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 below and remember to subscribe for a chance
to win one of these cool Halloween merch packs.
Tap left to check out the secret truth about Halloween 2018 and Michael Myers or tap right
for another video you're sure to like.
If you enjoyed this then I really appreciate a thumbs up and a share.
Thanks so much for watching and see you next time.
Yippee-ki-yay movie lovers!