Halloween Ends (2022) — "I've said goodbye to my boogeyman, but the truth is, evil doesn't die. It changes shape."

Yeah, weird way. It's been four years since Michael Myers killed my daughter, vanished without a trace. What are you gonna do when Michael comes back for here? Because he is coming. Maybe the only way he can die.

Is a fine I too. It's your last Halloween, Michael Halloween, and hello everyone, and welcome to the Culture Cast. I'm your host, Chris Dashu. And man, it has been it's been a year. It's been quite a year since the last Halloween, since Halloween of twenty twenty four.

Halloween of twenty twenty four found me not here and Lincoln. It found me back in Texas due to some circumstances more or less outside of my control. I was taking care of my parents' dog last year while they were overseas, and then my life that was already falling apart, continued to fall apart even further. And Alan Sachs, who I worked on the Peter and the Acid King project with, he passed away. My dog got sick, I got into a car accident all about the span of a lot of month of the month of October last year.

So this year's October uh could do nothing but be less awful than that. And I don't know if it was. I think that this year's Halloween was was kind of awful in a different way. As I mentioned on the last solo episode that I did, my dog passed away in the last couple of weeks, and on the Tron episode I talked about that kind of idea of an end of an era, where the kind of the moment when we can look back on something and say, from this point forward things were, you know, markedly different, or from this point you know, up until this point, things were different, and then things were different afterwards. So I mean, things are things are always different after a certain point in your life.

If if you actually sit and are kind of introspective about it, you know, you can often find a kind of multiple inflection points in life. And you know, again, loss, moving, marriage, divorce, those kinds of things tend to be kind of at the top of the list of things for you know, traumatic things that we have to deal with, grief driven things that we have to deal with. And the last year for me has been a lot of grief, been a lot of trauma, been a lot of a lot of a lot a lot of overwhelming emotions that are hard to that are hard to deal with on their own. And you know, I go to therapy once a week, which I think is mentally helpful. If anyone listening to this show is struggling with mental health, I would definitely go out and seek professional help.

Go and speak with your primary care physician or provider about kind of what you're dealing with mentally, and get them to give you a referral to a healthcare professional, a mental health care professional, and start your mental health care journey. I'm not sponsored by Better Help or any of those other kind of questionable mental health apps. I went to my doctor. My doctor told me to go and get psychiatrically evaluated. I went and did that, and then I went and talked to a therapist after the fact, after I figured out what was going on with me, I went and took care of it.

And again, I don't know, this is just my mental headspace on how to handle things. But taking care of your grief and trauma and mental problems when they happen and quicker, you know, sooner rather than later, will allow you to actually, you know, handle the things that are overwhelming you in a healthy and positive way. And boy Corey Cunningham and Halloween ends is the best example I've seen in a very long time of a character who does not allow himself to heal from the trauma and grief that has been not really his fault, given what happens at the beginning of Halloween Ends, which I think is one of the one of the more kind of interesting openings of a horror movie in the last decade, possibly ever even.

But the character sure of Corey Cunningham is such an interesting character in cinema because he is a character that has been included in a horror franchise that did not need a new villain, that did not need a secondary you villain being introduced in the thirteenth hour, essentially to supplant Michael fuckin Myers, who is a character that so many people have a lot of really strong affinity and ties. For me personally, I love Halloween. I watch it every year on Halloween, and I watch it at least one or two other times during the year. I actually, you know, David Gordon Green's trilogy say what you will about it. It was immensely financially successful, which I think is not necessarily an indicator of quality.

But you know, in these kinds of cases, one could make the case that that is the case, and at least to the people that are making the decisions to further create films or lay out the money to the people to make the films. Yeah, I mean this, this, this movie, This movie kind of bothered a lot of people more than any other movies in the Halloween Gordon Green kind of trilogy did. And it's because of the Corey Cunningham character. It's because the character was introduced that is a I wouldn't say even a loner. I mean, he's just like a nerd who bad things have happened to him, and he, instead of taking care of his mental health and doing something about it in a healthy way, has decided to further turn inward, further isolate himself.

His home life isn't good as it is anyways. He you know, he's picked on by people in the town. The entire town has ostracized him because of the accident that happened, which I mean obviously was not his fault. But the opening of Halloween Ends, I think is one of the more horrifying things we've ever seen in cinema in terms of like the the stakes of what is happening, and then the like Oh my god, misunderstanding. So Halloween ends as a movie that, like I've mentioned, kind of ruffled people's feather in a way because the focus of the movie is in a lot of ways similar to Halloween three Season of the Witch.

David Gordon Green even wanted to have Halloween Season of the Witch the Shamrock Mask Factory. He wanted to have that in this movie. He actually wanted to include that in this film, which I think is rather telling of the movie as a whole, that the point of the movie was actually going to be to further kind of pay homage to the film in the franchise that has aged better than most of the films that came after it. You know, Halloween three, I think is a movie that on its own, obviously as a film outside of the Halloween franchise, I think it's an immensely successful film. Now I understand why when it came out initially it was received so kind of poorly.

I mean, look, people wanted to see more Michael Myers. But the original Halloween movie was meant to be a anthology horror series. It was never meant to be the story of Michael Myers and the continuing adventures of Lourie Strode. It was always always, always supposed to be about an anthology story of you know, of Halloween Knight, telling the story of Halloween Knight, not necessarily telling the story of one character and her interactions with another singular character. Look, nothing wrong with it.

I mean, if you're successful, if the movie is successful, you'd be kind of hard pressed to not go. Okay, well, I understand why we're making another five Michael Meyer movies. But Halloween three kind of was not at the time what anyone was expecting. It was a complete and utter departure from the Halloween franchise. It was not Michael Myers, it was not Lourie Strode.

