WARNING: Major spoilers for Halloween.
Halloween 2018's ending brings a stop to 40 years of Michael Myers - or does it? David Gordon Green's reboot-sequel is a scary, funny return to the father of the slasher genre, and there may just be more Halloween sequels to come.
Halloween 2018 follows on from the original movie, picking up decades later. Laurie Strode has cut herself off from Haddonfield in a tricked-up armored house, her daughter Karen resents her for raising her as a warrior, and granddaughter Allyson is trying to live a normal teenage life burdened with that legacy. Meanwhile, after a visit from two podcast journalists, Michael Myers is transferred from Smith's Grove and breaks free. He stalks Haddonfield once more, killing anybody unlucky enough to cross his path before locking in on Laurie and Allyson, setting the stage for a cross-generational showdown.
Related: Our Halloween 2018 Review
The ending of Halloween 2018 had a lot to do. It needs to serve as a cap to a story that's had many tellings over the past four decades while also leaving the closet door ajar for more sequels down the line. Thankfully, David Gordon Green and co-writer Danny McBride achieve that with the ease of Michael caving in his doctor's skull. Here's what happens, what it means, and what could be next for Halloween.
- This Page: Did Michael Myers (And Laurie Strode) Survive Halloween 2018?
- Page 2: How Halloween 2018 Changes Michael Myers
- Page 3: What Halloween 2018's Ending Really Means
What Happens At The End Of Halloween 2018
The third act of Halloween 2018 is kicked off when police officer Frank Hawkins (Will Patton) comes across Michael Myers and runs him down with his cruiser. When inspecting the body, his companion Dr. Ranbir Sartain (Haluk Bilginer) attacks: after years studying Michael in captivity, the psychiatrist wants to study the killer in the wild. Sartain kills Hawkins (who identifies himself as a survivor of the original Halloween), hauls Michael into the cruiser with Allyson and drives to Laurie's house. Of course, things don't quite go to plan for him - Michael curb stomps Sartain and heads to the house unmonitored.
At the house, Laurie hides Karen in her basement and begins trying to lock an invading Michael in. He eventually comes out of the shadows, they fight, then she falls off the balcony to the ground below, disappearing unseen just as The Shape did in the original. Allyson arrives in the house and Michael switches focus, breaking into the basement to attack her and her mother. The three generations of Strodes fight back - Karen shoots in him a shotgun, Laurie pushes him down the stairs and Allyson stabs him with his knife - and Laurie springs her real trap: the basement is a cage for Michael, the house a bomb rigged to explode.
The three women escape as the house goes up in flames, although a cut back to the basement shows no sign of Michael. Halloween 2018 ends on Laurie and her family hitching a ride in a pickup silently recovering from the ordeal.
Related: Halloween's 5 Timelines Explained
Did Michael Myers Survive Halloween 2018?
The big question intentionally left by Halloween 2018 is whether Michael Myers is really dead or not. The last time we see him, Michael is trapped in the cage just as Laurie's house starts to burn. However, when the film cut back to the flames, the room appears empty. Did he escape? There are no clues provided for how - the bars to the cage remain unbroken - but the movie makes a point of suggesting he's not where he was stood eerily still just moments before. Things are further darkened by the end of the credits, where Michael's unmistakable heavy breathing can be heard. This could be just for atmosphere, but in the spirit of post-credit scenes feels like a massive hint that he survived (IT played a very similar trick with Pennywise's laugh last year teasing IT Chapter Two).
For all intents and purposes, Michael Myers is both dead and alive. A sequel to Halloween is looking likely - Blumhouse is already in the early stages of development, and this movie's predicted box office will leap over the cheap $10 million budget almost immediately - and that will need Michael Myers to return (Halloween 3: Secret of the Witch is the only entry to not feature the killer, and it was a box office failure as a direct result). This Schrodinger's Killer situation is thus a very smart move; Halloween 2018 gives Laurie her long-awaited victory over evil, but at the same time is considering the future of the franchise.
