Michael Myers is back with a brand new sequel
to the original Halloween movie that sees
Laurie Strode face her tormentor in a thrilling
showdown.
Yippee-ki-yay, movie lovers, it's Jan here
and in this video I'm breaking down everything
you need to know about the ending of the new
Halloween movie, including that WTF twist,
and crucial details you might have missed,
plus I'll explain my theory about the mask
and the role of Laurie's granddaughter in
the next sequel.
Make sure you watch till the end for some
bonus easter eggs!
So tap the bell and also leave me a comment
about the movie for a chance to win one of
these cool Halloween merch packs.
Spoilers ahead for Halloween 2018 plus other
movies in the franchise.
The climax of the new Halloween movie sees
Michael Myers battle three generations of
Strode women in an epic showdown.
Laurie's been waiting years for this moment
and she's fortified and booby-trapped the
house to the max.
Michael does manage to break in though and
during the final confrontation we get a replay
in reverse of the final moments of the first
Halloween movie, as this time it's Laurie,
not Michael, who goes over the balcony and
then disappears.
Laurie's daughter Karen then attracts Michael's
attention with her cries for help, leading
him to believe she'll be an easy next victim,
but it turns out to be a trap.
Basically, the hunter has now become the hunted
as the Strodes have him cornered.
The final trap is then sprung as the Strodes
start to fill the safe room with gas, after
which Laurie lights it up.
Halloween fans will notice similarities between
this scene and how Dr Loomis set Michael on
fire in a hospital room full of leaking oxygen
canisters in Halloween 2.
The three women flee the burning house, and
are picked up by a passing truck.
A very quick shot inside the basement shows
it on fire, though we can't see if Michael
is there any longer.
What we do hear though is a light breathing
sound, which director David Gordon Green has
said is Allyson.
The movie ends with a close-up of the granddaughter
still gripping the knife which she used earlier
against Michael during their escape.
And if you stay all the way through the credits,
there isn't an actual post-credits scene,
but you do hear what seems to be Michael breathing,
similar to how you hear Pennywise's maniacal
laugh at the end of the credits in IT: Chapter
One.
Which in my mind implies that Michael is still
alive!
Ending the movie with the sound of Allyson
and Michael's breathing is a direct homage
to how the first movie ended and, as we know,
Michael was still alive and at large then.
The second Halloween movie did attempt to
establish that fire was the only thing that
would eventually kill Michael, but that idea
was tossed out when he returned in Halloween
4.
Curiously, this new film features a tape of
Dr Loomis saying that Michael needs to be
terminated with Loomis at the time insisting
he should be there to make sure Michael's
vitals are no longer functioning and to incinerate
the body.
Still, it's been reported that Blumhouse are
already working on a script for a sequel to
this movie, which is hardly surprising given
how much money it looks likely to make at
the box office.
In many ways, this Halloween movie feels like
an updated version of the 1978 Halloween,
even if it is laden with easter eggs and callbacks
to many of the other movies in the franchise.
In this sequel, Laurie has reclaimed the narrative
switching the role of predator and prey by
hunting Michael herself, tracking him, trapping
him and seemingly [in her eyes] killing him.
There was a hint at this role reversal between
Laurie and Michael early on in the film when
Allyson and her boyfriend did a gender-swap
cosplay of Bonnie and Clyde at a Halloween
party.
And that little moment was also one of many
parallels drawn in the film between Allyson
and her grandmother.
It's also interesting that in this film we
have three generations of Strode women who
have survived Michael and there's an intriguing
detail in the ending that I think means Laurie's
granddaughter will actually be the key to
the next sequel.
The final shot of Allyson still holding the
knife she used against Michael feels like
a deliberate callback to the ending of Halloween
4: The Return of Michael Myers.
In that movie, which now exists in a separate
timeline, Laurie's daughter Jamie ended up
making a kind of psychic connection to Michael
Myers when she touched his hand at one point
in the film.
