Spoilers and Secrets Revealed by Director

• Warning: Major spoilers below if you haven’t seen “Halloween Ends.”
• David Gordon Green told Insider why it took so long for Michael Myers to show up in the movie.
• He revealed the scene that was originally a DVD extra and said Jamie Lee Curtis insisted on doing her own stunts.

With “Halloween Ends,” director David Gordon Green puts a cap on his relaunch trilogy of the iconic horror franchise. And he held nothing back.

With 2018’s “Halloween” followed by “Halloween Kills” three years later, Green took us on a blood-soaked ride as he ignored the nine sequels that came out after John Carpenter’s groundbreaking 1978 movie and has Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode character patiently waiting 40 years for the return of psychotic killer Michael Myers.

But for “Halloween Ends,” Green gets even more daring — introducing a new evil character and giving us less Michael Myers.

The movie catches up with Strode as she’s finally come to terms with the loss of her daughter at the hands of Myers, who has not been seen since the events in “Kills.”

However, there may be a new evil entering Haddonfield.

We are introduced to Corey (Rohan Campbell) who has been ostracized by the town following the death of a boy he was babysitting. After being bullied through the first half of the movie, and growing fond of Strode’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), Corey encounters Myers and becomes the villain’s killing protégé.

It leads to a gory ending that finds Strode and Myers having their final showdown.

 

 

Ray Green/Universal

 

The movie, currently in theaters and on Peacock, has been bashed by the critics. Variety called it the franchise’s “most joylessly metaphorical and convoluted entry” (it has a 40% Rotten Tomatoes score).

But the way Green sees it, it’s no fun doing a franchise like “Halloween” unless you take big swings.

“It’s tricky because you want to invite the fans to the party, but you also want to give something that’s 100% of your creative energy,” Green told Insider over a Zoom chat about his mindset in making the third movie. “You’ve got to swing for a few, you don’t always hit them, but why not take the risk at this point.”

Here, we chat with Green about the movie’s biggest spoilers, his reason behind why we don’t see Michael Myers until well into the movie, the gory scene that was originally planned as a DVD extra, and Curtis’ insistence to have Myers smash her face through a prop-glass cabinet.

 

 

Universal/Peacock

 

Green felt opening the movie with a kid’s death would grab audiences ‘by the throat’

You go and do something in the first 15 minutes of the movie that’s very rare in mainstream horror movies: killing a child. Did you get any pushback from Blumhouse or Universal in making that choice?

Once we knew we were going to do a babysitter intro, and we’ve seen a lot of them, a lot of great ones, I think we needed to do something that grabbed people by the throat a little bit. Or a lot.

And what was really fortunate for me in this creative standpoint, the reason I continue to make movies with Blumhouse, is you get in a room and start pitching ideas and you sculpt them to be even better. It’s not like they are these authoritarian corporate figures who are telling you what to do with your movie.

The second we have a rough draft we bring our DP, our production designer, our set designer, our sound mixer, and our producers into a room and we read it out loud and we hear how it goes and then we decide if it’s shocking enough.

For this scene in particular did it evolve from, say, the kid breaking a leg to him falling four stories to his death?

No, he always died. There was no softer version.

Were there different causes of the death? 

No. There were certain intentions that were different. Was Corey more mean? Was the kid really bad and, Corey in defending himself, leads to the kid dying? There were those kinds of questions we were asking. But we always knew it had to end with some ambiguity that the town could point to and say to Corey, “You’re a monster.”

 

 

Ryan Green/Universal

 

Green defends his choice to not have Michael Myers show up until 30 minutes into the movie

Outside of a brief recap at the beginning, Michael Myers doesn’t show up until 30-40 minutes into the movie. Was there a discussion on if he should show up earlier?

There was a discussion and even through the editing process. Because you could take certain scenes from earlier and move them around. It just felt right.

Maybe I’ll watch it in two years and think that’s too long a gap, but it was important to me to develop characters and understand them in their own way and then introduce how Michael relates to that situation. Because he’s so exciting when you see him. Myers just gets people shaking. I was worried that was going to distract from the substance of the Corey/Allyson story as it was developing.

 

 

Ryan Green/Universal

 

I thought it was a gusty move, but for me, it worked because when Corey goes on his killing spree in the Michael Myers mask, you know what his journey was to get there.

To your point, in the script stage, it was always a question if it would work because we hadn’t cast our Corey yet. And if we didn’t have a strong Corey cast then nobody wants to hang out in that movie. When we met Rohan and we did rehearsals I was just like, thank God. The guy is layered with vulnerability but he’s also tough and physical and can really ride motorcycles. He’s handsome without being pretty. He had all these attributes that we were really hoping it would pay off.

It pays off to the point that, towards the end, I thought what you were doing was introducing us to the new Michael Myers. That Blumhouse would go and make more movies with him as The Shape.

To be honest, I think from a studio perspective they would have been excited about that. Continue on with him. But we were writing linearly and you get to the point where you know he’s got to go. How does he go? We don’t know, but he’s got to go. He’s too evil. And no one sees his death coming.

