David Gordon Green’s “Halloween Ends” has proven rather divisive amongst the fanbase, with a good chunk of the reason being the film’s heavy focus on the new character of Corey Cunningham.
Rohan Campbell plays the young man who serves as the main character of the film with Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode, and her final showdown with Michael Myers really only constituting the last half hour or so.
The rest of the film deals with the blossoming darkness within Corey following an accident in the opening that sends his life into a tailspin. David Gordon Green was asked about this unexpected approach by EW and explains why he chose to do it this way:
“I wanted to get a new perspective of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode and the family, and I wanted to bring a new central character to be a pivotal exploration of those characters and the town. We’d seen the story of a stalker, and we’d seen a lot of the ways that trauma had affected Laurie Strode, but I really wanted to see how that affected the town.”
The 2018 film focused on Laurie and her family, the second on the town of Haddonfield and mob justice, and the third on how the violence continues to impact the survivors long after what happened. Green elaborates on his approach:
“Bringing in a new character of Corey Cunningham, and discovering first his own immediate trauma in our cold open, and then how that affects him, and then how an encounter with our already established evil could become kind of an infectious thing.
It’s a study of the contagiousness of these negative entities that are in our lives. If they go unchecked, then they spread. If we can wrap our head around them, and be our own hero, then maybe we’ve got a fighting chance.”
It’s certainly more thematically deep stuff than just a final showdown between Laurie and Michael. The film does offer a pretty definitive end to Myers & Strode’s saga, and is now out in cinemas and available on Peacock.
