Editor’s Note: The following contains spoilers forHalloween Ends. Proceed with caution.
In the months leading up to the release ofHalloween Ends,Jamie Lee Curtisadmitted thatfans might be angry with what they saw. There had been speculation since then about what that alluded to. Now that the film is out, we know what the twist is that has indeed baffled many fans, but satisfied others who craved something different from the usual paint-by-numbers slasher. This time Michael’s evil has been passed on, and we have a copycat killer wearing the worn and burnt William Shatner mask.
While Jamie Lee Curtismight get the top billing, the focus ofHalloween Endsis on a young man named Corey Cunningham, played byRohan Campbell. The opening finds Corey accidentally killing a boy he is babysitting on Halloween 2019. It’s shocking and graphic, and it destroys Corey’s life. Even though he was never found guilty of a crime, much of the town of Haddonfield has turned against him. So many of the residents believe that Corey is a killer. A few people still believe in him, especially Laurie Strode and her granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). Laurie protects him when he’s bullied and Allyson is drawn to the hurt she sees in him because she feels it, too.
Corey’s life undergoes another fateful change when a group of bullies attacks him on a bridge, with one throwing him off onto the ground below. It’s then that someone unseen pulls his unconscious body into a sewer pipe, Pennywise-style. When Corey awakes, he is attacked by Michael Myers. There have been mentions of people going missing throughout the years. We now know why. The Shape is alive, coming out from time to time to hunt fresh victims. Corey is meant to be his latest, but as Michael wraps his hand around Corey’s throat, something happens that turns this film into a drastically different beast, as well as creating a new one.
As Michael is choking out Corey, his latest victim struggling to stay conscious, we zoom in on Michael’s eyes (or the one that’s left anyway). We then zoom in on Corey’s eyes, with The Shape’s mask reflected in them. Michael can see himself in Corey’s eyes, literally, and then figuratively. A lightning quick montage of images shows all the horrors that Corey has experienced, interspersed with images of the mask. At this moment, what is Michael seeing? Are we to believe that he can truly see what has happened to Corey, or does he recognize something in his eyes, an evil lurking beneath his sadness simply waiting to be unleashed? Either way, the evil in Michael “transfers” itself to Corey, its power waking up the buried hate inside him. A bond has been formed, and Michael does something he has never done before. He releases Corey and lets him live.
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When Corey stumbles out of the sewer, he is confronted by an older homeless man. The man has seen Michael Myers take people into the sewer before, but they never come out. “Why did he let you live?” he asks. He gets in Corey’s face and demands that Corey go back inside and get his mask. “I’m Michael Myers,” the man says, pulling out a knife. In an act of self-defense, Corey kills the homeless man. Just as with the child a few years before, the death is not intentional or an act of evil, but it’s the last straw. When Corey goes home and looks in his bathroom mirror, the scared kid disappears, giving way to a detached and angry face.
Whatever has happened to Corey, Laurie now senses it, too. When she sees Corey standing by a hedge outside her window, a call back to a similar scene from 1978’sHalloween, she looks horrified when she had just been his biggest supporter. Allyson can sense a change too, but she still pursues him, her grief attaching to his. He tells Allyson at a diner that he’s not afraid of people anymore, and then steps up to an ex-boyfriend of Allyson’s, a cop named Mulaney (Jesse C. Boyd) that won’t leave her alone. After this a hopeless Allyson says, “Just burn it all to the ground." A newly confident Corey replies, “I’ll light the match,” and looks over his shoulder to where the cop was.
Later in the night, after Corey has dropped off Allyson at home, he rides away on his motorcycle. Mulaney follows close behind in his car. Corey isn’t going home though. He returns to the sewer under the bridge, and as Mulaney searches for him, Corey attacks. He then runs into the sewer laughing, as if daring Mulaney to follow him. Of course, he does, and finds Corey standing still, staring at him with a smile on his face. It’s then that The Shape we’ve been waiting for pounces.
