Halloween Kills arrives in theaters and on Peacock on Friday, October 15, picking up immediately after the events of 2018’s Halloween. Michael Myers escapes the blazing basement where the Strodes left him to die and resumes his killing spree across Haddonfield. It rips open old wounds from Haddonfield’s previous encounter with the boogeyman.
Director David Gordon Green, who co-wrote with Danny McBride and Scott Teems, ensured that this sequel emphasizes the title’s “Kills.” That became a natural result of Michael Myers’ mindset at the start of this. Speaking with Bloody Disgusting, Green explains: “Like any movie, you want to up the ante, and you want to see what the villain is capable of. We reestablished in the 2018 version the scenario with Michael and Laurie (Jamie Lee Curtis), and I felt like there was a very satisfying sigh of relief type of conclusion in that film.
“Then as a writer, it becomes your objective of, what are we going to do? How do we get them out? What’s he like when he is out? Through our creative conversation, we just assumed that he would be really pissed off. So, the movie is his pissed-off journey through the rest of that evening.”
Michael Myers (aka The Shape, left) in Halloween Kills, directed by David Gordon green.
The body count and extreme violence of the kills paint a clear, gory picture that Myers is indeed angrier than ever before. When asked about the insane body count and creativity of the kills, Green responded, “It surprised me with where we landed in terms of its aggression. I wasn’t intending that. Although I intended for it to be an aggressive and chaotic chapter, I never intended it to be this vivid. Yet I just was drawn to it in the editing room, and Tim Alverson, my editor, and I talked a lot at length about what’s too much and where crossing the line is. Did we step over it? And maybe we did.”
Without delving into spoilers, Green makes a very daring choice with Halloween Kills’ conclusion. Of the bold swing, he shared, “That ending, that wasn’t how the script ended. So, we got a little weird and came up with that at a point when we were about to lock picture. I was excited to take that kind of nail-biting risk as a filmmaker. I like to feel like I’ve connected with the crucial moments of the movie with an audience and seen how they’ve read it and how they interpret it, and do they like it? Do they hate it? What am I in for? That was an interesting one where we just said, let’s do it. We just jumped in. So, we’ll see. Time will tell how that ending survives the court of public opinion, but we feel good about it.”
What might this mean for the final entry in the planned trilogy?
“Halloween Ends is complete, and actually, I’m getting John Carpenter’s notes on the new draft later. So, I’m excited about that. There is resolve. Like any trilogy, you want it to have a beginning, middle, and end. We had a concept of the ending, and two years ago, we wrote the first draft of it. So, we had it all mapped out before we went into production on Kills. We knew where it was going, and we wanted Kills to be a symphony in the middle of the book of the Strode saga.”
Michael Myers’ rampage unleashes on October 15, when Halloween Kills arrives in theaters and on Peacock.
Halloween Ends is currently set for release on October 14, 2022.