This Earlier Halloween Movie Has the Best Ending in the Franchise

The Big Picture

• The
  Halloween
  franchise has had its ups and downs, with the original still a classic but some sequels are considered laughably atrocious.
• Halloween H20
  , released in 1998, provided a perfect finale with Laurie Strode facing off against Michael Myers, and recent efforts have tried to recapture that success.
• The latest
  Halloween
  films are essentially reboots of
  Halloween H20
  , attempting to erase the sequels and return to the simple premise of good vs. evil.

The Halloween franchise has been going strong for 45 years and counting. Well, sort of. While the story of Michael Myers has been told over 12 of the 13 films (Halloween III: Season of the Witch learned what a mistake it was to leave him out), the quality of the entries has been mixed. The original is an all-time classic that set off the slasher boom of the ’80s. Some of the sequels were seen as just okay and some were considered just laughably atrocious by the general public. The plots got crazier, with Michael Myers going from a mindless killer to a brother obsessed with his sister, to a cult member, and even a bullied hulk with mommy issues. With those wacky plots came some pretty outlandish endings. Amidst that, however, was a perfect finale. In 1998’s Halloween H20, Laurie Strode (Jamie Lee Curtis) had what was supposed to be her final showdown with Michael. Of course, it didn’t stick, but it worked so well that David Gordon Green‘s recent efforts spent three films trying to get back to that point.

The ‘Halloween’ Franchise’s Endings Vary in Quality

John Carpenter‘s original Halloween in 1978 is still regarded by most as the greatest slasher, and one of the best horror movies in general. Michael Myers was the Boogeyman come to life, a soulless, silent entity who killed for no reason. At the end, his final victim, Laurie Strode, is unable to keep him down. It’s Michael’s doctor, Samuel Loomis (Donald Pleasence), who then seemingly kills The Shape, shooting him six times in the chest, sending Myers stumbling off a second-story balcony. Of course, when Loomis looks down, Michael is gone, a phantom disappearing into the night.

Carpenter only meant to make one movie, but Halloween‘s success turned a classic into a franchise. All those sequels meant Michael Myers had to be defeated, yet able to return for the next film. It also meant that every new film had to try to top what came before it with something even more shocking. Halloween II sees Loomis saving the day again, this time blowing up himself and Michael inside a hospital. Even though The Shape was very much dead, Halloween 4: The Return of Michael Myers gave Michael some burns and had him awaken from a ten-year coma. In the finale, he’s shot dozens of times by several cops, only to fall down a mineshaft and disappear. In Halloween 5: The Revenge of Michael Myers, the Boogeyman is captured, leading to a silly image of him sitting in a jail cell still wearing his mask. It’s then that a man in black barges in, murders everyone in the police department, and escorts Michael away. Halloween: The Curse of Michael Myers leaned fully into the cult storyline, showing Michael Myers as a man under their powers. The last act sees Tommy Doyle (Paul Rudd) beating Michael Myers to near death, only for The Shape to disappear once more.

‘Halloween H20’ Gave Fans the Ultimate Showdown

The Halloween franchise was in a bad state in the mid-90s. The sixth entry was a critical and commercial dud. It had gone so far off track that the Boogeyman was no longer scary, but a parody. Then what seemed impossible happened: Jamie Lee Curtis returned. Curtis had left the franchise and all of horror behind after Halloween II. She became a major Hollywood star over the next two decades, but in 1998, she came back, wanting to make one last Halloween film that would erase the silliness of the past and get back to the simple premise of good vs. evil. The only way to do this was to pretend that everything after Halloween II never happened.

Halloween H20 finds Laurie Strode as a woman living in fear. Her encounter with Michael Myers that one fateful night

changed and ruined her life. She is so scared of her brother finding her that she fakes her own death and moves as far away from Haddonfield, Illinois as possible. She ends up at a private school in California and becomes a high school teacher living under the name of Kari Tate. Every Halloween becomes an unbearable nightmare. She’s obsessed with Michael Myers, seeing him everywhere, to the point that she’s an alcoholic. She is so protective of her teenage son, John (Josh Hartnett), that he pushes her away. He’s the only one who knows his mother’s past and he wants her to let it go. Michael Myers is dead. It’s time to move on.

Obviously, Michael is very much not dead. He finally finds his sister and in the third act, the siblings come face to face, with the Shape wearing a hideously bad mask. Laurie now faces a decision. She can run and hide or she can fight. In the first two Halloween films, Doctor Loomis saved her. He can’t now, as he has passed away (Donald Pleasence died in 1995). When the Boogeyman arrives, John is scared and ready to flee. And her poor boyfriend, Will (Adam Arkin), is quickly disposed of. Laurie is all alone. She should probably run, and in fact, she starts to, getting her son and his girlfriend, Molly (Michelle Williams), to safety. But when they reach the school’s gates, she sends them on their way and turns back. She can’t run any longer. She must face her demon. That leads to the powerful shot of Laurie kicking in the glass of an emergency axe box and walking into the school with the weapon, yelling her brother’s name.