They're not even mentioned in the third movie. It wasn't John Carpenter either, though you could make the case that the second movie was John Carpenter, and that didn't seem to help. I mean the second I'm not a huge fan of Halloween two, Halloween two. I think in a lot of ways, like is the reason they made these Halloween movies is to counteract Halloween two more so than h two O or any of those movies. But it's not surprising that Halloween Ends is what it is given that David Gordon Green is a student of cinema, he is a student of franchises.

He understands and appreciates the importance of film franchises, and. He pays homage. But he also is irreverent with the way he treats the source material. And that's, in my mind, something I'm here for. You know, we've talked a lot about over the years, you know, being subversive or subverting audiences expectations, and you know, to use the famous pop culture example of the last ten years, you know, the Last Jedi is a movie that subverted everyone's expectations in a way that, I mean, really upset a lot of people.

I'm not going to sit here and pretend like I liked Last Jedi when it came out. Actually haven't seen it since it came out. I don't remember enjoying it at the time. I remember thinking that the movie had had its problems and that I wasn't a big fan of it. But the people that really didn't resonate with it felt like it took the franchise as we know it and didn't honor the roots of the franchise and was kind of looking at the franchise as an opportunity to do something very different, And well, why would you do that if you have a franchise that has all these rules and expectations.

It's like, well, some people are interested in paying lip service to the original series, some people are interested in cow telling to the expectations of the original series, and some people are interested in just doing their own thing. And they've always wanted to do this thing in this world. And you know, could they have written a script for a movie that isn't Halloween that has a character like Corey Cunningham at the beginning, or has the shamrock mask factory. Sure, but would it have gotten people through the doors as easily? No?

Oh, And that's I mean, that is the reality. This is a business. I mean, you know, it's called show business. It's not called show show. As I've said with so many people in the industry before, it's not called show show.

It's called the show business industry. Because there's a money component here. To speak to the tron aries of it, all boy, there is a money component to tront Aris. And it didn't make any money. Why didn't it make any money?

Well, it's not because it didn't give the audience what they wanted. There was just no audience there to watch the movie. I don't know who they made tron aries for that movie. The original film came out in eighty two, the sequel came out in two thousand and eleven or twelve, and then the most recent film came out in twenty twenty five. Anyone who watched the original Tron in theaters, it's in their forties or fifties at this point, well it's even sixties.

They're not going to see tron aries in mass and the people that would be going to see it, I don't think they're interested in the Tron franchise because it's just I just don't think that it. I don't think it has the legs that it used to with the audience now because people's tastes have changed. However, when Halloween Ends came out, it was well received financially, but critically, it was critically and as a as a fran and you know, as kind of the fans of the horror franchise would would let you know, the fans of the franchise did not like him. The fans of the franchise were pretty disappointed. They didn't like the Corey Cunningham character.

They were again not interested in the lack of Michael Myers. It was some of the similar kind of critiques of The Dark Knight Rises, where it's like, where's Batman. Batman's in this movie for five minutes, and it's like, yeah, that's very fair. In Halloween Ends, Michael Myers is in the movie fifteen minutes. Maybe, I mean, it's if it's even that.

You know, the movie's one hundred and eleven minutes, so it's almost two hours long. I would say Michael Myers is in the film less than a half an hour, but it's it's less about him specifically and more what he represents. And that's, you know, to come back to the kind of this is a very different Halloween story of it all. This is the story of Michael Myers's influence and legacy on the town after that Halloween Night that took place, you know, in the first movie, in the twenty nineteen Halloween Night, because the beginning of the movie is set in the year of the original release of the New Halloween franchise, and so you know, everything has taken place over one night in this series, in these three films.

So this film opens with a flashback to the Night of Halloween where Corey Cunningham accidentally kills the kid that he's babysitting by kicking the door and causing him to fall off of the stairwell and plummet like three stories down to his death. And you know, obviously Corey gets arrested, Corey is cleared of manslaughter, but I mean, the entire town knows that he killed someone. Whether or not it was intentional doesn't seem to change the fact that the entire town. Has ostracized him. And that is.

A literalism of what people who are suffering from trauma and guilt and grief struggle from. Is feeling othered by it the thing that you're suffering from. Obviously, the movie, because it's a film, and because Haddenfield is a kind of town that has been and again Laurie talks about it in her and her narration throughout the film, her monologue that is kind of throughout the film, she talks about how the town of Haddenfield has kind of been infected by the sickness that is Michael Myers, by the by the by the overwhelming evil that is Michael Myers, and that evil has kind of permeated the town. And you know, the opening of the film, the title crawl, we have pumpkins within pumpkins within pumpkins sprouting out of each other.

And I think that's very telling it and indicative of what this story is getting at, which is, you know, around you know, even those small towns are you know, very welcoming and kind. You know, I live in Nebraska. Nebraska nice is a phrase, Nebraska nice being people aren't actually nice to your face. They're nice, you know, they're nice to your face, but they're not actually nice to you behind your back. They're actually just you know, being assholes.

And that's where the term Nebraska nice comes from. And hadden Fields in Illinois, so you know, we're not We're we're not in the world of Scream where it's California. We're in the Midwest. And I think what's funny is David Gordon Green actually gets to the midwesternness of Haddenfield in this movie, where we have you know, the local the local theater punks, the band kid punks acting like assholes when they're normally the ones being marginalized. You know, they're they're going after someone who you know is the most marginalized and ostracized of everyone in the town because you know, he's viewed as as a murderer and a fuck up and you know, kind of a monster, and you know, people pick on him because you know, they're you know, he's like the town drunk essentially.

You know, at the. Beginning of the movie, he's talking about how he has all these plans he's going to go away to engineering school, and then once everything happens and again, and it's not his fault what happens, like this is not a what's interesting is unlike Halloween, this is not a Michael Myers is evil and he's always been evil. And again, they even make the case in this movie that, you know, maybe Michael Myers is an evil and maybe Lourie Strode is just you know, antagonizing someone's who's mentally unwell, because I mean, again, someone who's mentally well does not kill their sister with a knife. And so you know, they make the case possibly in this movie, like, well, is Michael Myers actually evil or is Lorie Strode just the one who antagonized him.

