The Director of HALLOWEEN ENDS Breaks Down That Shocking Opening Scene

If you haven’t watched Halloween Ends yet, you might want to skip this. Spoilers ahead! This post involves information on the shocking and brutal opening scene of the movie.

Before I go on, I was actually kind of disappointed by Halloween Ends. I was super excited about this movie but there was so much about it that really didn’t make much sense. I did like the concept they were trying to go with, but I don’t think it was executed properly. It also probably didn’t help that the audience in the theater I saw it in was laughing through the whole film like it was a comedy. I’m gonna have to watch it again because that first viewing just didn’t work. I also felt the pacing of the film was off and there were holes in the story.

Now, on to the meat to the meat of the article! Halloween Ends kicks off in a much different way than the first two films. Director David Gordon Green’s Halloween opened with a scene where Michael Myers was confronted in a mental institution and reunited with his mask. Halloween Kills opened with a fun flashback to the night Myers was caught in 1978. Halloween Ends kicks off with a series of events that leads to a jacked-up Halloween night involving Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell) and the death of a young boy he was babysitting.

This sets the tone of the film and Myers really isn’t in most of the film. The story mostly puts the focus on Cunningham and how the tragic events of that night affected his life. The director offered some insight on the opening scene of the movie during an interview with CB saying:

"When [John] Carpenter first made his Halloween film in 1978, there was the working title of 'The Babysitter Murders.' One of the things we wanted to look at was the subgenre of that. Look at a movie like When a Stranger Calls and things like that and movies that influenced some of our choices in an opening. And we wanted to have an opening, a cold open that no one knew anyone, none of these players were of the legacy of Halloween so we could start to point towards something that was a little different from our previous two installments. Even the font of the film is blue instead of orange when we're doing our title sequences, which is a little nod to Halloween III: Season of the Witch, which was its own curveball to the franchise."

Green went on to talk about the movie as a whole saying:

"I have to say, I wanted this to really go for it, and the ambition we had to do something different, do something out of the box, that invited some of the tropes and cliches that we're trying to honor from within not just the Halloween franchise, but within the slasher genre, wanted to bring some of that in, then show people a new take and fuse things like a love story through it."

I get it. I actually like what they were trying to do with the movie, there were just so many situations where common sense is thrown right out the window, especially the relationship between Cunningham and Andi Matichak's Allyson. I don’t know how escalated so fast. That opening scene of the film thought was great! I loved the opening scene! After that, it just lost me.

Anyway, I did enjoy aspects of the film, and I will give it another go in a different setting. So many people are telling me that it’s good, so yeah, I’ll give it another go. Halloween Ends is in theaters and on Peacock now.