also stretches credulity to believe anyone could survive the fire Michael escapes at the beginning of Kills, much less be able to dispatch a slew of firefighters, after the injuries he's obviously sustained. It also wouldn't be irrational to ask if a man could take the beating Michael does at the end of Kills, and get right up and go about the slaughter of the crowd who dealt him that beating. Could these things possibly explained by psychosis? Maybe? None of these examples are the most outrageous thing we've accepted in the history of this franchise. Is it just easier to believe Michael is a supernatural entity because we accepted it forty years ago? Kills does go over the top with everything, which also points to it being about the mythology of Michael Myers. It is, itself, sartorial and operatic in its approach to storytelling. 

The other side of this though, is Michael being nothing more than a man is a much more interesting choice. It puts the other films in this trilogy, and some parts of the 1978 original in a different context. There seems to be some confusion about what happens when Corey first encounters Michael. If Michael is a supernatural entity, he's somehow reading or bringing up the darkness that becomes the engine driving Corey's turn to being a killer. If Michael isn't a supernatural entity, its Corey's reaction to coming face to face with someone he's spent the last four years, if not his entire life, being told is a monster, a supernatural embodiment of evil, the boogeyman and possibly facing his own death. We do see Laurie also have a flashback to all of her own brushes with darkness and death, so this seems to be a slightly sloppy representation of the "life flashes before your eyes" idea. 

In part, it's the mythology the town has created around Corey which leads to him becoming what he does. Corey's mother even blames Laurie for what happened to her son after the death of the boy he was babysitting. Without being able to bring Michael to any kind of justice, with their boogeyman having disappeared, the town turned Corey into their new boogeyman through this mythology. There are plenty of interesting questions which could be asked about Corey's mother too, not least of which is how all of this has changed her. 

If Michael is just a man, albeit a supremely disturbed man, everything we've seen in this trilogy comes down to the effects of people believing in the mythology they've embraced surrounding Michael, and what that belief brings out in them, including Laurie. With the sibling plot cut out of, there isn't any reason to believe Michael is specifically looking for Laurie, as is pointed out in Kills. He doesn't end up at her house because he's looking for her. He ends up there because Sartain brings him there. Laurie has created her own mythology about Michael coming back for her, but he never was. In Ends, there's nothing to suggest he came back for Laurie either. He follows Corey to Laurie and Allyson's house. He's seen Laurie earlier, and walks away. There are repeated references to the idea that it was Laurie's obsession with Michael which caused the events of Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills, and they're not necessarily right, but they're not completely wrong. When Allyson is angry enough to try to hurt Laurie, she does so using what the people in the Haddonfield have been saying about Laurie's responsibility for the events of 2018. She's angry and hurt and lashes out, but there's a grain of truth in what she says too. 

All of the events in Kills are driven by mythology, the belief Michael is the embodiment of evil. If he were, at least one innocent man died as a result, not to mention it makes the foolishness of a mob running around screaming "Evil dies tonight" look even more ridiculous, maybe as foolish as something in that context should. If Michael Myers is just a man, the belief in that mythology deserves to be treated with a sartorial eye, doesn't it? Kills has a lot of problems, but seeing it this way could clear up the issue of the tone of some of the scenes. If people are running around armed, believing a person was somehow some kind of supernatural embodiment of evil, in today's day and age, I'd rather see it made fun of than treated seriously. If we, as an audience, believe there's something supernatural about Michael, the hysteria is somewhat less ridiculous. It just looks poorly executed. If Michael is just a man, it looks like absolutely unhinged mass hysteria, which is how it is portrayed. 

The events of Ends are all about the consequences of believing in things which are separated from a factual representation of reality, in this case, the supernatural. It's not a mistake that everyone in this town is cruel to all of the main characters in Halloween Ends. All of the people in Haddonfield being cruel and lacking the self awareness to see their own place in perpetuating this insanity strikes as realistic in the world we live in now. The only characters in Haddonfield who don't treat them with hostility and/or disdain are Lindsay Wallace, who has twice survived her own brushes Michael, and Frank, who survived Michael and Sartain's attempts to kill him. 

This is where we come to the bit that for die hard fans of the franchise will be even more heretical than Michael being simply a man. What is the origin of this mythology which caused so much pain, death and sorrow in David Gordon Green's trilogy? To point a finer point on it, who is the origin of this mythology? Where did everyone, including Laurie, get this idea of Michael being the embodiment of pure evil? Dr. Sam Loomis. 

It's not controversial to say Loomis was among the worst psychiatrists in movie history. It's become something of a joke among the horror crowd. If what really causes the chaos, death and pain we've seen in this new trilogy is the idea that Michael is somehow something more than a man, an embodiment of pure evil, Loomis is the one responsible for creating and spreading that idea. Beyond that, if Michael is just a human being, what does that say about the way Loomis treated Michael over the decades Loomis had him captive in Smith's Grove? What happens to someone who is already deeply mentally ill, psychotic by all the evidence we're given, and they then spend decades being told they are and treated as if they are nothing more than pure evil? It would suggest the Michael Myers who escapes Smith's Grove in 1978 is as much the creation of Loomis as Corey is the creation of Haddonfield as a town. 

