Halloween Kills' reveal that a certain major character was still alive lazily retcons the 2018 movie. In horror movies, death is often not the end of a character, if only because so much of horror incorporates the supernatural and otherworldly. By contrast, slasher film deaths tend to be permanent, as a sub-genre all about the body count would feel pretty toothless if the victims had a habit of surprise survival or resurrection. In fact, the only characters usually capable of that in slashers are the killers themselves.
Halloween's iconic slasher Michael Myers is no different, having miraculously - and usually inexplicably - managed to survive many things that would kill even the toughest human being. Even if only considering director John Carpenter's 1978 classic, since the current Blumhouse Halloween canon erased all the other prior sequels, Michael famously gets up and walks away after Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance) shoots him six times at close range and he falls off a balcony. That also comes after Laurie Strode stabbed him in the eye with a hanger.
The only human characters in the Halloween franchise that have survived such clearly deadly scenarios are Laurie and Loomis themselves, and even they did eventually prove incapable of doing so anymore, both having died in multiple films thanks to Halloween's snarled continuity. Halloween Kills upended that tradition by revealing Deputy Frank Hawkins (Will Patton) was somehow still alive after he appeared to be definitively killed off in Halloween 2018. As great and popular a character as Hawkins is, his "death" was one of the most shocking and upsetting things in Halloween 2018, and reversing course on it so suddenly not only undercuts that film, but lowers the stakes for Halloween Ends.
While it's unclear as of yet if Hawkins' survival for a sequel was always the plan co-writers David Gordon Green and Danny McBride had in mind for the character when writing Halloween 2018, the way Hawkins' almost demise is presented in Halloween Kills suggests that it wasn't. When Hawkins has a brief flashback to Halloween 2018 in Kills, all that's shown is the secretly evil Dr. Sartain stabbing him in the throat and leaving him for dead. However, that's not all that originally happened. In Halloween 2018, Sartain stabs Hawkins several more times after he's on the ground, then steals Hawkins' police truck and runs over his lower body before leaving the scene. That's a pretty definitive death, and it's no wonder that basically everyone agreed Hawkins was dead after seeing Halloween 2018.
The idea that, after being partially run over and stabbed multiple times, Hawkins was somehow able to not bleed out long enough for help to arrive, is hard to logically accept. It feels like a retcon used to bring Hawkins back, and while many fans were indeed happy to see Patton's character return, that doesn't mean the return made any sense. With that in mind, it's no wonder that so many believe Karen Strode isn't really dead, despite Michael Myers seemingly slashing her to pieces at the end of Halloween Kills. If Hawkins can survive what he survived, why can't any other major Halloween character do the same that's not shown to be completely 100 percent dead onscreen? If fans don't think deaths will stick, that makes encounters with Michael Myers feel a lot less tense, and that's not a good thing.
