Supposed franchise finale Halloween Ends can't land the ending

The horror that lay below the surface in the original Halloween film is now out in the open. People have lost faith in the American Dream, and the false promise of small-town, suburban living has collapsed. In Halloween Ends, violence and despair are rampant. Though statistically, violent crime has largely been on the downturn since the 1970s, the perception of lawlessness feels pervasive. Technology and political division have sowed darkness into the fabric of the American experience like an uncontrolled disease.

The paranoia of this society informs the unexpected horror of the cold opening of Halloween Ends. Though the premise is familiar, a babysitter, Corey (Rohan Campbell), watches a kid on Halloween night; the spectre of Michael Myers has long steeped into the collective unconscious of the town. Corey doesn’t worry about the monsters in the shadows, but he’s soon drawn into a spiral of uncertainty as the night worsens. The random, unpredictable death central to this sequence challenges Myers’ pure, unadulterated evil, realigning its themes with the generational trauma and paranoia introduced in the previous two films. Here, the evil is mistrust and fear, an aching poison that seems as unstoppable as any monster.

Corey plays an integral role in this new film. The town has essentially turned against him, refusing to believe that what happened to a child under his watch was an accident. Only Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) offers him a helping and sympathetic hand early in the film. But, when he starts to go steady with her granddaughter, Allyson (Andi Matichak), the action turns for the worse and the weird.

On the one hand, kudos to the team for taking some narrative risks, even though they don’t quite work. Michael Myers seems to have almost mystical, hypnotic powers in this film, forcing people to act against their better nature. While intended as a commentary on the nature of violence and trauma, it feels far sillier than the filmmakers intended and doesn’t make sense if you think about it for more than a few seconds. The ideas are there, but the execution is lacking, as the filmmaking cannot strike the right tone of seriousness and playful horror fun. The result is a film that feels of the past but with the worst aesthetic sensibilities of the present.

It feels like the franchise has been worn to the ground, and there’s nothing new to say using these characters and motifs. Halloween Ends feels especially boxed-in this year, amid a fair number of recent exciting and original horror films, limited to tropes and conventions that belong to another era. More importantly, it feels reflective of a general media trend, which is so risk-averse that nearly everything we watch and consume is based on some pre-existing material. As a frequent moviegoer, it often feels like the general audience is being franchised to death.

In some ways better than expected and, in many ways, much worse, Halloween Ends aims to expand the idea of generational trauma as a larger social issue. The problem is that this approach of exposing the rotten American underbelly was done much better a decade ago by Rob Zombie with the same foundational material. Zombie’s film was unafraid of exploring issues of class as it relates to crime and monstrosity, real or perceived, where this film still feels like a middle-class horror story for and by people unconcerned with the cyclical nature of poverty and the widening gap between rich and poor. The anxiety at the heart of this film remains a middle-class one but ignores the new reality that most middle-class families can’t afford a house or a comfortable existence. It’s storytelling for generations long gone.

Halloween Ends isn’t a total wash, but the sum of its parts doesn’t add to something particularly effective. The ideas are there but lack follow-through or depth, riding instead on the tired coattails of the previous films. ■

Halloween Ends (directed by David Gordon Green)

Halloween Ends is currently screening in Montreal theatres.

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