Warning: Spoilers for the end of the 'Halloween' franchise, which closes out with 'Halloween Ends.'
After resurrecting the Halloween franchise in 2018 with a direct sequel to the 1978 film, the ongoing saga between Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) and Michael Myers comes to a close two movies later, in Halloween Ends, which is now in theaters and streaming on Peacock. Both Curtis, who has portrayed the former babysitter stalked by the masked killer for over 40 years, and director David Gordon Green break down the climax of the 2022 film that marks Laurie and Michael’s final (and bloody) battle.
Curtis “takes the physicality of this role very seriously,” Green says. “She’s the one that when we’re doing a big stunt piece or for this climatic battle in this movie, she’s the one saying, ‘I want to go the extra mile.’” He adds that on set, she’ll say, “Let’s push it even farther.” And indeed she does, with Laurie and Michael getting into serious blows before one of them comes out on top.
[Warning: Spoilers for the conclusion of Halloween Ends, which is the final installment in the Halloween franchise starring Jamie Lee Curtis as the films’ main “final girl” Laurie Strode.]
In Halloween Ends, which is the final chapter in Green’s “H40” trilogy of films following Halloween (2018) and Halloween Kills, Laurie and her granddaughter, Allyson Nelson (Andi Matichak), have attempted to move on from the events of the prior installment, which saw Laurie’s daughter and Allyson’s mother, Karen Nelson (Judy Greer), murdered by Michael before he disappeared.
“At the core of this movie, it really is Laurie Strode versus Michael Myers. And it’s an epic, epic final conclusion between the two,” Matichak says. “And how we get there is the fun of the journey, and that is what people are going to lose their minds over, I think.”
Four years later, Michael has been drawn out of hiding by Corey Cunningham (Rohan Campbell), a teenager accused of killing a child he was babysitting a few Halloweens prior who has grown up to become a town outcast and increasingly dark figure in Haddenfield. After being tormented by local high schoolers, Corey finds himself face-to-face with Michael, who lets him live -- and unexpectedly teams up with him as they go on a new murder spree. At one point, Corey even takes Michael’s and kills people as him.
Eventually, their killings lead them to Laurie’s home, where she first faces off with Corey, quickly shooting him before he then takes his own life. Later, Michael finally arrives, reclaiming his signature mask that Corey stole from him and then setting his sights on the babysitter he first tried to kill over 40 years ago.
The two come to brutal blows in the kitchen, where Laurie is smashed into a cabinet before she is eventually able to pin Michael down to the island with several knives and a tipped over fridge. Just when Laurie thinks she has him, he’s able to free one hand and nearly choke her to death before Allyson arrives to help finish him off.
After draining his blood, his dead body is then driven to the local junkyard, where Corey and Michael slaughtered several high school teens, to drop him into the car shredding machine, which tears his body from limb to limb until there is nothing left.
While there’s a lot of expectations going into their bloody brawl, the main thing Curtis was concerned about was that it didn’t look like another movie fight choreographed for the screen. And so the actress took the lead on set, working with her stunt double on how it should play out in front of the camera.
“There’s a video going around where I’m a little bossy in a rehearsal space and I’m like, ‘No, I don’t want it to look like a movie fight,’” Curtis says, explaining that all she wanted was for “it to look real. I wanted it to look like this final conflict was real.”
“There was a moment in the battle where I was in the room,” Curtis says, recalling that “I said, ‘What I really want is something so unexpected and brutal that people are going to be like, wait what, and it was where he grabs her hair and then pushes her face through a plate glass cabinet that has dishes.’”
Curtis was insistent that it was her doing the fight and not her stunt double. “I want it to be me,” she reveals. “And David was like, ‘No, no, no, ‘cause it’s going to take too much time to reset the cabinet every time.’ And I was like, ‘David, they’ll have the cabinet. It’ll just be a door that comes on. By the time they wipe the blood off my face, the door will be on and we can do it again.’”
And, of course, “It’s in the movie,” Curtis says, adding that “because that level of what you’re not expecting to see is that. I think that’s important.”
While the fight is a brutal one, it’s also cathartic. It is, after all, the final showdown between two characters that have faced off with each other in several films. And Green credits Curtis and James Jude Courtney, who portrays Michael, for “finding ways to make it emotional, finding ways to make it intimate,” he says, elevating the scene “beyond just the aggression [to where it] has reflections of the fact that these are two people that, for years, for decades, have been surviving confrontation.”
But at the end of the day, “It’s a horror movie. Don’t you want to see us battle?” Curtis asks, before saying that’s what audiences get. “That’s the battle.”
RELATED CONTENT:
