Warning: Contains spoilers for Halloween Kills.
Judy Greer’s Karen appears to be dead in the closing moments of Halloween Kills, but the movie’s changing sequel plans could change that. After the success of 2018’s Halloween reboot, hopes were high for the much-delayed sequel Halloween Kills. The second outing in director David Gordon Green’s reboot trilogy finally arrived over the weekend after myriad release date delays and has received mixed reviews from critics and fans alike.
Halloween Kills is both the bleakest and the bloodiest franchise outing since controversial director Rob Zombie rebooted the series. By the sequel’s closing credits, almost every major character other than Laurie (and Lyndsey, bizarrely) is left dead at Michael’s hands. Haddonfield’s resident boogeyman seems all but unstoppable by the time he kills the mob in the movie’s last act, but it is his last-minute murder of Judy Greer’s heroic Karen that truly seals the deal.
After a group including Karen beat Michael to the ground and stab him repeatedly, the heroes fail to heed the advice given by the Scream franchise and don’t shoot Michael in the head. As a result, Myers soon rebounds and, in a feat of superhuman strength, massacres the entire mob before hunting down Karen in his childhood home. Karen’s subsequent death seems relatively definitive, but the sequence is so sudden that the character could reasonably have survived. This is particularly true given the fact that Gordon Green’s reboot timeline has a penchant for putting characters through the wringer, and the fact that Hawkins survived the 2018 reboot (not to mention the litany of violence Michael himself survives in the sequel) improves the odds for Greer's supporting heroine even further.
Karen’s Halloween Kills Death Is Quick
With the highest body count of any Halloween movie so far, it is no surprise that Michael can't afford to be slow about murdering his victims in Halloween Kills. However, at two pivotal points in the sequel’s fast-paced action, the villain does stop to linger on one kill. Early on, he spends a few minutes jamming knives in an already-dead corpse, and later in the action, he spends an age toying with Cameron before finally breaking the poor boy’s neck and putting him out of his misery. In contrast, his frenzied attack on Karen is suspiciously short-lived. Staring out the window, Karen is ambushed by Michael and stabbed in the movie’s last minutes. A frantic montage is cross-cut with Laurie staring out the hospital window, the scene seems to imply Karen is definitively dead as she is left lying on the floor.
However, before being unmasked, Michael inexplicably left Lindsey alive earlier in the sequel, and Karen’s apparent death sequence is over very quickly, meaning there is no guarantee she didn’t make it out alive (if severely injured). Karen has been a major figure in the new trilogy and her death would be a huge blow to Laurie, which could heighten the dramatic impact of the heroine’s final showdown with Michael in the third movie. However, her apparent death could also merely be a cliffhanger designed to keep viewers invested in the new saga and eager for the next outing. Although Greer herself confessed to being “bummed” about the movie’s ending, this alone is no guarantee that the actor isn’t going to return in the next outing and currently keeping that fact under wraps.
Michael Myers Made The Same Mistake As Karen
The characters of Halloween Kills, lacking the self-referential slasher smarts of There's Someone Inside Your House's heroes and other meta-horrors, fail to dispatch the villain with a clean headshot. However, there might be a secret reason behind this. Viewers may have been frustrated to see Karen impale Michael on a pitchfork, only for her to fail to then finish the job by shooting him in the head. However, in the closing scene, Michael similarly stabs Karen repeatedly but doesn’t instantly kill her with a head wound or a neck snap — something that the preceding movie’s action has proven he is more than adept at doing. If Halloween Kills can use Michael’s lack of a clearly fatal headshot as an excuse to keep the killer coming back, it stands to reason that the repeatedly stabbed, but potentially still breathing, Karen can return by the same token.
Granted, Karen doesn’t have any of a slasher villain's vaguely supernatural powers of regeneration, but she also endures a lot less brutal treatment than Michael. If Karen comes back in the third movie, she will be surviving a brutal stabbing, whereas Michael’s already-confirmed return required him to weather numerous stabbings, baseball bat beatings, shootings, and even an aforementioned impaling incident. As a result, the sheer violence survived by Michael could allow the Halloween series to keep Karen around.
David Gordon Green Changing Halloween Ends Helps Karen’s Chances
Perhaps the most compelling reason to believe Karen could have survived the movie comes not from the movie Halloween Kills itself, but from the circumstances of the movie’s production. It seems likely that the original draft of Halloween Ends, set to pick up immediately after Halloween Kills, would have killed off Karen to heighten the showdown between Michael and Laurie. However, unlike the upcoming 2022 Scream reboot, Halloween Ends is being rewritten to address the COVD-19 pandemic, meaning the planned plot of the trilogy ending outing could be completely rewritten. Now that director David Gordon Green has conceded that he is rewriting the new movie to be set nearer its 2022 release date, incorporating COVID-19 and contemporary politics, it seems more likely that Karen will have survived since rushing to save her life could explain how Laurie (and Haddonfield at large) managed to let Michael Myers give them the slip once again for another four years.
It scarcely seems possible that Michael will be able to walk out of his childhood home after killing Karen and go into hiding for the four years between 2018 and 2022. However, if the survivors of Halloween Kills are less concerned with apprehending Michael and more worried about ensuring Karen survives, it makes sense that the killer could escape for the four years that will now be elapsing in-universe between movies. This could mean a return for Greer’s heroine and an explanation for why Michael was able to make it out of Haddonfield alive, thus providing a more compelling setup for the new Halloween trilogy’s long-awaited final chapter after the divisive action of Halloween Kills.
