The Ending of HALLOWEEN ENDS Was Changed After Test Screenings
The latest installment of the Halloween franchise has come to an end with Halloween Ends. In it, Michael Myers and Jamie Lee Curtis's Laurie Strode face off with each other one more time after a brutal fight in the kitchen of her home.
If you haven’t seen the film yet, you might want to skip this because I’m now entering spoiler territory. This wasn’t the original ending of the movie. According to director David Gordon Green, they ended up changing it after test screenings.
In the ending we saw, Laurie and Allyson manage to brutally take down Myers and injure him to the point where he bleeds to death right on their table.
After they kill him, they, along with the police, strap his body to a car and parade him through Haddonfield. The community come out to watch and a procession is formed, ending at the salvage yard. It’s there that Laurie puts Michael's body into an industrial shredder, and they obliterate him. He’s dead. There’s no coming back from that.
When talking about the original ending Green explains that Haddonfield witnessing Laurie grind Michael up was added after screenings of early versions of the movie. He told Entertainment Weekly:
"We were trying to do a little bit more of a modest, intimate ending. [Halloween] Kills was big and expansive and super noisy and aggressive, almost like an action movie at points, and I wanted this to return to the simple dramatic roots.
"But then there were times when I thought it just didn't play big enough and I wanted some scope to it. We wanted something more grand, and [that became] the procession sequence. So the actual ending of the movie we came up with this summer, like two months ago, after we screened it a few times."
Green also explained that there were multiple endings considered for the final chapter:
"We went through a lot of endings. Some were really bleak, and some were less bleak. The version we ended up with, I think, is optimistic, hopeful. After Kills came out with a bleak ending, I didn't want to do that again. I wanted to have some note of satisfaction."
What did you think of the way that Halloween Ends came to a close? Did you like it? Hate it? What would you have liked to see?