 

 

Ryan Green/Universal

 

Michael Myers might not have special powers, but Green says he’s an ‘extraordinary human’

So when we meet Michael in this one he’s hanging out in the sewers and he’s weak. It’s almost like Corey rejuvenates Michael and in turn, Michael introduces evil to Corey. Does that mean Michael has special powers? Can he feed off others who are as evil as him?

I like that you’re reading into it that way. I’ve always tried to make sure there’s an extraordinary human layer to all of what you just said. To hear from other characters, like at the end of “Halloween Kills,” it’s Laurie saying, “He’s more than a man.” That’s her philosophy.

In this one, it’s Willy the radio DJ saying, “This is all a conspiracy, how can one man survive all that?” We are trying to plant the seeds so that everyone can use their own intuition there. But at the same time, I can make the point: bad boys create bad boys.

The movie does ask the question, does evil breed evil or does a person’s environment create it?

It’s like what the father of the child who dies at the beginning of the movie says in the pool-hall scene. It’s a line that I added in post to make sure this was clear.

He says, “The kid I knew would never have hurt my son, but the look of the kid I saw at the side of the road, was that always in him or did the town do this to him?” I do want that to be a theme that people take away in terms of the infectiousness of evil.

 

 

Galaxy International Releasing

 

But the “Halloween” super fans are going to say Michael giving Corey his evil is a hat tip to the shocking ending in “Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers” when Jamie touches Michael and in the last scene, she kills her foster mother. 

That’s a great ending.

Did anyone bring that up when going over the script? “We’re going straight ‘Halloween 4’ here.”

We would spitball that because that’s a movie I enjoy. I see where they were going with that movie and I respect a lot of the choices. But we are ignoring that movie in our trilogy.

 

 

Universal/Peacock

 

We were supposed to see more of Corey’s mom’s death, the killing of Willy the DJ was originally just a DVD extra

What was the most memorable death scene to do in this movie?

The one that stands out is the DJ. That wasn’t supposed to be in the movie. We were doing that for a DVD extra. At the script stage, we decided that would be the one we’d get ridiculous with and keep it for the DVD.

We shot Corey’s mother’s death very vividly and that was to be in the movie. But when I got in the edit room, I didn’t like the pacing. So now we don’t see the mother’s death, and that will be on an extended version if we make one. But that one is inspired by “Black Christmas.” It parallels the Christmas carolers scene in that movie, but we have trick-or-treaters.

So we cut that scene and just loved the weirdness of the DJ death. Corey is sloppy and angry, so there’s something about watching that. In the edit, we were like, “Are we really going to use this?” It was so wild we had to put it in there.

 

 

Ryan Green/Universal

 

Jamie Lee Curtis was heavily involved in crafting Laurie’s final battle with Michael Myers (Jim Courtney), she even did ‘98% of the stunts’ in the scene

How did the final battle between Laurie and Michael evolve?

There was a lot of evolution. There was one version that had Allyson infused through the whole fight. But ultimately we pared that all back. I didn’t want it to be your average knockdown drag-out brawl without a degree or emotion, without a degree of intimacy between these two characters that have come so far. It needed real moments. Pauses, looks, glances. However you want to look at it, these are two survivors and here we are facing them in a climactic moment.

We had a scripted idea of where it would go and how it would begin. And then I let the stunt coordinator, Kevin Scott, and his stunt team go on the set and pencil in the geography of how the fight would go down. Then we brought in Jamie and then Jim Courtney to get their takes.

We made it a real conversation even though there are no words spoken in it.

What kind of input did Jamie bring to the scene?

I would say 98% of the stunts are her doing them. Actually, her double only did two shots. That’s Jamie’s head getting smashed into the glass. She really went for it.

In fact, her face going through the glass cabinet was her idea. She said, “I want him to grab me by the hair and smash me into the glass.” And I was thinking, I still got two more weeks to work with you, I can’t have shards of glass in your face. But she did it. That’s her face going in the glass. That stunt was her idea. I was reluctant — if not trying to forbid it — but it happened and it looks great.

What stands out is how slowly Laurie does the slicing of Michael’s neck and wrist. 

For the moment when we say night-night to Michael, I thought it was important to be slow and methodical. Let’s let it drain. Let’s hold hands. Let’s look each other in the eye.

 

 

Universal/Peacock

 

Now, you say looking into their eyes. That moment between them is very similar to Michael looking into Corey’s eyes. Are we to believe Laurie now has Michael’s evil inside her and must battle it? I mean, she’s got Michael’s mask sitting on her coffee table now!

It’s an amazing insight. It makes me wonder if Corey lived and didn’t have a fucked up mom, maybe he could have gotten through that. I think Laurie is smarter than Corey and knows what it takes to put in the work to heal yourself and your community, so I feel she will put every effort into what she needs to do.

But I also salivate over wondering. I mean, the mask is just sitting on the coffee table, somebody’s going to fucking pick that up. [Laughs.]

Hypothetically, if Jason Blum came to you 10 years from now and said, “I got the right script to bring back ‘Halloween,'” would you be up for it?

I’m done. But if he said, “I got the script for the new ‘Halloween’ and it’s a Bollywood musical,” I’m there.