Halloween Ends will end the sequel trilogy of films—including Halloween and Halloween Kills—that Danny McBride and his frequent collaborator David Gordon Green (HBO's Eastbound & Down, Vice Principals, and The Righteous Gemstones) co-wrote. Now, the final trailer has been released, promising the most dangerous Michael Myers yet.
Halloween wasn't John Carpenter's first masterpiece but it was his first megahit, inspiring decades of slashers to follow using the formula he established. The Halloween sequel trilogy has seen a high level of critical scrutiny and will be wrapping up the new story when Halloween Ends is released in October 2022.
McBride and Green's sequel trilogy began with Halloween, a film in which Myers is reactivated by true crime podcasters and subsequently starts up a new rampage. This was followed by Halloween Kills, in which the community of Haddonfield, Illinois hunts for Michael Myers in a method very reminiscent of how the real-life Night Stalker, Richard Ramirez, was caught in California. After killing Laurie's daughter at the end of Kills and escaping, the Halloween Ends trailer begins with a man investigating a sewer outflow pipe while Laurie Strode states that it has been four years since Michael Myers vanished without a trace. Suffice it to say the journey through the sewer pipe doesn’t end well for the man and The Shape makes his definitive return.
Laurie Strode, ever vigilant, tells a bartender she thinks she saw Myers recently. She gets confronted by her granddaughter who tells her that she pretends like she’s moved on, but is instead obsessed with death. She gets asked by a young man what she’s going to do when Myers comes for her again. Laurie continues, in voice-over, saying that something feels different about Myers this time and that he’s grown more dangerous as shots of the new cast of kids (and presumably victims-to-be) make their appearance getting ready for another Halloween night in Haddonfield, a town for whom Halloween should be treated like Christmas for the Whos with the Grinch around.
Saying that he killed her daughter, but that this time, she’ll kill Michael Myers, we see Strode doing the opposite of what she did in the first movie of this new trilogy. Instead of having a house that locks up like a fortress, we see her leaving the door unlocked, even open, inviting Myers into the trap she’s set for him, a fight to the death between the pair, the murderer and his would-be victim now turning the tables on him. A montage of Myers going on a rampage follows, with Laurie in voice-over saying that maybe the only way Myers can die is if she dies, too, taking on a bit of a supernatural quality to the proceedings. “It all ends now,” Strode says. It ends with Myers on his back, Strode above him with a butcher’s knife, removing his mask, before cutting to the credits. “You came here to kill me,” she says in one final glimpse, “So do it.” Myers springs up, ready to oblige.
Halloween has always been the story of a killer known only as the shape, a suburban bogeyman that Carpenter, ever the socially commenting filmmaker, was inspired to create having seen events like the Manson murders and the “white flight” that lead to Caucasians abandoning the cities for the suburbs during the '60s due to racially perceived biases regarding the rise of crime. Carpenter turned this idea on its head with the movie by having a killer show up in the suburbs and having the killer come from within the community. It followed itself with decades of sequels of varying degrees of quality—a couple of which even featured horror icon Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode.
Halloween Ends will be released in theaters and on Peacock on October 14th, 2022.
Source: Universal/YouTube