I don't think that the movie is making the case that Michael Myers isn't an antagonistic and that the people have Haddenfield are the problem. I think it's just more asking an interesting question. It's kind of opening up the horizon of like just to ask that question, not necessarily make the statement that that's the case. And I say all of this. Because the Corey Cunningham character represents the idea of instead of you know, evil being from within, evil can be fomented externally and the kind of over nature of what you're dealing with without any sort of support at home or any support of your own.

Because again that's the other thing that Corey Cunningham character has no support at home whatsoever. That evil is, you know, it's the nature versus nurture. Michael Myers is just evil, seemingly just evil. Corey Cunningham if not for the fact that he accidentally killed a young child on Halloween night who was fucking with him. Mind you, the kid was fucking with him, not the other way around, Corey Cunningham would have just gone on and lived a normal life.

He might have gone away to college and never had any issue. He I mean, he. Would he have met Laurie Strode's granddaughter Alison. No. But to be fair, if he hadn't met her, a lot of the other awful things in this movie would not have happened as well.

But Corey Cunningham, if not for the fact that something bad happened to him, he would have gone and lived a normal life and been perfectly fine. It's the way that he reacted to what happened that is the point of this movie, And the point of this movie really is like, make sure that if bad things happen, if you're in a situation where trauma and grief are ruling your life and you feel overwhelmed by it, that you have a healthy outlet for your emotions. You have a healthy outlet for your feelings, you have a healthy outlet for what's going on. It doesn't seem like Corey ever went and spoke with a therapist. It doesn't seem like Corey ever went and spoke with anybody about what happened.

I'm not even sure that the people in the town really know what happened. And look like anything else, everybody in the town could not be against him, so there would be some people in the town that would be sympathetic to him. There would be people in the town sympathetic to him because he seems like a nice person at the end of the day, seems like a bit of adult I mean, at the beginning of the film, we have the parents of the young child being like, well, hopefully he's better at babysittinghi, and he has a yard work, and it's like, well, shit, man, like, why are you like this kid is being piled on even at the beginning of the movie, and so you know, and then you look at the way his family treats him.

You look at the way his mother treats him, you look at the way his stepdad treats him, and you're just like, I understand now why someone who is already at risk it has now further given in to the evil further kind of turned their face towards the evil of the situation and made it apparent that, you know, he's embraced the evil. But he was not always evil. He was teetering on the edge of evil. He came from a broken home. He came from a home where his mother was abusive and his mother was I mean, I would say sexually abusive almost, but and in a lot of ways, like what his mother was doing was very overwhelming.

She's a I'm a helicopter parent maybe, but her like there's like a weird level of like physical intimacy that she has and kind of like ownership of the intimacy that she has over her son that would lead me to believe that there was some sort of abuse going on at some point. But it just it's less about telling us specifically what's happening, but giving us an idea that, like, this guy's home life is just as unst as the rest of the world. And maybe you know, the world wasn't as unstable as it is now, but you know, the fact that it is as unstable as it is now is contributing to this character's already overwhelming mental situation, the situation being like he killed someone. There's no support system there, there's no one there to kind of reassure him that things are okay, reassure him that he's not a monster.

And you know, that's where we kind of see the Loris Strode character come in to the to the equation. And so the thing that's interesting about the Loris Strode character is Laurie in this movie is better. Laurie is unlike her version of the character in the first two films, where she's living out in the woods by herself and running away from things. She is embracing the grief and the trauma and saying, you know, fucking bring it on, like let's go, Like I want so badly for you to like test me, tempt me, do what like grief and trauma. Do what you can to push me down, do what you can to make me not feel like I am in control here.

But I am going to push back and tell you unequivocally, no, I am in control. I am not going to let it derail me. I am not going to let it overwhelm my life and control my life. That's why she moves into a house at the beginning of this movie. That's why she's working on her memoir.

That's why her character. I think, if anything, and this is the thing that I find really interesting. I didn't see a lot of anger directed toward the Lourie Strode character, even though in this movie she's being written very differently from the last two movies. And I find that rather funny because I feel like this is the way people wanted Laurie Strode to be written as someone who is just like, you know what, I'm not going to let this affect me. I'm not gonna let this ruin my life.

I'm not gonna let this control my life. I am going to live. I am going to acknowledge that bad things happen. Bad things can happen, but bad things don't necessarily always happen, but they can happen. And you know that's why in that first Halloween movie, we have Laurie literally out in the woods, isolated in this cabin, and it's like, man, what a bummer for the character of Laurie Strode.

But at the same time, it's like, you know, if this is the story that you want to tell, this is a logical direction to go. That she's so concerned with the return of Michael Myers that she's going to isolate herself from everyone else so that no one else has Michael Myers drawn into their web because he, again, per her belief system, is attracted to Laurie Strode. I mean again, this franchise, these three movies make the case that Lourie Strode isn't really special in any way to Michael Myers. They more or less make the case here that evil comes from everywhere and that evil is ever present, and you know, it's how we re and in this movie, it's how we react to the evil in the trauma that defines us, not the evil and the trauma that's you know, inflicted on us.

Like evil in trauma and grief don't define us. But with the Corey Cunningham, it more or less has defined him throughout the entire run of the film. I mean, every time he interacts with anybody in public, they make a point to talk about, you know, that's Corey Cunningham. Didn't hear what happened to him? Or that's Corey Cunningham, what a freak?

Like everybody in town knows. I mean even Laurie knows. Laurie sees him the night everything happens, Like Laurie knows that, you know, the town is treating this kid poorly, which is why Laurie goes out of her way to you know, however, all of that does not change what we get as the movie, because as it is a Halloween film, and as it is not going to just be a bunch of people enjoying their time on Halloween five years later and just reminiscing about Michael Myers, because hey, we haven't seen him since twenty nineteen. This is a Halloween movie written by David Gordon Green and friends, so we are going to get the literal return of Michael Myers, but also the sort of metaphorical transference of evil or again, this franchise finally addressing the idea of is Michael Myers evil or is he possessed by something evil?

