Why director David Gordon Green put a brand-new character at the bloody center of Halloween Ends

Warning: This story contains spoilers for Halloween Ends.

Halloween Ends has been hyped as the final battle between masked killer Michael Myers and Jamie Lee Curtis' Laurie Strode, and the film ultimately delivers on that promise. But many viewers of the movie may be surprised to discover how much screen time is devoted to the story of a brand-new character: Corey Cunningham.

Played by Rohan Campbell, the newcomer accidentally causes the death of a child he is babysitting in the film's pre-credit sequence and becomes a pariah in his hometown of Haddonfield, Ill. Three years after the tragedy, Corey encounters Michael Myers, who has apparently been living in Haddonfield's drainage system, and is inspired to embark on his own reign of terror, murdering people in a variety of different ways while also beginning a relationship with Laurie's daughter Allyson (Andi Matichak). So why did director David Gordon Green want to prominently feature a freshly-minted character in his third Halloween tale?

"I wanted to get a new perspective of Michael Myers and Laurie Strode and the family, and I wanted to bring a new central character to be a pivotal exploration of those characters and the town," says Green, who also co-wrote the film. "We'd seen the story of a stalker, and we'd seen a lot of the ways that trauma had affected Laurie Strode, but I really wanted to see how that affected the town."

Green did so by "bringing in a new character of Corey Cunningham, and discovering first his own immediate trauma in our cold open, and then how that affects him, and then how an encounter with our already established evil could become kind of an infectious thing. It's a study of the contagiousness of these negative entities that are in our lives. If they go unchecked, then they spread. If we can wrap our head around them, and be our own hero, then maybe we've got a fighting chance."

Ryan Green/Universal Pictures 'Halloween Ends'

Rohan Campbell's credits include Hulu's The Hardy Boys show, in which he plays one of the leads, but the actor is a relative unknown. How did Green come to cast Campbell in this important role?

"Rohan Campbell was [one] of the hundreds of auditions you'd see tapes on," says the director. "I kept filtering and filtering, and he kept being there, and then I would share him with the production designer and my AD (assistant director) and say, 'This is somebody, this is somebody.' He had this face, there was a toughness to it and a sensitivity to it, he was handsome without being pretty, he looked like he had life and emotion in there, and physicality. I was massaging the script and finding how that face kind of connected to the story we were telling. Then I started talking to him, and just saw that he had all these characteristics, and the physicality was important, he wasn't just acting like a guy who was riding a motorcycle, he knows how to ride a motorcycle. I thought these things were important for this character to embody a little bit of that '80s leather jacket bad-boy, and I wanted to make sure it wasn't just a song-and-dance kid that could pretend, that [he] had some life experience to back it up."

Ryan Green/Universal Pictures Halloween Ends

The addition of Corey to the franchise also allowed Green to orchestrate some very different "kills" from those seen carried out by the knife-wielding Michael Myers in his previous two Halloween movies, 2018's Halloween and last year's Halloween Kills.

"Halloween Kills was very much a supercharged version of Michael Myers, but it was all within his consistent character," says the director. "One of the things I wanted to explore is someone that is emulating these [acts] of violence, but he's messy, and he doesn't know how to do it well, so instead of a clean cut to the throat, he's got a corkscrew, and he's just jabbing it desperately into a man's throat. That's something that Halloween movies don't do because it's not within the character of Michael Myers, but I wanted that midnight movie madness. One of the exciting things about bringing a Corey character in here is I can do borderline campy violence to scratch that itch of the things that I like about some '80s movies that I really respond to."

Green mentions John Carpenter's Christine, 1981's Butcher, Baker, Nightmare Maker, 1987's Blood Rage, and Peter Jackson's directorial debut Bad Taste as movies from the era that helped inspired the tone of Halloween Ends.

"We do dabble in that without going full camp," says Green. "Most of those movies I was watching on VHS at a friend's house when I wasn't supposed to. But [it's great] when you can experience that [tone] with an audience that's screaming and looking away and laughing, and all these things that our bodies do in a primal way. I wanted to give a little buffet of some of those treats in this movie."

Halloween Ends is now available to watch in cinemas and on Peacock.

Watch the film's trailer below.

Want more movie news? Sign up for Entertainment Weekly's free newsletter to get the latest trailers, celebrity interviews, film reviews, and more.

Related content:

• Halloween Ends director is 'confident' movie will be Jamie Lee Curtis' last appearance as Laurie Strode

• Halloween Ends star Jamie Lee Curtis says 'endings are a bitch, but so is Laurie Strode'

• Jamie Lee Curtis recalls her most famous roles

• Everything Everywhere All at Once star Jamie Lee Curtis ignites multiverse 'feud' with Doctor Strange 2

• Jamie Lee Curtis says she's embarrassed she assumed Ana de Armas was inexperienced when they first met

• Laurie Strode tells Michael Myers to 'Come and get me, motherf---er!' in Halloween Ends trailer