Spoilers ahead for Halloween Ends.
The horror genre has been in the midst of a renaissance for years now, with some of the best horror movies returning to theaters with new sequels/reboots. This trend is partly due to the massive success of the 2018 Halloween, which was expanded into a full trilogy by filmmaker David Gordon Green. And the Halloween Ends director recently explained why the new threequel focused on that new character Corey.
Prior to its #1 release in theaters, anticipation for Halloween Ends grew since it was billed as the final showdown between Jamie Lee Curtis’ Laurie Strode and the villainous Michael Myers. But The Shape had a surprisingly limited amount of screentime, with a ton of the content focused on newcomer Rohan Campbell as Corey Cunningham (plus a deep cut cameo). David Gordon Green was asked about this departure during an interview with EW, responding with:
I wanted to get a new perspective of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode and the family, and I wanted to bring a new central character to be a pivotal exploration of those characters and the town. We’d seen the story of a stalker, and we’d seen a lot of the ways that trauma had affected Laurie Strode, but I really wanted to see how that affected the town.
There you have it. While the 2018 Halloween focused entirely on Laurie and her family’s trauma, the following two sequels panned out to show how the town of Haddonfield was affected by the massacres. While the townsfolk formed an ill-fated angry mob in Kills, the plot of Ends shows how The Shape continues to inform the violence among the survivors. And that definitely includes the way Corey was treated throughout its 111-minute runtime.
Corey’s importance in Halloween Ends became clear immediately, as the cold open sequence followed his experience in Halloween of 2019, one year after the bloody events of Kills. In it we see him accidentally kill a boy he was babysitting, with Michael Myers noticeably missing. And Rohan Campbell’s new character would have even more screen time thanks to his relationship with Laurie, Allyson, and even The Boogeyman.
Later in his same conversation with EW, David Gordon Green further explained why Halloween Kills gave so much focus to the new character Corey. He shared where his head was as a filmmaker regarding this unexpected plot point, saying:
Bringing in a new character of Corey Cunningham, and discovering first his own immediate trauma in our cold open, and then how that affects him, and then how an encounter with our already established evil could become kind of an infectious thing. It’s a study of the contagiousness of these negative entities that are in our lives. If they go unchecked, then they spread. If we can wrap our head around them, and be our own hero, then maybe we’ve got a fighting chance.
When Laurie Strode is writing her book in Halloween Ends, Jamie Lee Curtis’ narration explains the way that Michael Myers was still an infection that the town of Haddonfield was fighting, despite being missing for a number of years. We saw suicides, murders, and (of course) the way the town turned against Corey and branded him a psychopath. The movie’s time jump shows how the years of that label has negatively affected the newcomer, ultimately leading to the violent events that occur when Michael Myers returns.
With Halloween Ends in the rear view, horror fans are looking to the various upcoming horror movies still heading to the big screen. In the meantime, check out the 2022 movie release dates to plan your next movie experience.