Is he does he have agency of his own? Or is there something else? And this movie makes the case that there might be something else. There's a scene in the film where Corey Cunningham, after being kind of further antagonized by the band kids, the last kids you would ever think to be bullies, he's thrown kind of underneath an overpass and he crawls into a or I guess he's dragged into a sewer drain, and he interacts with Michael Myers, who looks him in the eyes and kind of can see into his soul in a way, and in seeing into his soul, it, you know, he he realizes that, you know, there's a there's a ability and a possibility for evil, and an ability and a possibility for Corey to I don't know, to be evil.

I mean, it's never explained. They don't really do anything with it. In terms of Michael and Corey, we get Laurie kind of talking about to Corey kind of like, you know, what she can interpret as his abilities, what she's interpreting as he's doing, what his kind of agency in the situation is. But what I really like about the Lrie Corey interactions in this movie are it is the it is the doctor Melfie Tony soprano of the film. It is the kind of emotional core of the film is Laurie trying to prevent Corey from going down that road of Michael Myers, of you know, becoming the other being othered by your society and your neighborhood and your community to the point where the only course of recourse that you have is to lash out and attempt to kind of secure your place in the community.

And Laurie sees that with Corey. I mean, she can see that Corey is clearly at risk. He's the kind of person who has, you know, has a lot of agency of his own, but his agency is constantly being interrupted by the external world and how he's being treated by other people. He's letting the way he's being treated by other people overwhelm what he knows he should be doing. I mean again, like, you know, he had a lot of aspirational goals.

He had a lot of aspirations before the murder at the beginning of the film happened. And then you know, we picked back up three years later and he's, you know, he's given up life completely. He's working in a you know, a junk yard. He's not doing much with his life. He's being antagonized by the Marching Band kids.

But you know, he has taken a downturn in life that is again partially his fault and partially not. He didn't take it very well. He didn't react to it very well. Clearly we don't see that. That's the part of the movie that we don't see.

We don't see the accountability that is lost on Corey Cunningham's part. We don't see the accountability that's lost when it comes to him going, well, yes this happened. No it's not my fault. Yes it was an accident, but I'm not going to let the townspeople continue to bully me and ostracize me. I have to further stick up for myself.

And it's not clear to me that Corey Cunningham at any point in the film actually sticks up for himself. It's not other than when he starts killing people, which obviously is kind of the nuclear option in terms of actually sticking up for yourself. But we don't get the sense that Corey Cunningham at any other point in the film feels comfortable sticking up for himself unless he has, you know, the identity that he's born with taken away by using the Michael Myers mask. I mean, we have a lot of mask wearing in this film. It's very metaphorical.

The idea of wearing a mask, you know, having a mask, you know, what does that mean to you know, to hide one's face, to hide one's identity, to hide, to hide or hide behind something. You know, And with someone like Batman, you have something where, you know, the the cape and the cowl and the mask are being used as kind of objects of power because Batman knows that the level of fear that he strikes within people is being exacerbated by dressing up like a bat by dressing up like Batman, and Corey Cunningham understands similarly that if he dresses up like Michael Myers and goes about murdering people, in the town that the iconography of Michael Myers, the mask that Michael Myers wears, has struck enough fear into people, has struck enough fear into the townspeople that he can traffic in using that and hide behind that as a way to manage his mental health by using Michael Myers as kind of a mask, both for himself but also for committing crimes, taking it out, you know, getting revenge on the people who treated him like shit and ostracized him in the town.

You know, he runs into the mom of the child that he kills at the bar, and you know, she she just won't let it go either. And look, I'm not saying she doesn't have a right to be upset, but she literally goes, You're a monster, Corey Cunningham. You lost your mind. You killed my son. It's your fault, you know, Like innocent people don't kill kids.

And it's like, you know what, like that's not the case. Like, you know, evil, evil can be born, but evil can also be fomented, and evil can be you know, evil can sit and fester for a long time. And three years, while it might not seem like a long time, is the amount of time in this film where Corey Cunningham has done nothing about the murder that he committed at the beginning of the movie, whether or not it was intentional, he's still killed and he hasn't seemingly done anything about it other than wander through life for three years and allow the townspeople to continue to pick at him and picket him and picket him and picket him, and push and push and push, from the band kids to the kids parents, to the radio DJ who went about ostracizing Corey over and over and over again.

And what's interesting is, you know, he brings up the idea that people look at him differently and they see him as a monster, even though he's a survivor of what happened as much as anybody else's. And you know, he says to Alison Laurie Strode's daughter in law, like, you know, people look at you and they see a survivor. It's not your fault that Michael Myers went after you. But people look at me and they see a monster. And you know, what happened to us is not what happened to both of us is neither of our fault.

And it's in that moment where you realize that, like, no, Corey is actually to blame here as much as anything else. He's to blame because he's unwilling and unable to do better, and he doesn't want to actually like take Alie Allison's like, you know, open hands. He's not actually wanting to take her like comfort and care. He rejects that, and in rejecting that, he finds himself in a situation where he goes and is further antagonized by the marching band kids. He's then tossed over the bridge, and that's when he interacts with Michael Myers, and that's when you know, that's the crossing of the rubicon moment of the movie.

It's only about, you know, a half an hour into a two hour film, but about a half an hour in you realize, like, this is the moment where Corey Cunningham could have just gone away with Alison and he could have stayed at the bar and things would have been different, and things wouldn't have ended the way that they did, and he wouldn't have gone and murdered you know, a bunch of townspeople. I mean again, most of these people that he murdered were deserving of it. I mean, this is kind of a dexter scenario. You know, being bullied is obviously not a reason to kill someone. But the Marching Band bullies are pretty nasty.

