By Chris Snellgrove
| Published 51 seconds ago

Ever watch the fandom collectively turn on a beloved franchise all at once? For Star Wars fans, it happened when The Last Jedi derailed decades of lore in favor of doing something completely different. For Star Trek fans, it happened when Starfleet Academy stopped exploring strange new worlds and started exploring Zoomer slang and CW-style teen drama. Meanwhile, for Halloween fans, it happened when Halloween Ends mostly replaced Michael Myers with a much more modern villain: a troubled young man who decides to solve all his problems, one murder at a time. At 40 percent on Rotten Tomatoes, it’s safe to say that Halloween Ends is one of the most reviled films in the entire franchise.

Here’s the thing, though: in the parlance of The Dark Knight, Halloween Ends wasn’t the film that franchise fans deserved, but it was the one they needed. After Myers became a figure of borderline parody in Halloween Kills, Halloween Ends did something we haven’t seen since the third film in the series: it took the focus off the most famous masked killer in horror history. The result (assuming you can ignore the goofy climax) is one of the most provocative horror films of the last decade, and you can check it out for yourself on Netflix. 

Mikey Likes It

Halloween Ends begins with a babysitter (played by Rohan Campbell) accidentally killing the child he is watching in a freak accident. He becomes an outcast and pariah in Haddonfield, where even bored high school bullies harass him. After an unexpected run-in with a decidedly decrepit-looking Michael Myers, this bullied babysitter finally becomes the monster the whole town thinks he is. Things get messier when he falls in love with the granddaughter (played by Andi Matichak) of Laurie Strode (played by OG scream queen Jamie Lee Curtis), Myers’ oldest surviving victim. As the bodies pile up, the film barrels towards an explosive finale in which different generations of god and evil must fight for whatever is left of this troubled town’s soul.

While critics largely hated it, Halloween Ends deserves credit for taking big creative swings. David Gordon Green’s first Halloween movie was a solid reboot of the franchise, situating itself as a direct sequel to the John Carpenter slasher that started it all. That movie was good but not great, and much of what made it special was bogged down by weighty and sometimes awkward world-building. Halloween Kills, meanwhile, felt like a gonzo parody of the whole franchise, pairing over-the-top violence with cheesy dialogue and relentless nostalgia slop. Comparatively, Halloween Ends feels like a unique and fully-formed commentary on both the franchise and America’s epidemic of violence. 

A Stab From The Past

Admittedly, some of the criticisms of Halloween Ends are fair. The tone is inconsistent, waffling between slow-burning psychological thrills and boiling slasher violence. The finale (a clearly shot-for-the-trailer, hilariously geriatric showdown between Laurie and Michael Myers )is unambiguously the worst part of the film. The characters are written as modern American archetypes, which sometimes interferes with the otherwise grounded storytelling. Finally, the film de-centers Myers in favor of a young, new killer, which will be off-putting to anyone who tuned in to see their favorite masked madman engaging in a bit of the old ultraviolence.

However, that last criticism is most definitely a feature of Halloween Ends rather than a bug. The brutal truth is that, narratively speaking, Michael Myers is played out and has almost nothing left to offer to this franchise. Director David Gordon Green wisely ignored the tangled continuity of Myers’ lore, returning him to his default state as the embodiment of pure evil. But there’s only so much you can do with “evil man is evil,” which is why Halloween Kills gave him nothing to do but hack up everyone he ran into. Halloween Ends, however, posits that Myers’ evil is infectious, effectively spreading throughout the entire town like a cancer.   

Little Boy Blues

It certainly spread into our protagonist, a young man whose life is forever changed when he accidentally kills a boy. He shares something important in common with Myers: putting on a mask is how he leaves his humanity behind, fully embracing his identity as a monster. However, he is much more sympathetic than Myers because he fights his destiny, trying to rebuild his life after it is shattered into a thousand pieces. Thanks to Rohan Campbell’s compelling performance, audiences are forced to ask how culpable he is for his brutal actions and how much blame can be placed on Michael Myers, a legend who is simultaneously Haddonfield’s most immovable object and its most unstoppable force.

It helps that Campbell has very natural chemistry with Andi Matichak. Her character has endured so much tragedy in such a short time that she is in a perfect position to fall in love with the town’s resident bad boy. Together, they form a decidedly postmodern pair of star-crossed lovers: she just wants to escape from it all, while her serial killer boyfriend wants to tear everything down. Their relationship is as passionate as it is dysfunctional, and their doomed romance is every bit as compelling as the film’s satisfyingly gory kills. 

Evil Smiles Tonight

Is Halloween Ends the best film in the franchise? Of course not. That honor goes to the John Carpenter original, a bloody slice of slasher perfection. But Ends is better than most of the original sequels (especially Halloween III and Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers), and it’s infinitely better than both of Rob Zombie’s remakes put together. If you can get over the relative lack of Michael Myers, it’s even better than Green’s first Halloween film because it offers us a genuinely fresh story set in this venerable cinematic universe. Throw in great kills, crunchy actor chemistry, and a pitch-perfect performance from original Final Girl Jamie Lee Curtis, and you’ve got something truly special.

Care to decide for yourself if this hated film is secretly brilliant? Want to wash away the fetid odor of several stinkers in the franchise, or maybe just get the phrase “EVIL DIES TONIGHT” out of your head? All you have to do is stream Halloween Ends on Netflix to experience this melancholic meta-slasher for yourself. By the time the credits roll, you’ll have a new respect for one of horror’s most notorious modern films. But you’ll likely join the legion of Halloween fans who are all united by a single, simple hope: that Myers stays dead a little bit longer before Hollywood tries to bring this slasher series back to life again.