Through that connection Jamie took on some
of Michael's evil instincts and ended up stabbing
her foster mother, holding the weapon she
used as the movie finished.
Remember that, in this new film, Allyson came
into close contact with Michael when she was
trapped with him in the back of the police
car.
She also witnessed several horrific murders,
her father's been killed, and after fleeing
Michael she ended up traumatised, in the middle
of Laurie's shooting range, surrounded by
creepy bullet-ridden mannequins.
Although Allyson obviously survived, I wonder
if she might end up suffering from similar
PTSD to Laurie.
The question is will Allyson get the psychological
help that she needs to deal with everything
that's happened to her, unlike Laurie in the
original films?
So, there's a possible connection between
Allyson and Michael which could be explored
in a sequel with actress Andi Matichak taking
the lead role, rather than Jamie Lee Curtis.
OK, so let's talk about that contentious twist
in the third act where Dr Sartain, or "the
new Loomis" as Laurie called him, stopped
Sherriff Hawkins from shooting Michael, by
stabbing the officer with a pen blade, at
which point he not only became a killer himself
but even took on the identity of Michael Myers,
donning his mask!
This moment was foreshadowed earlier in the
film when Sartain told Laurie how Hawkins
had stopped Loomis from killing Michael Myers
40 years ago.
This time around though, the roles of the
psychiatrist and the sheriff have been reversed,
with Dr Sartain stopping Sheriff Hawkins from
killing Michael.
On the surface, Sartain is similar to Loomis,
who in this version of Halloween has passed
away off screen.
Like Loomis, Sartain is obsessed with his
patient Michael; however, his ideas about
the killer are basically the complete opposite
of Loomis's.
Sartain wants to explore and understand what
makes Michael tick and is desperate to see
him reunited with Laurie presumably so he
can observe what happens.
The character of Sartain has proved polarizing
among fans and critics, with some complaining
he's too cartoonish and that his performance
is OTT, although the idea of a deranged psychiatrist
who wants to become like Michael is rather
interesting.
I think the problem is that the character
of Dr Sartain might feel jarring to some fans
who consider him a replacement for Dr Loomis,
a much-loved character from the franchise
who couldn't return in person because actor
Donald Pleasence has long since passed away.
But in reality, the real Dr Loomis of this
Halloween movie is Laurie Strode.
After all, Laurie knows Michael better than
anyone, and she and Loomis were both there
that fateful night in 1978.
Also, just like Loomis, Laurie's warnings
about Michael aren't often taken with the
degree of seriousness they should be.
So, the real message we're supposed to get
from both Sartain and the podcasters' obsession
is that it's actually useless to try to understand
why Michael Myers does what he does.
As Laurie herself says, 'there's nothing new
to learn; there are no new insights or discoveries.'
Ever since the first film, many fans have
questioned Michael's motivation themselves
and it's something the franchise has attempted
to answer in its myriad of sequels and ever-increasing
mythology over the years.
But this Halloween movie says we should forget
about all that and just listen to Loomis and
Laurie's view of Michael, in other words,
he's basically the embodiment of [pure] evil.
Indeed, as director David Gordon Green has
said, 'In our version of the story, as in
[John] Carpenter's, [Michael] is an essence.
He's not a character.
There's no arc.
He's Shape!"
Speaking of which, given Michael's victims
are mainly random, then perhaps it could also
be possible for the person under the mask
to be random too.
So even though the film teases that Michael
could still be alive with a shot of an empty
burning basement and what sounds like his
breathing at the very end, what if Michael
really is dead?
The real twist then could be that the Michael
Myers legend lives on through copycat killers
who take up his masked identity, as Dr Sartain
briefly did in this film.
Remember, for example, that we don't know
for sure if the police managed to recapture
all those patients who escaped from the bus
with Michael.
Because this Halloween movie replaces the
original sequel, Halloween II, the reveal
in that film of Michael and Laurie being siblings
has been discarded.