What follows is a back-and-forth fight that ends with Michael stabbed and seemingly dead after falling from another balcony. Laurie knows better now. She’s no longer the girl who would drop the knife. Laurie steals a coroner’s van containing Michael’s body and drives away. When her brother awakes, she ends up driving off a steep hill, tumbling to the bottom, where Michael is ejected and pinned between the van and a tree. He is now the one who is trapped and completely at his sister’s mercy. Laurie looks sad. Despite it all, this is still her family, and she doesn’t want this life. After allowing her fingers to graze her brother’s reaching hand, she takes the axe and swings it hard at his head, decapitating him. Michael Myers is dead. There’s no way to come back from that. It’s the perfect ending. There were no shenanigans involving open endings or bonkers subplots. Halloween H20‘s finale is kept simple, and thus, effective. A traumatized woman decides to stop running from her male aggressor and fights back, killing her attacker for good. Laurie Strode takes her power back and gets her life back. And then it all went to shit.

The Latest ‘Halloween’ Films Are Basically Reboots of ‘Halloween H20’

Halloween H20 had a fitting end, but even as the film was being made, Jamie Lee Curtis and everyone involved knew it wasn’t the end. According to the DVD’s audio commentary, Curtis returned with the agreement that it would be the last Halloween film ever, but money talks. Franchise producer Moustapha Akkad long had one rule: you could do whatever you wanted to Michael Myers in a movie, but at the end of the day, he had to come back for a sequel. Akkad told Curtis she could have her movie with its ending, but that there would be more films afterward. A disappointed Curtis agreed to do the project anyway but with one condition: when it came time for the eighth film, she wanted to be killed off. In 2002’s Halloween: Resurrection, it turns out that it wasn’t Myers Laurie decapitated but an ambulance driver. Laurie is killed by Michael in the first 15 minutes. After that moment, he goes home and starts killing people doing an internet show from his childhood home, with the last act having him electrocuted. Alas, he opens his eyes in the final seconds, promising more sequels. However, they finally found a way to kill the Boogeyman — poor box office performance. Halloween: Resurrection was regarded as the worst film in the franchise.

It was decided to reboot the whole damn thing, with Rob Zombie put in charge of 2007’s Halloween, a film that retold the story of Michael Myers vs. Laurie Strode. This time, Michael is a behemoth who kills because he was bullied and had a bad home life as a child. The motiveless killer of the original is gone. Laurie shoots her brother in the head in the last moments, but, as you guessed, he came back again for 2009’s Halloween II. This bizarre entry had Michael as a hobo with a beard and unmasked. The final frames had no longer a Boogeyman either being impaled or shot by the police depending on what version you watch. That film’s failure left Michael buried for nine years.

Halloween came back in 2018 when new director David Gordon Green went to Jamie Lee Curtis with a new pitch. He wanted to erase all the sequels and go back to the first film. His vision would see Laurie Strode as a woman consumed by her past, with a grown child who had been pushed away by her obsession with Michael Myers. Laurie’s trauma would turn to action when Michael Myers escaped and ended up in a good vs. evil battle with his former victim. Sound familiar? It’s basically H20. There are a few differences, with Michael and Laurie no longer being siblings, and Laurie being a woman who stayed in Haddonfield and prepared rather than ran away. Outside of that, the plots are the same and Laurie is the same. She’s an alcoholic who can’t give herself to anyone, a woman destroyed by the monster who almost killed her.

No Film Will Ever Beat ‘Halloween H20’s Ending

While Halloween H20 told the story in one film, money still talks in the 21st century, so their new tale was spread out over three films. Though the first film in David Gordon Green’s trilogy, Halloween (2018), gets the story almost right, we still don’t have a fitting end. Laurie and her family are able to trap Michael in a basement and set the house on fire, but then they just leave, not even staying to make sure Michael’s dead. It’s Laurie dropping the knife in 1978 all over again. Halloween Kills puts Laurie in the hospital and didn’t have her interact with Myers once. The frustrating ending has Michael attacked by a mob but with no one going for a kill shot. The heroes were so inept that many turned against the movie.

Halloween Ends promised a true end and this time, we actually got it, but it came at a cost. Much of the film doesn’t involve Myers at all, but a troubled young man who goes on his own killing spree. Michael only appears sporadically until the end, when the film rushes the final encounter between Laurie and Michael. It feels anticlimactic, though at least when a maskless Myers is put into a grinder and turned into hamburger meat, we know this is the end. There can’t be any more shenanigans to bring him back. Sure, there will be a reboot of some sort one day, but this version of Michael is dead for good. Though the newest trilogy is fun for Halloween fans, it is also unnecessary. It’s almost six hours of trying to rewrite recent failures, an apology to the past that confesses H20 was the perfect ending. David Gordon and Jamie Lee Curtis are doing all they can to get back to 1998, where we were given the best finale in the franchise. It was there that Laurie was victorious. Apologizing sequels can’t recapture that no matter how hard they try.

Halloween H20: 20 Years Later is currently streaming on Prime Video in the U.S.

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