I mean, yes, they're like high school kids, but they they're just unrepentant in how in how much of assholes they are, And so the film kind of codes it as well. They're getting what's coming to them, and for the most part, a lot of the people in the town by again by Corey's approximation, are getting what's coming to them. I mean, that's kind of the point of what's going on is you know they're getting what's coming to them because you know, they ostracized and antagonized Corey, and you know how terrible and how awful for them to do that, and it is it is terrible. I mean, the way that they treat Corey as terrible, the way that they make him feel like a monster, and they ostracize him as terrible.

But at the same time, you know, he's not handling it in a healthy way. He should have just left. He should have never stayed in Haddenfield. And if he hadn't stayed in Haddenfield, none of this would have happened. If he hadn't stayed in Haddenfield, he might have gone somewhere where nobody knew him.

Because yes, you know, while people do have things follow them from town to town or state to state, there are also plenty of people that, you know, they leave where they are and they go somewhere else and nobody knows them. And that's that. And Corey could have done that, Corey should have done that. Corey didn't do that, And in not doing that, we then have a character who's been pushed to the limit of his mental capacity because he cannot and will not and is unable to look at the situation as anything other than the world is out to get him. And look, the world the world is isn't not out to get him.

It's been shown very clearly that the community is very vocal with him about the things that have happened and the things that he's done. Is that realistic? I mean, in this day and age, you could you know, extrapolate, you know, interpolate onto other scenarios. You know, people feeling like they are justified and validated in their bad behavior, and so their bad behavior has existed in that form kind of passively, but now they've been given the opportunity to outwardly embrace. Their worst vices.

And I think, you know, the last Halloween film, Halloween Kills, the entire hospital kind of interlude of the film really spoke to the mob mentality of Haddenfield, which is, you know, even a good town of good people can be turned into monsters by you know, the notion or the idea of bad things going on or people, you know, doing bad things in the town. And I like that in Halloween Kills we see the mob mentality kind of we see that infection moment of the town where the town starts to become evil and lose its mind, you know it the Stephen King story. One of the aspects of that kind of story is that Darry, the town itself is evil and Darry has kind of been infected by the presence and the evil of Pennywise.

And I think that, you know, David Gordon Green cops from it in this movie in that respect, like Haddenfield has been infected by the evil of Michael Myers. He's you know, subterranean even I mean, he's underground in this film, which is ironic given the kind of Pennywise being underground of it all. But Michael Myers is in the sewers of this movie. He's underground. He has been waiting for three years, underground to I mean again, we're not even sure, because he could have made his presence known in three years.

I think he's been waiting again, per the narrative's belief, he's been waiting three years for Corey Cunningham to come down here. He's been waiting three years for some someone to find him. I mean, there's clearly the homeless man who finds him. But you know, Corey Cunningham wandering into the drainage ditch is the inciting incident of this film that then everything else plays out from. It's the reason Michael Myers comes out of the sewer, because Corey goes back to get the mask.

It's the reason that Laurie and Michael meet one final time, because Corey interacts with Michael and makes and you know, essentially it reawakens the beast, as it were. And I like that aspect of the movie. It doesn't bother me that Michael Myers isn't in the film that much. And I'll tell you why. I don't think in a lot of ways, that the horror films of old, the slasher films of old, and the way things were done are really interesting.

In twenty twenty five, I think it's more interesting to do something fun and new and creative with your characters. And I think sidelining Michael Myers as a kind of as kind of the evil that he is is and the evil of the town and the evil of every evil incarnate, using that but having it kind of be like the evil DNA a little bit of kind of you know, speaking of John Carpent or the Prince of Darkness, you know, like, is is the devil real? Or is he just like a or is he just like you know, a complex string of amino acids. I mean, this movie asks that question. Is evil real?

Is Michael Meyer's evil? Or is evil something that exists within him? Is evil something that he has not been able to control himself either, And so similarly to Corey, he kind of has just embraced it because that's the easy thing to do, and confronted with it, I think Michael is actually evil. I think Corey is one of those people that was kind of, you know, he was vulnerable, He's av he was you know, a very vulnerable person who you know, because of his vulnerability and his you know he's at risk. I mean, you know, he's such an at risk like person, and he was at risk before all the bad things happen.

He was at risk before he accidentally killed a kid. I mean, his mom was still treating him that way before everything happened. His home life was still a mess before everything happened. It's just once there's nowhere safe to go, that's when you feel overwhelmed, and that's when you feel like you can't do anything about the situation. And Corey has no course of action.

He has no release valve for the tension and the pressure in his life, which is why he should have gone and gotten taken care of mentally, because you know, we wouldn't have this movie if that had happened. But at the same time, because that isn't what happens, we get to see one of the better I think kind of you know kill compilations or collections of a Halloween movie. We get a Junkyard scene that's pretty great. It's got a lot of interesting kills. I think that the intensity that they bring to that scene is great.

We had Michael killing people in a lot of interesting ways, I mean, and a lot of might not Michael ways, I mean non Michael Meyer's ways, like using cars and motorcycles and other things. I mean, Michael Myers is primarily known as a you know, butcher's knife killer. I mean that is his kind of, you know, his weapon of choice. And we get a lot of non kitchen knife kills. And I really like that about the movie because we get to see someone else using the Michael Myers mask, someone else using the Michael Myers kind of symbology to create fear in the town and to create fear among the people that were antagonizing him.

And you know, that extends to the visual language of the film. We get a lot of callbacks to the original film with Corey standing at the edge of the bush and Laurie looks outside and sees him. There's a lot of visual language that's repeated. There's a lot of things that we kind of get from other films. I mean, again, to go back to the Halloween three Silver shamrock of it all, Like, this movie is so Halloween three in that it just kind of is interested in doing its own thing and it doesn't.

