Why Halloween Ends’ Opening Kill Is So Effective

Halloween Ends (now streaming on the SYFY app), the conclusion to director David Gordon Green’s legacy sequel trilogy which offered a new conclusion to the saga of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis), is a divisive movie, but it was probably always going to be that way. Offering a conclusion (not the conclusion, as Michael will probably outlive all of us) to a story this beloved, especially if you’re not original creators John Carpenter and Debra Hill, is always going to be a tricky proposition. 

But the interesting thing about Halloween Ends isn’t that it divided fans upon its release in 2022; it’s that it did its best to take chances while it had those fans eager to watch what happened next. Like it or not, this is a movie with some big ideas about how to not just conclude the Laurie vs. Michael saga, but to say something about its impact on a small Illinois town and the people within it. It’s a movie that reaches for something new, something unexpected, and that’s exemplified by its jaw-dropping opening kill. 

Why Halloween Ends‘ opening is so effective

Ends picks up four years after Halloween Kills, a film that unfolded largely on the same night as 2018’s Halloween. You might expect a film with that kind of time jump to immediately catch up with its main characters, Laurie (who’s trying to live a quiet life) and Michael (who vanished without a trace at the end of the last film), but Green and his co-writers don’t do that. Instead, they introduce an entirely new character, college boy Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), and after promoting that big time jump throughout the marketing of the film, they take the action back to 2019, one year after Michael’s latest massacre.

Corey is a good kid, a smart kid, a kid with a bright future, and when we meet him on Halloween night in 2019, he’s doing what Laurie Strode used to do, and heading into the rich part of town for a babysitting gig. It’s the first Halloween since Michael returned and then disappeared, so everyone’s on edge, including the parents (Candice Rose and Jack William Marshall) who are about to leave Corey with their young son, Jeremy (Jaxon Goldberg). That sense of edginess, combined with the cavernous nature of Jeremy’s home, makes Corey nervous, and by extension we the audience are searching every shadow, looking for the return of Michael Myers.

But we don’t get that. Instead, the parents leave, Corey settles in, and Jeremy quickly reveals himself to be a bit of a problem child for his babysitter, playing all kinds of creepy little pranks and eventually tricking Corey into a locked closet. Now, we’re going to get into SPOILERS for a three-year-old movie right below this trailer, so if you haven’t seen Halloween Ends yet, you might want to go watch it on the SYFY app, then come back to us.

Still here? OK, so Corey’s locked in a closet, in a massive house, while the kid he’s tasked with keeping safe is outside. As we’ve already established, Corey’s a good kid, so every instinct in him is telling him he needs to get out of this closet, get the situation under control, get Jeremy to calm down and behave. He’s panicking because he’s convinced he’s messed the whole night up, and he’ll be in trouble, and then other babysitting gigs will dry up.

In the midst of Corey’s panic, everything we think we know about what’s going to happen next starts to evaporate, because the conflict is no longer about what’s lurking outside this house. It’s about what’s inside, and yet we’re still thinking about Michael Myers, where he might be hiding, what he might do to this little kid who’s now roaming this mansion alone. We’re thinking this because we’ve seen these movies before. 

And then Corey forces the door open, and the door hits Jeremy, and Jeremy promptly falls over the balcony and lands with a thud in the middle of the family foyer, instantly dead. 

If you saw Halloween Ends on opening weekend, then you know that theaters absolutely erupted at this moment, with shock, with laughter, with pure excitement over just how unhinged it all felt. It’s a moment that immediately knocks the entire audience off balance, leaves us wondering where this film could possibly go, and what this death could possibly mean in the larger context of the Halloween franchise. It’s jaw-dropping in the best way, and while opinions differ on how well the film handles what comes next in Corey’s story, it’s hard to argue just how viscerally effective that opening kill still is, almost three years later.

Halloween Ends is now streaming on the SYFY app.