1981's Halloween II established the idea that
Michael was trying to kill Laurie because
she was his sister.
He'd already killed his other sister Judith
at the beginning of the first film and after
escaping, he wanted to finish the job and
kill Laurie as well.
That brother-sister relationship became the
basis for Michael's motivation in various
Halloween movies, for example, Halloween 4
where he decided to go after Laurie's daughter.
This new story abandons all the continuity
from those other films, which means that,
in this new timeline, Michael's obsession
with Laurie is simply random and it was just
her bad luck that she wandered up to the old
Myers house at the moment he was standing
inside, looking out.
With Michael's family connection to Laurie
gone, it actually makes him a much scarier
villain.
And that fact is acknowledged in a very meta-moment
in the movie where Allyson tells her friends
that Michael and Laurie being siblings was
just a lie the townspeople made up to make
themselves feel better about the terrifying
babysitter murders.
In this Halloween movie, Michael doesn't appear
to have any particular motivation as to who
he targets and he really does fulfil his homicidal
instinct.
With the exception of holding back from killing
a baby, this Michael seems to kill whoever
he feels like in his path.
Everyone from gas station attendants to sandwich-making
mothers, and in a rather shocking move, we
even see him murder a young boy, though the
director deliberately blurs the shot somewhat.
When Laurie calls him "the Shape" at one point
in the movie, it's not only a reference to
how Michael Myers was credited in the first
film, it's also an acknowledgement of the
kind of faceless violence the character represents.
He's a remorseless, brutal killing machine
with no real humanity, and that lack of humanity
is alluded to throughout the film with characters
referring to Michael variously as 'it', 'this
thing', or 'property of the state', and during
his final confrontation with Laurie, he hides
among her mannequins as he's just another
soulless entity.
Halloween 2018 is, of course, stacked with
easter eggs and call-backs to all the other
films, but there are some particularly interesting
details I noticed that really add some extra
meaning to the movie.
This sequel pays homage to the orange-coloured
opening credits and jack-o'-lantern of the
original film.
But there's a clever riff on them this time
though as a decomposed pumpkin slowly comes
back to life over the course of the credits,
which is a nice metaphor for this film's rebirth
of the Halloween franchise after what many
would say are years of it slowly rotting away.
And did you notice that Sheriff Hawkins was
playing a Back to the Future game when got
a call about the bus crash?
Like Laurie, in the new timeline, Hawkins
was there in 1978 and actually stopped Dr
Loomis killing Michael, something he seems
to regret and he tries to make up for what
happened that night by mowing Michael down
with his police car all these years later,
which is also an easter egg to how Deputy
Ramsey crashed into Ben Trammer in Halloween
II while he was wearing a [Michael Myers]
mask.
And if you're curious why Karen wears a Christmas
sweater in the movie when it's Halloween,
remember when Allyson's friends told her that
her grandmother Laurie should skip Halloween
and just put up a Christmas tree?
Well, the real meaning of Karen's festive
jumper is to symbolize how she's rejecting
her mother's paranoia and Halloween's associations
with terrible personal tragedies in her family.
Effectively, she wants to skip over or block
out Halloween and jump forward instead to
a happier holiday season.
At the end of this film, the room where Laurie
falls out the window is an exact rebuild of
the bedroom from the original movie's finale.
It wasn't made to use for the end of this
movie originally but was actually built for
a completely different purpose which I'll
discuss in my deleted scenes video shortly.
However, an unintended consequence of using
the same set for the final sequence in the
new movie is that it subtly adds to the feeling
that Laurie has never been able to shake off
her past since the events of 1978.
So, what was your favourite moment in the
new Halloween movie?
And do you have any theories about Michael
Myers or Allyson returning in a new sequel?
Let me know what you think in the comments
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to win one of these cool Halloween merch packs.
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Yippee-ki-yay movie lovers!