Myers attacks Mulaney, but he is shown to be very weak, falling to the ground and struggling to get up when Mulaney fights back. “Show me how to do it,” Corey begs of Michael. “Get up!” he yells, and for a second, The Boogeyman seems sympathetic, a pathetic old man being harassed. He does make it to his feet though, and as Corey holds Mulaney down, Michael stabs the cop to death, limping and moving slowly at first, but then, with the first stab his body twitches, the act of killing transforming and strengthening Myers, until he’s back to standing up straight and looking like the Myers of previous films.
When Corey goes to Allyson’s home that she shares with Laurie, her grandmother sees Corey and Allyson go upstairs together. What she doesn’t see, but eventually senses, is that Michael Myers is there too, just outside where his new protégé is, watching Laurie from behind a tree. Did they leave the sewer together? Did Corey show Michael where Laurie lives, or did Michael find them on his own?
Halloween Endsfinally turns into a full on slasher, when Corey, wearing a scarecrow mask, attacks a sleazy doctor Allyson works for (Michael O’Leary) and her coworker Deb (Michele Dawson) at the doctor’s fancy home. Corey has become his own Shape. That doesn’t mean he’s invincible, however. Though he easily dispatches of the doctor outside, Deb gets away, hurting Corey’s arm before locking herself inside the house. Corey furiously bangs on the sliding glass door, then grows still as Michael does what he does best, killing Deb by stabbing her up against a wall. Before he does, he looks to Corey outside the door to make sure he’s watching, as if teaching his young apprentice.
Later, when Corey is with Allyson, the pair are insulted by a radio DJ outside the station. Parked on the side of the street, Laurie watches them. Corey sees her and looks at her with disgust, then looks at his overbearing mother with that same disgust when she slaps him and kicks him out of her house. While sleeping at the abandoned house where the young boy in his care once died, his head on the bloodstained floor, he is awakened by Laurie. She talks to him about two kinds of evil, the second kind being one that lives inside us like an infection. Corey tells Laurie, “You should give in. You should surrender to that feeling you had the first time you ever looked into his eyes.” Laurie might not quite know what that means, but we do. Corey is confessing that seeing Michael unlocked something in him, and he’s going to let it out.
Whatever is left of Corey is now gone. He calls Allyson, telling her that Laurie wants to kill him. “I can’t take it anymore,” he says. “It’s time to say goodbye to Haddonfield.” Corey then goes straight to the sewer and attacks Michael Myers. Myers fights back, but in his weakened state, Corey overpowers him and takes his mask. “You’re just a man in a Halloween mask. What are you gonna do now?” As he leaves, Michael sits up, looking back to where Corey was. There is anger is his motions. His accomplice has insulted and humiliated him and in the mask taken the one thing that makes him who he is. While Myers may have awakened an evil in Corey, the connection between the two is now broken.
Corey finds the bullies who threw him over the bridge earlier and baits them into following him to the salvage yard he works at. When they arrive, he stabs one through the eye off-screen, rams another with a tow truck, beats a third with a wrench, and then the transformation is complete, when Corey, now wearing a mechanic’s jumpsuit just like Michael, puts on the mask. He kills the lead bully in the most gruesome of ways with a blowtorch then stomps the head of a survivor.
Corey, now transformed into his own Shape, goes on a killing spree against others who have wronged him, killing his mother and the radio DJ. His final act lands him at Laurie’s house, but our final girl is waiting. She knows Corey is coming for her, and the moment he walks into her bedroom, Laurie shoots him in the shoulder, sending him stumbling over the stair railing to the floor below, just like the young boy in Corey’s care once did.
Corey is still alive, though seriously wounded. Laurie tries to get Corey to fight her, but instead he laughs maniacally and says, “If I can’t have her,” then stabs himself in the throat. Corey may have dressed up as Michael Myers, but he’s not the next him. In the end, he’s just a troubled and lonely boy who doesn’t want to be alone.
That loneliness reaches out to Michael Myers when it turns out that Laurie’s personal Boogeyman is in the house too. As Michael picks up his mask and knife off the floor, a dying Corey reaches out and grabs Michael’s hand. Is he seeking compassion from the man who set his evil loose or trying to protect himself because he knows he poked the beast and is about to pay? Whatever the reason, Michael breaks Corey’s neck. The connection between the two is disconnected and Corey’s evil dies. A few minutes later, Michael’s evil will die as well.
