Halloween Kills, the latest installment of director David Gordon Green’s Halloween trilogy, is out in theaters and streaming on Peacock now. After being delayed a year due to the COVID-19 pandemic, fans of the franchise can finally get their fill of Michael Myers mayhem, just in time for the annual horror holiday. If you’ve seen Halloween Kills, though, you might have noticed something missing from the movie. We sure did.
Warning: The following contains spoilers for Halloween Kills. If you haven’t watched the movie yet, stop now and do that. As previously mentioned, it’s both in theaters and available to stream on Peacock. So it’s not a hard movie to track down.
While practically everything fans love about Halloween is present and accounted for–iconic music, imaginative kills, lots of stalking by a tall guy in a William Shatner mask–you might have noticed that two very specific characters never share a scene together. For the first time in a Halloween movie starring Jamie Lee Curtis, her Laurie Strode is never directly facing off with Michael Myers.
For Green, it’s all about setting the table for what’s to come in 2022’s Halloween Ends. “It was important to kind of tell their stories as they separate and communicate with their own intimate collaborators what their point of view is, so that in the third one, we come back together, and we take that intimacy and make it epic,” he explained to GameSpot.
Of course, as Curtis detailed in a group interview, the story does a good job of explaining why the two are apart.
“Laurie, first of all, thinks Michaels dead, and she’s a wounded warrior,” the actress said. “So she is rendered impotent by this attack. She’s been knifed in the stomach. She’s had a surgery. So when we first meet her, she’s a wreck. She’s just survived the surgery. As the movie progressed, I understood what David was doing. You see, she’s the target. Michael is the arrow. Michael is trying to come to her.”
At least, that’s what Laurie–and the town of Haddonfield–thinks. Instead, Michael never comes to the hospital. Instead, he goes home, killing anyone and everyone in his way. And it all leads to the climax of the film, as the other Strode women, daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak) descend on the Myers home, with Karen ultimately paying with her life.
“I thought it was a really interesting choice of David’s,” Curtis said. “And I thought that the ending, the last 10 minutes of this movie, are as spectacularly beautiful, gruesome, mega-violent next level chaos [and] insanity… The way that the movie builds, it’s like an opera. It feels operatic, and then it stops.”
Then, of course, we do get that tease of what’s to come. As Michael kills Karen, the shot repeatedly flashed to Laurie in the hospital. Somehow, she seems to know what’s happened. However, we don’t see the aftermath of the event. Still, whatever happens from there, we know it won’t be immediate. The next film jumps forward four years, according to Green. Four years later, Laurie will likely be completely healed from the injuries she sustained in the first two films, meaning you can expect to see both characters in fighting shape, heading into their final–for now–confrontation.
Halloween Kills is in theaters and streaming on Peacock now.