Really care about anything else. It doesn't really care about what's come before it, which is interesting given the film is directed by David Gordon Green, who directed the other two films in this franchise, and he wrote the other two films in this franchise, And it's just it's wild that he's so concerned with telling a different story, one that he knew would be divisive because the horror bros want Michael Myers. They want more kills, they want more gore, and it's like, look, you got Halloween Killed. Halloween Kills is the most a tip like say what you will about Halloween ns. Halloween Kills is the black sheep of the Halloween reboot trilogy.

And I will tell you why it is the black sheep because Michael myers Is intensity in that film is exacerbated intentionally so that we can see Michael Myers ripping people apart and being horrifying in a way that he never was before. And he's pushed at the end of the first movie to go and exact vengeance and revenge on the town that has wronged him, and he goes about it in the most bombastic, gory and over the top way. In that fight with the firefighters at the beginning of Halloween Kills is pretty intense. And by a fight, I mean him murdering all the firefighters and them not standing a chance. That is atypical of Halloween.

That's not like Halloween is a very slow burn franchise. The original movie, most of the film is just Michael stalking people, and then we get Lourie and Michael at the end of the movie sort of fighting each other, but more Laurie just running away from Michael and trying to protect herself. So, you know, Halloween as a franchise is not known for people being eviscerated on screen left and right. That's never been the intention of Halloween. But Halloween Kills because because the horror tastes have changed, because things like Terrifier exist, because things like Saw and Hostile exist.

The creators of Halloween knew that the people who were gonna come see this movie, there would be a sub section of the audience of the people that would come see this movie that want to see a gory, brutal Michael Meyers murdering people and tearing them apart with his butcher knife film. And we don't. It's not that we don't need that, it's just that should be viewed as atypical. This movie is a typical Halloween movie. It's a very slow burn film.

It's a very methodical film. You know, Michael or Corey as Michael goes around kind of killing people very slowly, very methodically, very intentionally Halloween kills. I mean, it's a brutal film of Michael just roaming the town murdering people. And look nothing wrong with it, but it is the atypical Halloween movie of this trilogy. The trilogy really like the third movie, I think is more in line with the first movie than the second one does with either.

And I think again that just goes back to the well, the intention of the filmmaker in the second movie was so different than in the third, And I think that's what's interesting about David Gordon Green for me, is that David Gordon Green is not necessarily compelled to do what the audience wants him to do. He's not necessarily compelled to do what he thinks is the expectation. He tends to just do whatever he wants. He tends to do whatever he thinks is going to push the story in an interesting direction. And him and Danny McBride and Paul Brad Logan, and Chris Burmere, like, they have all done a fantastic job with this script in creating a movie that speaks to the themes and the ideas of the Halloween franchise, but they tell it in a way where Halloween feels secondary to the story.

Halloween, the franchise feels secondary to the story, and I think for a lot of people, the third act of the movie is kind of where the real rubber meets the road in terms of like, well, now we've gone a step too far, and look, I can't blame this movie's advertising campaign for trying to convince you that it was going to be the fight of the century between Lowery and Michael. If that's what you thought, that's because the trailers of this movie sold it that way. And that was not being done in good fate. That was being done as advertising for films tends to be not being done with the best intentions. It was being done because they wanted people to come through the door, and they knew.

What people are going to see. But they knew that there was going to be a group of people who would be swayed by seeing, oh, this is the last time that Michael and Laurie will ever fight each other. So this is gonna be an event. I gotta go see the last time Michael Myers, you know, is on screen. First off, this is not the last time Michael Myers is never going to be on screen.

If if any of us know anything. About the horror world of horror filmmaking, it's that you cannot keep a good franchise down. It might seem like it, but even something like Friday the Thirteenth is getting you know, reappraisal and readjustment with you know, the Angry Orchard collaboration of it all, which is so fucking insane and so wild and so bizarre in and of itself. But Halloween as a franchise is a notable and one with notoriety. So of course the advertising for the film was going to be Michael and Laurie taking it to one another.

That is literally fine minutes of a two hour movie, like ten minutes tops like the Michael of it All. The Michael Myers of it All specifically is not part of the main plot. It's kind of the wrap around, as it were, to use a horror anthology parlance, like it is the wrap around of the story, we get to see the Michael Myers story come to a conclusion. I almost said satisfying here, but I think that that's me subjectively saying that. I think objectively a lot of the people that are huge, bigger fans of Halloween than I am, we're disappointed.

And I understand why. I you know, if I'm gonna go see a Michael Myers movie, I kind of want Michael Myers to be in it. But I also, as someone who watches a lot of movies and can get out of my own way, understand that, you know, I am in the filmmaker's hands. I am in the director's hands here, like the director is making a film for him ultimately or her, and if I resonate with that film, cool, If I don't with that film, cool. The intention of the film maker was to make a film for them or for what he perceives or she perceives to be the audience, and that's what David Gordon Green did with all of the Halloween movies.

It just happens to be that the first two movies resonated more with the audience that it was expected to resonate with than the last one. But I can't help. But wonder, like, did David Gordon Green not think, well, if I don't put Michael Myers in my movie a lot, people might be disappointed. I wonder if he was like, well, I put him in my movie a lot. In the first two The first movie was very much like a love letter to Michael Myers in a lot of way, like we get you know the movie.

He's the focus of them. And so I sit here and I wonder to myself, like, did we need yet another retread of the first two movies. I don't think so. I actually think the Halloween NS does some really interesting, fun and unique things with a tired franchise. And I'm not gonna say tired as in the first two movies in the Requel trilogy.

We're tired. But if the third movie in this Requel trilogy had just been like those first two movies, I think I think myself and a lot of other people would have said, well, this is all we're doing. Like, I don't know what people wanted from this third movie. I guess people wanted an hour and a half of Michael and Laurie fighting. But Jamie Lee.

