After the failure of Halloween Kills, hopes are high for Halloween Ends, and director David Gordon Green’s tease about the final reboot movie honoring John Carpenter’s work can be what saves this new trilogy. In the era of remakes and reboots, the horror genre hasn’t been safe, and one of the most notable reboots is that of the Halloween franchise. The Halloween universe began in 1978 with John Carpenter’s movie of the same name, and even though it wasn’t well-received upon its initial release, time has been good to it and it's now regarded as one of the most influential horror movies ever made.

Halloween told the story of Michael Myers, who on Halloween night 1963, when he was six years old, murdered his older sister, Judith, for no apparent reason. Michael was then sent to Smith’s Grove Sanitarium and didn’t say a word again, becoming the subject of many studies as well as the patient of Dr. Sam Loomis (Donald Pleasence). Fifteen years later, on October 30, 1978, Michael escaped and returned to his hometown Haddonfield, Illinois, where he began to stalk Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and her friends, with Laurie becoming the movie’s final girl. Halloween ended up spawning a franchise with 13 movies (including Rob Zombie’s remakes and the upcoming Halloween Ends), and it’s currently going through a reboot with a new trilogy that started strong in 2018 and crashed with the second entry, Halloween Kills.

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The Halloween reboot trilogy is a direct continuation to Carpenter’s original movie, and as such, it ignores all movies that came after it, meaning that Laurie and Michael are not related and her children Jamie Lloyd (Danielle Harris) and John Tate (Josh Hartnett) never existed. David Gordon Green’s Halloween reunited viewers with a deeply disturbed Laurie who continues to deal with PTSD and spent years plotting her revenge against Michael, and was a critical and commercial success – sadly, the same can’t be said for the sequel, Halloween Kills. All eyes are now on the upcoming Halloween Ends, the closing chapter in the reboot trilogy, and which Gordon Green has already teased will be a more intimate movie and an appreciation of Carpenter’s work rather than an ode to just this particular franchise.

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Among the many things that made Halloween 2018 a big hit was that it kept the same essence as Carpenter’s original movie, with a terrifying Michael Myers that kills at random, and successfully introduced Laurie’s daughter Karen (Judy Greer) and granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), who went from being estranged from Laurie and not believing her about “the Boogeyman” to teaming up to put an end to his reign of terror. Halloween Kills, however, didn’t have any of those elements that made the first movie a success and didn’t do much to push the story forward, relying a bit too much on nostalgia with the return of characters from the original movie and making Michael Myers supernatural again. Gordon Green teasing that Halloween Ends will change the tone and be an “appreciation of Carpenter’s legendary body of work” can be what saves the Halloween reboot trilogy, which is in desperate need of going back to its roots after what Halloween Kills did.

With Karen now apparently dead, and Laurie and Allyson being the last ones standing, Halloween Ends has what it needs to be a more intimate movie than the previous ones, as the surviving Strode women now have an even bigger reason to kill Michael Myers. Halloween Ends needs to go back to a simpler style like that of Carpenter’s Halloween in order to make up for the mess of Halloween Kills, which had too many (and over-the-top) deaths and spent too much time trying to explain why Michael Myers does what he does (which was also one of the mistakes of Rob Zombie’s remakes).

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