Loomis spreads this idea, this "infection" to the sheriff of Haddonfield, as well as to Laurie. When we see Brackett in Halloween Kills, he's still locked in that same perspective, 40 years later. We see in the scene at the talent show, Tommy clearly believes this. In the 2018 film, they make a point of having the podcaster ask Laurie specifically about The Boogeyman. She treats him as if he has to be an idiot to not believe in this idea. Because the male podcaster is clearly a pompous ass, it doesn't play to the audience as if the idea of Michael being some supernatural being is ridiculous, and again, after 40 years of running with that idea in the franchise, it's not ridiculous to the audience either. We see it as a ridiculous question, and not just because he's such an ass in the way he asks it. We believe Michael is The Boogeyman, because it's what forty years of films have been telling us, even as we have come to collectively accept Loomis is utterly absurd and unhinged as a character. Michael has been locked up for forty years, and all of these people are still utterly terrified of him. 

The sequence in Kills that takes place in Haddonfield Memorial Hospital has been thoroughly skewered. It is extra, even for a franchise as full of the fantastic and absurd as this one. It's over the top. It's almost camp, to the point it feels like it's failing at being camp. What if it's not attempting to be camp though? What if it's more about satirizing the idea that this entire town has been living with this belief in Michael as some kind of supernatural entity for forty years? If one were attempting to go about making fun of this kind of irrational belief, what we get in Kills makes more sense, tonally. Kills still has a slew of problems, not least of which is mixing this kind of point and laugh attitude in with the way this irrational belief results in the death of an innocent man. The sequence in the hospital is still out of balance, and as a result, that death doesn't have the impact it should, but it does make it less messy from a thematic standpoint. This would also explain the over the top nature of Anthony Michael Hall's performance as Tommy, a kind of zealous, true believer in this supernatural mythology. I'm not saying all of this works, by any means, but I am saying these decisions make more sense in this context. Halloween Kills is still an extremely flawed film. 

In Ends we even have Laurie taking over a Loomis like role in the second half of the film. It's now Laurie going on about "his eyes," similar to Loomis in the 1978 original. It's now Laurie attempting to be Allyson's protector, where Loomis was Laurie's protector in 1978. In this, it's even more important that Allyson is the one who comes to Laurie's rescue in her final showdown with Michael, and that the film ends with Allyson doing what Laurie never did, leaving Haddonfield. We even get a scene with Laurie telling Corey she wants to help him or find him help, but turning immediately from that offer of help to being a threat to Corey. Laurie isn't wrong that Corey has been consumed by the darkness, the evil of his experiences, but she's not exactly right either. 

It also makes the coda to Halloween Ends more consequential. Putting Michael in the crusher at the junkyard isn't about destroying some kind of supernatural entity, it's about the town giving up on what is something like an article of faith or a mass delusion. 

This entire trilogy hinges on the way the story of Michael Myers, The Haddonfield Boogeyman, effects people who believe it. Sartain's inclusion in Halloween 2018 has been one of the most criticized aspects of that film. He is truly ridiculous, as a character. The way Ends treats this mythology around Michael though, and the way all of the characters have been effected by that mythology, Sartain makes more sense. It's the same mythology which creates Sartain's obsession with Michael. Sartain would have come across it as a result of Loomis writing it, repeating it, including it in the way he talked about Michael any time someone gave him a chance to do so. One thing Rob Zombie's films got right was the way Loomis becomes a kind of celebrity as the result of the story he's telling about Michael. This trilogy opens with podcasters having travelled to Haddonfield and who are also well schooled in Loomis and Laurie's ideas about Michael. No doubt Loomis in this timeline would have had plenty of opportunity to spread his gospel. It's the reason Sartain's obsession begins. It's what drives him to become Loomis's student, and then to lobby the state to become Michael's doctor. It's not out of the question to ask whether Sartain is part of Michael escaping the bus either. He's gleeful at the possibility of "seeing Michael in the wild" later on. How did being Loomis' student effect the obsession he already had, because of Loomis running around spouting this crazy theory? It puts a different light on his actions. The events of this trilogy are all the result of Loomis being a terrible psychiatrist, spreading this ridiculous story about a patient being the supernatural embodiment of pure evil. 

If Michael is a man, it changes everything about Loomis. He's no longer just a kind of campy, updated Van Helsing-esque character. His lunacy has been the thing which causes all this pain and suffering forty years after the events in 1978 and then in Halloween Ends. Michael may be the villain in this quad of films, but Loomis especially, and then Laurie, also bear some responsibility. 

In the way it engages with the mythology of Michael Myers, Halloween Ends asks a lot of the audience. Are you going to be more like Laurie and the rest of Haddonfield, and dogmatically adhere to this mythology you've spent forty years being exposed to or are you going to look more critically at what's actually here? 

This trilogy is messy. There's no doubt about that. Halloween Ends does succeed in being a more interesting film than its predecessors and in adding a context to them that makes them more interesting, as flawed as they may be. It's trying to say some interesting things, but it's also trying to do so much, it doesn't end up being clear for anyone who isn't going to treat it like it deserves the kind of consideration a much more "serious" film would be afforded, and that's on the audience, the critics and the filmmakers. It's on the audience and critical community for assuming any film is not worth it. It's on the filmmakers, because they know who their audience is and they know how the critical community generally treats horror, especially sequels and reboots. 

Maybe because I've spent the last two years working on my own fiction projects, I'm also of the opinion that the people making the thing can make what they want, and if they know how the audience and critical community think about the kind of film or other creative work they want to make, they can take that into account to whatever degree they're comfortable with. "Fuck it. We'll make what we want" is an absolutely valid artistic motivation. The trade off is what it means for their relationship with the audience. 

Audiences, especially horror audiences, complain when a film or story has obviously been calculated for the possibility of drawing in the largest possible audience. See any discussion of "PG-13" horror. They don't want filmmakers or writers catering to the tastes of audiences, unless of course we're talking about the tastes of the person expressing this sentiment. They want filmmakers and other creators to cater to their tastes slavishly.