Curtis is a woman in her you know, in her sixties, you know, going on seventies. Like I don't know what physical back and forth you were expecting from Michael and Laurie in Neat, you know, like, this movie shows us a short, intense, close combats battle between the two of them where they sit and fight in Laurie's kitchen, and Laurie, you know, she gets the upper hand, but not really and then by the time that you know she is you know, has the upper hand, Michael also gets the upper hand. And so like I was convinced, I was convinced this movie was gonna end with the two of them just kind of flying off of a cliff together, or you know, getting decapitated at the same time, or any number of things that would cause them to both die at the same time.

And we don't get that, but the movie baits us into that right towards the end. The movie shows us, like, well that that could have been the case in a different movie. In this movie, we have Allison come and save Laurie in those waning moments of the fight as Lurie's being choked out by Michael. And I think it works. I think it works that then Michael is dragged to an industrial grinder.

He is then fed into said industrial grinder, and we watch as Michael Myers the shape is ground apart and we watch it happen. So there's not any of this like, well, we didn't see it happened, so maybe he's not dead. Like no, in this movie, there's none of that. In this movie. It's we watch him die and that's it.

We don't cut away, we don't look elsewhere, we don't attempt to have our gaze averted. We are here to watch the town and their procession of people affected by Michael Myers drag his body because he's already dead, mind you, like, he has been killed already. Laurie and Laurie and Allison killed him by slashing his neck and wrists. But you cannot survive, I mean, you know, regardless of whether or not you know this is a Halloween franchise. Regardless of whether or not Michael has survived all kinds of other things, this franchise has made it clear that he's not gonna survive that, and so he's dead by the time they drag him to the industrial grinder at the end of the movie.

But that's not really the point. The point is to put to bed Michael Myers as a character, and put to bed the Michael Myers kind of legacy, and put to bed what Michael Myers is all about. And I think this movie does a good job at putting the Michael Myers of it all to bed. Look, we'll probably get more Michael Myers, will probably get more of him as a character. I hope not.

I don't need anymore. This is a good ending to the franchise. This is a worthwhile way to put the Michael Myers character to bed. I wish Corey Cunningham had survived. I wish they had kind of made the decision that they seemingly thought about making to allow his character to survive, to have him be the Michael Myers of the franchise, to have him be the Michael Myers the series.

But I mean also Rohan Campbell, I guess was not ever going to be that. I mean, it's interesting they kind of float the idea of the transference of evil, and they float the idea that he could be the next Michael Myers, and that you know, his journey to becoming Michael or evil is very different from Michael's, but it's still a journey that he's gone on, and it's still a journey that he has been part of. And I was super interested in that character and seeing where that character went with things and where the franchise went with that character, who is so different from Michael, who has different agency than Michael, who has different motivations and means and intense than Michael. And I really wish that they had not bailed on the Corey Cunningham character.

I wish they had not bailed on Corey as the focus of the franchise because he's an interesting character and Michael Myers looms large in the movie. But Michael Myers didn't have to be the continued focus of the franchise. We could have moved away from And in this movie, it almost feels like they they ripcorded out at the last second, they parachuted out at the last second. And it bums me out, It really does, because for me, I wanted the franchise to end, and it did. But I also thought, well, if they could continue the franchise in a substantive way, and they could use a chance to kind of get themselves out of this while also ending things like why not right?

Like you it's unrealistic to expect that this franchise is not going to continue, and we don't get that. Corey Cunningham dies at his own hand and then he gets his head smushed by Michael, And I liked the idea of it looking like he was going to kill he was going to kill himself and frame it on Laurie. I like that idea. I wish that had been further kind of kind of discussed and maybe talked about, and it wasn't, And it really wasn't, and I'm disappointed because that's another kind of avenue that we could have gone down. But you know, the idea of Laurie being framed for his murder and him kind of going off to do murdery things, I mean, yeah, that's not Halloween.

But I mean again, if you listen to the response to this movie, most people didn't think that this movie was much Halloween. To begin with. So that's and that's my issue with this movie is you know, you go into it expecting Halloween and it's not Halloween. But right at the end of the movie, it remembers, oh, yeah, no, this is a Halloween movie, And I kind of wish it have just not done that. I kind of wish that, yes, Michael needed to die.

I agree with that sentiment, like that needed to be over and done with, But for me, like I could have really used some other thing to keep this going. I could have really used a further into of the Corey Cunningham story. And I think the issue that I have with this movie, as much as I like this movie, is this should have been two separate movies. The Corey Cunningham stuff gets in such the way of this movie, and it's so good that everything else that the movie is doing with the Halloween Michael Myers of it all doesn't live up to how good the Corey Cunningham stuff is. It almost feels like they're hamstrung by having to have Michael Meyers still be in this as opposed to just doing their own story.

And I'm really disappointed by that, because for my money, I would rather have a movie where the main character and the other characters. Maybe there's a legacy sequel aspect to it of it, but that's not going to get in the way of the climax of the movie that I'm watching. The legacy stuff should be integrated into it in an interesting way, but it shouldn't supersede the things that are happening. Look at Ghostbusters after Life, Oh, there come the Ghostbusters at the end of the movie, completely robbing our characters of any agency that they might have had in terms of stopping a Zool in that movie. And in this movie, it's like Michael Myers ends up overwriting all the interesting Corey Cunningham, Alison Strode, Laurie Strode kind of interaction that the movie has spent an hour and a half doing, and at the end it's like, but we know you're here for Michael, so we're gonna still do the Michael thing, and we're just gonna do the most obvious Michael thing.

And and that for me is kind of like, Ah, that's the missed opportunity with this movie is that this movie had to have Michael Myers in it, and it had to concern itself with ending that. And while yes, I think it ended it in an interesting way, I don't think it did it as interesting as it could have. I think it kind of second guessed itself in terms of what it thought the audience was gonna want, what it thought the audience was gonna need. It knew that the audience probably wasn't gonna vibe with the Corey Cunningham story, but they did it anyways. But then they pulled back at the last second, And in pulling back at the last second, it's like, well, why did we spend all this time commit to the bit or don't commit to the bit or don't And in my mind, this movie commits to the bit ninety percent of the way, But it's that ten percent that matters, because it's the ten percent that sticks out like a ninety percent sore thumb when you don't do it.

