Halloween Ends director breaks down that wild ending

Warning: This story contains major spoilers for Halloween Ends.

So now we know: Thanks to Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode, evil really does die in Halloween Ends.

First, the final-girl-turned-ass-kicking-grandmother kills masked murderer Michael Myers at the conclusion of a lengthy kitchen-set brawl. Then, just to make sure, Strode grinds Myers' body to a pulp in a giant car-cruncher as her fellow Haddonfield residents look on. The result is a happy coda to the saga for Strode and her daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak), albeit one that follows a ton of death and bloodshed, both in Halloween Ends and its predecessors.

"We went through a lot of endings," says filmmaker David Gordon Green of tying up his franchise trilogy, which began with 2018's Halloween and continued with 2021's Halloween Kills. "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."

Ryan Green/Universal Pictures Jamie Lee Curtis lets loose in 'Halloween Ends.'

Green and his franchise co-writer Danny McBride began plotting the final conflict between Strode and Myers after the success of Halloween (2018), a direct sequel to John Carpenter's original 1978 terror classic, and the first time Curtis had appeared in a Halloween movie since her role in 2002's Halloween: Resurrection.

"We've been writing this for probably four years," says Green. "As soon as the first movie came out, we started designing the next two with different writers. So Danny and I were writers on all of them, and then we would bring different cowriters in to help us curate our crazy brains and give it focus. We were writing this simultaneous to Kills with a different writing team." (The Halloween Ends screenplay is credited to Green, McBride, Chris Bernier, and Paul Brad Logan.)

Green explains that the last confrontation between Myers and Strode was shot in chunks during principal photography.

"We had spectacular fights that have been in it from the first draft," he says. "When you get into principal photography on the film, then you have the stunt team, and you're trying new things, and then you shut it down, and you go shoot it again at the end of the movie. The big showdown of the film we did in different increments. We'd assemble it while doing something else, come back to it, review the footage, and do some more. I wanted it to be emotional. I didn't want it to just be a brawl — I wanted it to have some story points. So I'm sure you could look through it with a microscope and find a lot of continuity errors from returning to that set multiple times."

Ryan Green/Universal Pictures 'Halloween Ends'

The sequence in which the population of Haddonfield watches Strode dispose of Myers' body was a late addition to the film following screenings of the movie's early cuts. "I screen movies a lot, from the very first assembly," says Green. "I want to watch the audience as much as I'm watching the movie. I'm ping-ponging back and forth, trying to see when they're engaged and when they're not."

He continues, "We were trying to do a little bit more of a modest, intimate ending. 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 was also happy to have given Curtis' character an upbeat ending after so much trauma. "I've come too far with Laurie Strode, and I want to believe in her — I want to believe in her future," he says.

So does the director definitely think this will be Curtis' last time at bat in the Halloween franchise?

"I do," he insists. "We said that together. After the first one, we decided to do two more. Her character's traveled through my whole life, and then at a point I just became the shepherd, so it was fun to inherit that character, take her on the journey I wanted to go on with her, and then say goodbye to her. I do feel confident we are saying goodbye to Jamie playing Laurie in the universe. At some point someone will maybe bring a new Laurie into something, some twist will happen, and the mythology will continue. But I do feel like this is the last time we're going to see her nervous smile and those fun enlightening attributes of Laurie Strode."

Halloween Ends is playing in cinemas now and streaming on Peacock. Watch the film's trailer below.

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