Spoilers! Jamie Lee Curtis addresses that 'incredible, inevitable' 'Halloween Ends' finale

Spoiler alert! The following post discusses important plot points and the ending of “Halloween Ends” (in theaters and streaming on Peacock), so beware if you haven’t seen it yet.

After more than 40 years of being haunted by and throwing down with masked killer Michael Myers, Jamie Lee Curtis’ “Halloween” heroine Laurie Strode won her last fight for survival in the trilogy closer “Halloween Ends.” But the finale leaves fans with the question of what exactly this happy ending means for her.

Set after the events of 2018’s “Halloween” and 2021’s “Halloween Kills,” the new film finds Laurie being ostracized in her hometown of Haddonfield because she's blamed for its bloody history. She meets a fellow ex-babysitter and trauma victim, Corey (Rohan Campbell), who begins dating Laurie’s granddaughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). But he falls under the evil sway of Michael, who’s been hiding underground since murdering Laurie’s daughter. After Laurie puts a stop to Corey’s bloody reign of terror – and Allyson blames her grandma for his death – Michael (played by James Jude Courtney) shows his masked face for a brutal kitchen showdown with Laurie.

'Let's go get it': Jamie Lee Curtis says goodbye to 'Halloween Ends' and hello to Oscar buzz

She crucifies him on a table with scissors. With help from Allyson, Laurie uses a large knife to cut Michael’s throat and wrists, and they watch as he bleeds out.

Curtis wanted a violent fight that was “this incredible, inevitable blending of these two people physically,” the actress says. “There has to be an intimacy. There's a moment where he's behind her and it's not sexual, of course, but it is intimate.”

She also didn’t want it to look like “a movie fight” – Curtis called for an all-out brawl. “At one point, I said, ‘I want him to take her by the hair and push her face through the plate glass cabinet on camera.' That unexpected moment of like, ‘Wait, what?’ I'm very satisfied that fast and furious contact between these two people is the result.”

Director/co-writer David Gordon Green acknowledges filmmakers “certainly entertained” the idea that Laurie wouldn’t survive the fight. “We played with it,” he says. The faceoff “felt not just like two foes, but two survivors in a way. There was a real stake there. There were moments of doubt where I would not know who I wanted to win.”

'Halloween Ends' review: It's a bloody shame Jamie Lee Curtis didn't get a better sendoff

Ultimately, Green was struck by a line in the script from a scene where Laurie runs into old friend Frank Hawkins (Will Patton), and there’s a little spark between them as Frank talks to her about going to see the cherry blossoms. The director found the reference “charming” and it led him to an ending where, after Michael’s corpse is paraded through town and then crushed into pieces in a compactor, Frank and Laurie sit peacefully on a porch as “a little callback to that moment of flirtatiousness,” Green says.

There is one dark note to this somewhat happy ending: While Michael is gone, it appears that Laurie kept his mask. When Michael touches Corey early in “Ends,” the villain sees the young man’s history of trauma through a sort of psychic flashback and it seems to connect the two, as Corey then embraces his sinister side. Cut to the final fight and a similar moment where Michael witnesses everything Laurie’s gone through, all the way back to their initial “meeting” in John Carpenter’s original 1978 “Halloween.”

Ranked: All of the 'Halloween' movies

Does that mean Laurie’s now been infected by “The Shape” of evil? “I think probably,” Green says. “I don't know how you couldn’t. I guess I'll say, is that infection able to be remedied?”

For the filmmaker, “Halloween Ends” is ultimately “an examination, in hopefully an entertaining way, of how evil manifests,” he adds. “You're in a hospital or on a subway, you'll see a look in an eye that stings you, that moves you, that affects you, that you walk away with. You don't know if it's hurt, if it's harm, if it's evil, what it is. Sometimes it's just your own vulnerability looking back at you in the reflection of someone's eyes  There is a very powerful moment there that’s inevitably infectious. And then how we treat that becomes the conversation we have after we walk out of the film.”

'Blonde' fact-check: Did Marilyn Monroe really have a threesome with Charlie Chaplin's son?

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: 'Halloween Ends' spoilers: Jamie Lee Curtis spills on her final battle