And that's the problem with this movie. The end of this movie sticks out like a sore thumb for the rest of the movie because the end of this movie is the ending of a movie that we weren't really watching. It's the ending of a movie that it thought it was showing us. But the movie that it's been showing us is the story of how evil foments, how evil becomes, how evil takes hold, not how evil has already taken hold, because in the original Halloween, evil's already taken hold. In this movie, this is about how if we don't support each other, if we don't look after each other, if we're not caring and compassionate and kind to each other and try to understand the human experience best we can.

We will ostracize people, we will push people away, We will cause people to turn to violence because that is the only option that they feel like they have. And I actually think the message of Halloween Ends is a lot more important and prescient than the Halloween Kills, Evil Dies Tonight mob mentality. I think Halloween Ends is one of the few films that I've seen where it makes the case that mental health is important. We should not turn people away that are struggling. We should not ostracize p people that are struggling.

We should not make people that are already vulnerable and susceptible, we should not further cause them harm and push them to do things like stabbing people in the neck with corkscrews, like murdering men and women, like taking a man's face and slamming it into a turntable so hard that his jaw distends. None of that could have happened if Haddenfield itself had not been evil. And that's the interesting thing about this franchise is is now the evil is not so much the people in the town as much as the town itself and kind of the the holistic nature of all of the evil in the town. It's kind of hard to find any one person in the town that isn't terrible. Other than like the people that were directly involved with Michael's evil, everybody else is just going out of their way to be antagonistic.

I mean, we have the doctor and the nurse who are antagonizing Alison. We have all the band kids, We have all kinds of people in the movie that are antagonistic towards Laurie and Alison and Corey. And you know, I think for me, in a lot of ways, the story in this movie works better than it's worked in any of the other ones, which is the town is evil. Bad things when they happen, tend to have a life of their own, and they tend to live on long past when they've happened, and this movie is indicator of that. Michael is an old, decrepit man, but he can still kill people.

Evil is even when evil is old and gray, Evil is still evil. Evil in any form is evil, and Corey is evil. Laurie, you know, she acknowledges his evil. The town is evil. The town's been infected by the evil, but Alison and Laurie have rejected the evil.

They've rejected the darkness. And that, for me is what I love about this franchise is that at the end, even though the movie kind of flails around in the third act, I like the conclusion of Halloween ends with Laurie and Will Patten seemingly getting together, Michael seemingly dead, Laurie being given a seemingly happy ending, and the movie echoing the final shot of the original film with you know, Michael's mask sitting there, and you know, you know, we're going to close on that, and we're gonna have There's not going to be any breathing this time. There's just going to be the mask. And there's no question as to whether or not Michael is alive. Michael is dead and gone, and I'm glad kill the past, let it die.

You know, I'm not one for revisiting the past, because I think getting lost in the past is a real fool's errand because the only thing that we can do is change the future and change our current situation, and how we react to the things that we deal with is what's important. The things that have happened to us. They've happened. It's past tense, can't do anything about it now. And that's what Corey doesn't understand is he he's the only one who can move on.

He's the only one who can move past things. If other people haven't moved past it, that's on them. But he allows those things to get to him. He starts internalize those things. By the end of the movie, there's nothing left.

He has lost his identity completely and embraced Michael Myers to the point where Michael kills him because he is stealing Michael's shtick, as it were. And I find Halloween ends to be an immensely interesting film. I find it to be a compelling film and one that I didn't know I needed, but one that now that I have it, I kind of can't help but like really enjoy it every time I watch it. I've gone on the record multiple times saying the opening of the movie is is hilarious in a lot of ways, and it's such a it was such a shocking moment that it kind of reminds me of the opening of Scream in a way. It's like he just didn't see that coming, and you know, scream obviously with Drew Barrymore, Like everybody knows Drew Marymore is gonna die at the beginning of the movie, other than the people who saw the movie in theaters, Like you could still go into this movie not knowing what's going to happen in the first ten minutes, and it is impactful and it is wild, and again like it's it's a moment of violence that's accidental, unlike a moment of violence at the beginning of Halloween that is intentional.

But yet the outcome is still the same. The outcome is still death and violence, and that's because our way of handling it is the underlying issue. The lack of attention, the lack of care, the lack of compassion in this society creates monsters and fomense monsters and Halloween ends, I think is turning a mirror on society and saying, look, we create monsters by not being empathetic and not being compassionate towards people, even people we don't agree with, even people we don't like, because people are people, and it's the lack of compassion in the world that causes people to feel like they have no other course of action. But to turn to violence when people are not compassionate, and that is seen as a constant.

I think Halloween N's is definitely worth revisiting. I think Halloween ns is a film worth checking out. I think Halloween Ends is is and has aged better than the movies that surround it in the franchise. And I, for one, am a I am a huge champion of this film, and I think that if you haven't seen it, I would definitely check it out and it you know, it should it should yield dividends in that regard because for me, I always want something weird from my franchises, and this is This is pretty weird. This is definitely out there.

So if you're on the fence about it, definitely check it out. Maybe don't announce that there's gonna be a trilogy of movies ahead of time so that the movies are completely robbed of their stakes, but hey, I don't make movies for a living, I just talk about them, So like, rate and review this show on iTunes and Spotify or wherever you get it. Please Patreon dot com, slash Culturecast, patreon dot com, slash Projection Booth, the patreon dot com slash Father and alone, are three places you can go to interact with the people that I work with or the shows that I work on. And yeah, Happy Halloween, stay safe, stay weird, don't do anything I wouldn't do, which is it's a pretty wide margin, and we'll catch you on the next episode of the Culture Casts.

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