Halloween Ends: How not to end a franchise

Tyson Head, Editor

A much anticipated Halloween Ends was released Oct.14, 2022, to theaters around the country just in time for fans to get into the holiday spirit. 

When Halloween (2018) released as a direct sequel to the original 1978 film of the exact same name, people thought it was amazing. It was nothing short of a love letter to the original film, bringing back the original protagonist of the classic horror film and introducing new people for the infamous Michael Myers to butcher. It was nothing short of a success, but then the second film of the new trilogy was released. Halloween Kills had a troubled production from the start. Set to release in 2020, the film’s progress screeched to a halt when COVID-19 hit. 

Later released in October of 2021, Halloween Kills picked up right where Halloween 2018 left off, seeing three generations of Strode women in the back of a rickety pickup truck, fleeing the burning house which has Michael Myers trapped in its’ basement. A squad of firefighters arrive and promptly get put down by The Shape and the halligan bar one of them dropped. While Kills may have very well lived up to its name, as it will go down as perhaps the bloodiest film in the series, it lacked in pretty much every other category. “I feel like kills is my favorite in the series because it got right what Halloween is really all about; the kills,” shared Grant Bebow. Again back from the original film we see the return of Tommy Doyle, the very same child that Laurie Strode took care of in 1978.

As the trilogy closes, we lose everything that makes Halloween, Halloween. Michael is in this nearly two hour movie merely fifteen minutes. Instead, we get Corey Cunningham, a man who accidentally killed the child he was babysitting one year prior. Corey deals with endless abuse until he meets the aging and decrepit Myers, and they share a connection. Corey then proceeds to start butchering citizens of Haddonfield just like his soulmate. According to Cole Lombard, “They should reboot the series again at this point. This was so horrible. How do you have a Halloween movie without Michael Myers.” 

Cunningham also falls in love with Laurie Strode’s granddaughter, Allyson. A romantic plot line takes center stage in a Halloween movie, just what everybody wanted from the final installment of the series right? Wrong. As if he didn’t take enough abuse in his absence, the movie does end with the apparent actual death of Michael Myers, as we watch his corpse mulched inside an industrial chipper. One thing’s for sure, Michael Myers will not be coming back the same way we remember him, and that is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions.