The Aftermath of David Gordon Green’s ‘Halloween’ Trilogy*
By Harper Smith
*What It Set Out to Do and Not What I Wanted It to Do
A few years back, Justin Beahm, a longtime friend of mine, gave me advice that, to this day, has never quite left my brain. His advice changed the way I looked at filmmaking in general and allowed this writer to try to appreciate a film for reasons I typically did not. While on a long phone call regarding Rob Zombie’s Halloween II (2009), a sequel to his 2007 remake of John Carpenter’s Halloween, Beahm explained to me why the film always resonated with him and why he appreciated it so: he recognized what Zombie was trying to do with the film, and by taking the time to appreciate what Zombie was going for, it freed him to lose the baggage that we tend to carry when a new sequel to a beloved series arrives in front of our eyes.
Bypassing the expectations of what we want or expect can be difficult. We love our favorites with passion and fervor; we argue and fight online about which sequel is the best, which characters deserved or did not deserve their fates, and what we will see in the next sequel. When said films arrive, online fans tend to declare that they’re either too close to the original ones or in some cases too different. We have such wildly large expectations that we are blinded at times by what the filmmakers themselves set out to do. Losing that and seeing a film for just the film itself, is a freeing thing, something that challenges what we want in favor of a story that has something to say.
David Gordon Green’s Halloween (2018), Halloween Kills (2021), and Halloween Ends (2022) trilogy of sequels to the 1978 classic film have been as divisive among fans as possible, some adoring them as a return to form (this writer) and some venomously hating them like they were made just to ruin their lives. The issue with that is this: Green didn’t just want to take on another Halloween sequel. The series has had its share of swings way out in left field, some having worked and some having, well…Resurrection’d. What Green, Danny McBride, and their collaborators tried to do was take what had happened in the 1978 film and put a magnifying glass on how those events would have affected not only Halloween’s beloved survivor Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) but the entire town of Haddonfield itself. It’s an experiment through three films, all utilizing very different approaches from each other, to work together to form a really compelling and, to be honest, thought-provoking set of statements.
I’ve always been somewhat vocal about my dislike of 1998’s Halloween H20, a film that attempted and, in my opinion, failed to do what Green did twenty years later. Whereas the Laurie Strode we saw in H20 felt so unlike the Laurie we met in the 1978 film, Green’s take on Laurie felt like it was revisiting the heroine we last saw crying as Loomis shot Myers over the balcony at the climax of Carpenter’s original. Forty years later, Laurie has alienated her family, been divorced a couple of times, and lost custody of her daughter over her paranoia that her attacker, The Shape Michael Myers, would someday return to finish what he started decades before. A recluse, Strode arms herself to the T but sadly has fallen into alcoholism as a way to cope with the traumatic aftermath from that night in 1978: her murdered friends and a headload of mental pain she has had to deal with ever since. We don’t see the brash, somewhat pissy version of Strode we saw in H20 — we see a broken Laurie who doesn’t run from her trauma but is obsessed with destroying it, an arrogance that we all tend to have when dealing with our own trauma. We so desperately need to deal with whatever happened to us; we assume brute force will fix it when all it does is harm the ones around us.
When Myers escapes a transport, and heads home to Haddonfield, Strode immediately expects Myers to come after her and we as viewers are given a really excellent statement from Green: Trauma does not give a single care about you. Myers has zero intention of going after Laurie because the events of 1978 meant nothing to him. He is simply evil. While Laurie has spent decades expecting her attacker to think about her as much as she thought about him, the fact is that we mean nothing to our trauma, and it serves only to destroy and nothing else. In the 2018 film, it is Strode who chases Myers for the most part. The only reason Michael comes after Laurie and her daughter Karen and granddaughter Allyson is that his demented doctor, Dr. Sartain, drives Michael to Laurie’s house for a confrontation. Aside from that, it’s safe to say Myers and Strode would have never seen each other again and Strode would have died wanting and expecting the fight that never would have happened. This is what Green gives us, making us realize his Halloween films aren’t going to be what we expect with a Marvel Cinematic Universe-level showdown that people seemed to want with the trilogy. Instead, we’re given a dissection of what abuse and trauma can do to an entire community and how one person’s pain can lead to others hurting.
When Laurie, Karen, and Allyson assume they defeated Myers at the end of the 2018 film, Laurie expects that her pain and trauma have passed — she finally beat the horror she’s lived with for forty years. But as the sequel Halloween Kills shows, one person’s pain can be appropriated by people around them, leading good people to adopt a bloodlust that in turn, eventually destroys them.
In Kills, we’re given the Haddonfield equivalent of red hat “Make America Great Again” rhetoric with the film’s “Evil dies tonight!” chants that viewers hated with a passion. However, those same viewers failed to see that the frustrating chants were intentional, showing how people can adopt something they don’t even fully get because hatred and anger are contagious and destructive. Haddonfield uses what happened to Laurie as a reason to go chasing anyone and everyone, assuming they’re Myers, and leading to innocent people dying, something very similar to the anger and hatred I witnessed during the immediate aftermath of 9/11. Almost immediately, I saw every Middle Eastern person I knew being compared to those who crashed the planes into the Twin Towers. People needed a face to direct their anger at and, like that hatred and misplaced ferocity in real life, Kills shows Haddonfield falling apart at the seams over not only their own anger but the unresolved trauma that Laurie allowed herself to live with for decades, leading to more and more loss. Haddonfield collectively attacks Myers at the end of the film but ultimately ends up getting annihilated in return, including, sadly, Laurie’s daughter Karen — another result of both Laurie’s decades-long anger and Haddonfield’s piggybacking said anger.
When we skip ahead a few years later for Halloween Ends, we see another side of Laurie’s trauma: fresh therapy. When she finally decides to not allow trauma to control her, she learns the key and tools to cope with what had happened and what she had lost. Laurie has rebuilt herself. She isn’t frantic anymore and there’s a softness to her. She flirts with Frank in the grocery store while twirling her hair akin to the Laurie from 1978 we all fell in love with. We see shades of happiness that we as viewers know won’t last, as two things are certain: 1) With Myers missing, Haddonfield needs someone to direct their anger and pain at, and 2) When we first begin to approach our recovery, we tend to blindly think it’s all over, not realizing there are confrontations we must approach if we truly want to move on.
Haddonfield sees their new monster in Corey Cunningham, a young man who, because of an accident, accidentally killed a young boy. Corey’s the new Michael Myers in so many of the townspeople’s eyes, something that Haddonfield eventually pushes Corey into becoming. Eventually giving in, and upon discovering Michael as a beat-up-almost-decaying man in a tunnel, Corey uses his pain to take up where Michael left off, proving Haddonfield right. It’s not because Corey wants to but because at some point if you do not take the steps to deal with your trauma and pain, it deals with you. In the case of Cunningham, it becomes a fulfilled prophecy. Laurie immediately sees the evil in Corey, and after Karen’s murder in the previous film, Laurie’s reaction is to protect her granddaughter Allyson from Corey. This is when Strode decides to stop the evil at all costs, something that, unbeknownst to her, eventually leads to the final confrontation with Michael. Due to Corey’s murderous spree, Michael’s evil and anger return and he comes back, donning his iconic mask again. We finally see the last confrontation between Laurie and Michael. But audiences were left shocked and let down for the most part in how this final fight played out. Instead of an Avengers-level confrontation, it plays out as it should. Laurie finally has the tools to defeat Michael for good. It isn’t just Laurie slicing Michael’s wrists and throat; it isn’t just Laurie destroying Michael Myers for good in a metal compactor. It’s Laurie and Haddonfield finally taking 40-plus years of abuse, pain, loss, sadness, anger, and trauma, and finally saying: WE ARE FUCKING DONE. That is what Ends is about. It’s about erroneously projecting your pain onto others when all you need to do is confront it yourself. It’s the culmination of three films that show three different sides of trauma. While we all love to playfully jab at how many times Jamie Lee Curtis said trauma in junkets for these films, that’s truly what these films are about: the different ways we deal with all the horror life throws at us. It’s about how we think we’re stronger than our pain only to see our pain destroy us from the ground up, and then when we’re given the tools to finally refuse to live life in horror any longer, we do what we need to endure. We survive.
Halloween 2018, Halloween Kills, and Halloween Ends might not have been for everyone, but it was certainly for this writer. I have felt so close to these films for the reasons I’ve just written about because I was able to take what I wanted and expected a Halloween film to be and instead saw what Green and Company were trying to do.
And goddamn am I happy they did it. 🩸
About
Harper Smith is a film journalist and composer, hailing from the Central Valley of California. For over a decade now, they have annoyed readers of many sites and magazines with an overabundance of Halloween 4 love and personal essays. Follow them on X @HarperisjustOK and visit their website Rainydaysforghosts.bandcamp.com.
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