This allows the rebooted Halloween timeline to neatly sidestep a long-standing issue with not just Michael Myers, but all slasher franchise villains. Every movie wants to have their icon's ultimate defeat, but as a result any sequel has to spend far too long bringing them back (see A Nightmare On Elm Street for particularly strained examples). Indeed, Halloween 4, Halloween 5, Halloween: Resurrection and Halloween II (2009) all had to contrive ways for Michael Myers to have survived an unambiguous, brutal death in the previous entry, in many cases undoing the narrative and thematic closure in the process. Halloween 2018 avoids needed any such problems by not reveling in his defeat.
Is Laurie Killed In Halloween 2018's Finale?
It's not just Michael Myers' fate that's in question at the end of Halloween 2018. Laurie Strode is injured during their final confrontation, and in the final shot of her in the truck is shown to still be bleeding rather profusely. Although the film doesn't spend much time on this aspect before cutting to the credits, the possibility of the series' hero dying is very much on the table.
Related: Just How Scary (& Violent) Is Halloween 2018?
And, all things considered, this would be a rather fitting end to Laurie's journey. Her life has been defined by her first run-in with Michael Myers, and now she's finally put him down - at immense cost. Even though Halloween 2018 retcons the brother-sister relationship between Michael and Laurie, the pair are still intrinsically linked, and this shared death day would be the ultimate underscoring of that.
Of course, the fact it's unclear may just be more sequel considerations, with preparations made for Jamie Lee Curtis to be written out as Halloween continues beyond Laurie (presumably with Allyson now the lead). This wouldn't be the first time this has happened. Halloween 4 killed Laurie offscreen when Curtis didn't return, while Halloween: Resurrection's opening sequence saw Michael finally get her before spending the rest of the stalking a dot-com bubble reality show (the 2000s were a weird time). If the Halloween reboot timeline does go this route, hopefully, it'll be done with more grace and weight than either of these cases.
On the other hand, Laurie's injuries may not be fatal at all, allowing for her to return in a supporting role in the Halloween sequel. Like many things with the character, it surely depends entirely on Curtis' interest in the franchise.
Page 2: How Halloween 2018 Changes Michael Myers
Halloween 2018 Makes Michael Myers Evil Again
In the original Halloween, John Carpenter envisioned The Shape (as Michael was known in the script and credits) as a personification of evil, a view conveyed overtly by Dr. Loomis; this monster killed without rhyme or reason, choosing prey and stalking until it was dead. That shifted somewhat over the sequels. The reveal in Halloween II that Laurie was Michael's sister made his initial attack much more targeted, while the introduction of the Cult of Thorn in Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers leaned right over into the supernatural (and we're just going to ignore Rob Zombie's "white horse"). Over the sequels, Michael Myers became a considerably different character.
Related: Ranking Every Halloween Movie, From 1978 To 2018
Thankfully, the original stalking monster is back in Halloween 2018. Once again, we don't know why he's killing: is he targeting Laurie because he remembers her from 40 years prior or because she shot at him? Does he chase Allyson because he recognizes elements of Laurie in her or simply because she's a teenage girl? The movie explicitly raises this question to not provide an answer. Indeed, Michael being unable to decide between whether to look for Laurie or attack Allyson during the final battle can be read as either a lack of real motive or conflict over which victim to chase.
Essentially, Halloween 2018 has returned Michael Myers to being pure evil, an embodiment of a dark force rather than someone with clear, if warped, thoughts. Nick Castle (who played Michael in 1978 and returns here) is even credited as "The Shape" in the credits again. Much has been made about how the reboot retcons everything that came before bar the original, but its this subtler shift that really allows Halloween 2018 to capture the spirit of the original.
What Was Going On With Michael Myers' Doctor In Halloween 2018?
It may not be as pressing a question, but one strange aspect of Halloween 2018 is Dr. Sartain. Initially presented as the movie's replacement for the late Donald Pleasance (he even introduces himself as "the new Loomis"), he slowly emerges as more of a warped mirror. Whereas Sam Loomis dedicated his life to keeping Michael Myers locked up after reaching the conclusion he was "pure evil", Sartain is more intrigued by The Shape's abilities. He helps the police find Michael, but isn't interested in recapturing him: he wants to enact a deadly case study on his psychopathic nature.
