I went into this with what I’d consider a reasonable amount of cautious optimism. Halloween Kills from last year still left me hankering to see how this trilogy was going to wrap up, but with the rather glaring flaws that showed up there, I was admittedly worried that it was the sign that things were going to properly bottom out. This would be the trilogy that first blazed its way into cinemas and created a fresh, clean slate that swept away the myriad of messy follow-ups to the 1978 original… only to do its own restocking of similarly wasteful material. I don’t even hate Kills as much as a lot of others seem to, but it still left me with a rather worrying impression, despite how much I got into its meatier subtext.
Thankfully, though, I am happy to report that this properly returns to what made the 2018 film work as well as it did. Although you’d be forgiven for being completely thrown off by what this finale has to offer.
The conflict between Laurie Strode and Michael Myers is still the nucleus of the story, as is the larger battle for the soul of Haddenfield, but the film opens with neither Laurie nor Michael. Rather, it opens with a whole new babysitter in Rohan Campbell’s Corey… which ends up with the death of the child he was sitting for, and himself copping the blame for it.
The opening credits for this film use the same font as Halloween III: Season Of The Witch, and while this isn’t that much of a departure from the series up to this point, it is still appropriately indicative of the gear shifts to follow. Corey ends up taking centre stage for a fair amount of the film, between his budding relationship with Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), his frequent run-ins with the increasingly hostile townies of Haddenfield over the child death, and… well, him being fashioned, both by the town and by Michael himself, into a new boogeyman. The newest figure to represent the fear that still has this town in a chokehold.
There’s bits of John Carpenter’s Christine in how Corey finds a morbid sense of power in embracing evil, while also falling in love (for a trilogy that has been emphasising the dichotomy of love and evil, going into rom-com territory makes way more sense than it really should), but more so than that, this reminds me quite a bit of A Nightmare On Elm Street 2 and Friday The 13th Part V. Both of those films also involved a main character turning intothe iconic slasher villain their respective series revolve around, and both turned out quite badly as a result of that gear shift.
And yet this reiteration of that same idea isn’t. Partly because, between the script and Campbell’s amazing performance, the tragic aspect of Corey going down this dark path adds to the chewiness of the film’s larger themes. But mainly, it’s because his involvement in the plot manages a nifty trick in keeping Michael in the shadows, while keeping it explicitly about him and his effect on the people in this town. Corey basically serves as the condensed form of everything that is happening because of Michael’s influence, where the overwhelming fear, paranoia, and faded retelling of old legends has created something capable of great harm. And just as much to itself as to anyone in its proximity. The fact that the film stays rather ambiguous about the shocking opening as far as… well, how much of the blame Corey should be shouldering, just makes the moral questioning hit that much harder.
From there, as crystallised by Laurie’s own words, both Corey and Michael represent the two forms that evil can take. Michael, as I’ve gotten into in past reviews, is evil as an exterior force; the absolute embodiment of it that serves as the reason why the human survival instinct exists to begin with. It is that which cannot be reasoned with. Whereas Corey is the evil that rests in us, the kind that can hide in plain sight as it drives people to hate, to rage, even to kill. That which can be reasoned with, but which takes real courage to attempt doing so from both sides. Being able to forgive isn’t easy, and I say that as someone who advocates for that over holding onto past hostilities.
Where this gets odd is that, for as gory and brutal as this can get, the actual conclusion to all of this is remarkably downplayed. The final confrontation between Laurie and Michael is about as low-flash as a slasher film gets nowadays, ending not in a blaze of glory but in a final, somewhat resigned air of ‘at last… it’s over.’. I hesitate to call it ‘satisfying’, as that implies that this appeals to that kind of emotional reaction, whereas this feels a lot more downtrodden. There’s hope in it, to be sure, but it’s quite bittersweet, and I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t work for some audiences.
But personally, I really like how this all wrapped up, to the point where it makes my misgivings about Kills a lot easier to swallow in hindsight. What David Gordon Green and Danny McBride have put together here is the kind of thoughtful, heartfelt, and yet entirely without shame of still being a slasher, take on the formula that I can get behind. The scares are solid, the gore effects are brutal without being gratuitous, the soundtrack is kick-arse (both the classic rock needle drops and the terrific soundtrack from John & Cody Carpenter and Daniel Davies), and along with staying true to the franchise’s understanding of evil, it even manages to redeem a narrative trope that sent some of its sibling series into their weakest iterations. Love lives today.
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