Here's the human influence on the evil Michael represents, a deluded enabling of his actions. It may even be that Sartain was the one who released Michael in the first place: how The Shape was unleashed isn't really explored in Halloween 2018 - there's a throwaway line that Michael overpowered the guard - but given the doctor's insistence of riding the bus to a maximum security prison and his subsequent actions make the entire ordeal look to be the result of his warped hunger for information.
Whether that's the case or not, his actions in Halloween 2018 serve to only make Michael Myers a more imposing presence; he's impossible to understand, with any perception of control an illusion. The Shape will bide its time and holds no loyalty.
Page 3: What Halloween 2018's Ending Really Means
The Myers Dollhouse Represents Laurie's Haunting
There's a lot of Halloween references littered throughout the new movie, from explicit retcon callouts to spiritually recast characters, but one of the most important is the dollhouse in Laurie's home. This is a reproduction of the Myers house, the building owned by Michael's family in the 1960s when he killed his sister, Judith.
Related: Where You Recognize The Cast Of Halloween 2018 From
The Myers house has been an important location in many previous movies - it's where Michael first visits and sees Laurie in Halloween, the dilapidated setting for Halloween 5's finale, a new home for the Strode family in The Curse of Michael Myers, and the backdrop for Resurrection's reality game - but doesn't appear proper in Halloween 2018 (beyond the archive footage flashback to Judith's murder). However, the dollhouse is far more important than a building last important in 1963.
This Myers dollhouse is a representation of how Michael haunts Laurie. That she even has it at all is striking - she's taken on the weight of all of Michael's crimes, not just those against her - and it being in her bedroom makes it utterly inescapable even in her quieter moments. At the end of Halloween, though, it also symbolizes her becoming free; the film makes a point of showing it burning in the final sequence, with the fight against Michael allowing her to let go. This is a nice extra layer of imagery across the two films, and also makes the prospect of Michael surviving or Laurie dying more palatable: it doesn't matter if the narrative ending is undone because Laurie's arc was more about her trauma than actually defeating The Shape.
What Halloween 2018's Ending Really Means
As discussed, a lot of Halloween 2018 returns the franchise back to its core ideas of inherent, unavoidable evil. This is at heart just a scary (and funny) slasher film, but still uses the genre to explore human perseverance in the face of unstoppable darkness. The final question of Michael Myers' survival, then, is more an inevitability: evil can never be truly defeated, but we should never give up.
However, in being a legacyquel, Halloween 2018 gets to explore these ideas through the passage of time. Laurie is a survivor of a traumatic event, one that reshaped her life and turned her into a warrior; she's both a victim and an aggressor, with personal relationships strained as a result. The long-felt impact of evil actions on survivors, and how they can eventually find closure - in this case with a very pointed fight back - is at the forefront of Halloween 2018 (as it was in Halloween H20, Jamie Lee Curtis' previous years-later return in 1998). The concluding note is a tough one, saying that healing possible but not easy.
More optimistic within that, though, there's the power of family across generations. One of the most impressive things about Halloween 2018 is how, in just one movie, it manages to create, tear down and rebuild a nuanced relationship between Laurie, Karen and Allyson, gifting them 40 years of offscreen history in such an effective way that when they come together to defeat Michael, it plays as a fist-pumping victory. We have three generations of Strodes, each dealing with the repercussions of Michael in their life, overcoming their personal differences to work together against an unrelenting force. It's a franchise-defining moment, and given how family used to be explored in Halloween, a considerable more honorable note to end on.
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What makes Halloween 2018 such a great movie in its own right, and far and away the best entry in the franchise since the original, is that along with being a tightly crafted, tonally assured slasher film, it has a strong emotional core with realistic characters. Where the series goes from here is unknown, but it's fair to say Halloween is back at the top of the pack.
Next: A Complete History of the Halloween Franchise So Far
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